I’d say audio CDs, but those have been back on the upward trend since streaming and download services started getting hostile and people started wising up to that hostility, in other words, people wanted to own their music again and so started buying CDs again recently vs. having a streaming or download service randomly yank content they paid for from their libraries.
ITT: People not realizing 10 years ago was nearly the end of 2015 and listing technologies that were popular 20+ years ago.
2015 still feels like a date from the future to me
Headphone jacks. They certainly still exist but every device I owned that made sounds had one in 2015, no longer the case
We class this as breakage and an indication of products to avoid until the product line is fixed.
For PC gaming and any sort of production/studio environment they’re still ubiquitous. Although yeah, not a daily driver for the public nowadays.
Optical disks. It was almost a necessity on laptop to have an optical drive, now there’s maybe one or two models out there that comes with one.
Even 10 years ago, disc drives seemed to be out of fashion. But if you laptop was 5 years old, it likely have one anyways.
I used a MacBook for 10 years that was one of the first models to come without a disc drive, it was a 2013 model.
I recall it being a bit ahead of the curve at the time, but it was a pretty fast curve before you really couldn’t find a laptop with a disc drive anymore.
10 years ago was 2015. I went to buy a laptop from Dell in 2014, and they didn’t have any models with a disc drive. I looked.
They weren’t quite ubiquitous anymore, but looking for a payphone wasn’t a sign of someone being a time traveler. The last one near me hung on until a couple years ago.
There’s a payphone by one of the elementary schools here. I wonder if it’s more likely that a kid without a cellphone is more likely to use it?
Here in Australia, they are all free now. I presume the phone company realised nobody was using them and preferred to keep them as free billboard spaces.
fun fact: they don’t have private numbers anymore, so you can gather a bunch of random payphone’s numbers for shenanigans.
They tend to have free wifi too so are somewhat useful.
I think I tried that once and you needed to download a Telstra app or something so I noped out. Ive seen the signs though.
disk players
I miss when laptop computers usually had disk players
USB external optical-disc players are available to plug into any computer.
Plasma TVs, DVRs, DVD players
Adding onto this: 3D TVs
Speaking of things that went nowhere, but the manufacturers thought they were the next big thing…
The one technology was obsolete before I could buy it, though when I first bought an Oculus Quest I tried ripping 3D Blu-rays and realized ~12 fps per eye is pretty shit quality anyway.
Plasma TV
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time…
4G cellphones.
But 5G phones still comes with 4G antennas and 4G cell towers are still being used to cover areas 5G cant reach (since 5G hass less range). I don’t even have a steady 5G connection where I live lol (its not even that rural, I live in a US City ffs).
I would rather say 3G cellphones.
LTE is still widely in use today, while being mainly common in higher-end devices in 2015.
3G/UMTS on the other hand still was the mainly used one in 2015, also because of pricing, while 3G networks are completely switched off by now.
Tablets? Those seem to have really fallen out of fashion and have been replaced with regular smartphones becoming quite a lot bigger.
I recently got a tablet so I could take handwritten notes during meetings. I thought I’d use it for a bunch of other stuff but I do not.
Not to mention, the
OCR handwriting recognitionmy handwriting is really bad.I see them often used in universities, maybe not as much elsewhere as ten years ago but still a regular occurrence
I like my tablet for ancestry research and not much else. But I think maybe still good for artists?
I’ll take the opposite view… what technologies are ubiquitous today that will be irrelevant in a few years?
Smartwatches. Nobody needs this shit, they’re mostly just toys for fat people who want to “monitor their health”, and for gadget-goofs that need everything shiny, new and overpriced, regardless of the actual utility in their lives.
Yeah nah.
People (normal people) like having their messages, facebook comments, whatever else coming up somewhere even more accessible than their phone in their pocket.
The transition from pocket watches to wrist watches was for similar reasons, although it took a (first) world war for the convenience to be fully appreciated.
Love my smart watch
I go jogging and leave my big bulky phone behind. I can still track my jog, listen to music, and check my heart rate, but at 1/20th the weight.
Maybe 1/100 people I see using headphones have wired headphones, certainly wasn’t the case 10 years ago. Bluetooth technology and quality has come a long way.
Bluetooth isn’t the technology that’s come a long way, it’s still the same shit it was decades ago. It’s batteries.
it’s still the same shit it was decades ago.
The engineers at Bluetooth SIG busting their ass to give us Bluetooth 6.1: “am I a joke to you?”
Kinda, yeah.
That’s just not true, Bluetooth codecs have improved sound quality DRAMATICALLY.
And I say this as someone who’s not a big fan of wireless.
I could NOT be bothered with charging headphones daily.
They usually charge themselves in their case (small pods) or have big batteries (over ear). I use my pods probably 8 hours a day, and just need to charge the case once or twice a week.
The battery will wear our within a few years and become unusable. My Bluetooth headphones now last about 30 minutes.
Got the AirPods Pro 1st Gen in 2019, still going strong. Usually have to recharge every 1,5-2 days and I use them pretty every day for commute from home to work and back (in total about 1,5H).
I got my headphones over 6 years ago, the battery last as long as it always has. And I use them a few hours every day.
I’m sure that’s true, but I’ve never managed to keep a pair of earpods for more than a couple of years. I always end up losing them, generally while travelling.
A decent set of headphones will have an effectively all-day battery, and most people probably aren’t listening to their headphones for 8+ hours a day.
I’ve had my headphones for about 7 years now and they still last for several hours on a single charge, and they support fast charging. If they’re at 0%, I can plug them in for 10 minutes and they’ll have about 2 hours worth of charge. I charge them maybe once a week with casual use.
I’d still have wires IF MY PHONE HAD A PLACE TO PLUG THEM IN.
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I’m not sure if I even have a choice anymore tbh… Really I only use my phone for music and text/call. A dandy map if I need one, but not usually.
I compared a tonne of flagship smart phones not that long ago. The Sony Xperia series was the only one to still have an audio jack. They’re quite expensive tho, so ended up with a phone sans the jack. I miss it dearly.
Buy a USB-C to headphone jack dongle. They’re about $5 and work on any phone.
Did that. Still annoying. Have to bring it everywhere. Will wear out the Usb C jack faster (pretty hard to wear out an audio jack tho). Can’t charge and listen to audio.
USB-C puts the springy bits that can wear out in the connector end, not the jack. The jack is just a piece of circuit board with bare traces on it, it’s very sturdy.
You don’t have to bring it everywhere, you attach it to your headphones and then it’s part of the headphones that you want to wear.
Fair point about the sprongs. But. Coz phones are so big, when phone+dongle is in my pocket it often puts a lot of pressure on the USB. Which A, doesnt seem good and B, can easily cause the jack to very slightly disconnect and pause the song. Also, when the sprongs fail on the dongle it starts doing crazy shit like play/pausing song or adjusting volume.
I’d need to buy like 3 more dongles in that case…
I’d much rather just have an audio jack on my phone.
See how they massacred my boy…
People really will copy anything Apple does.
I do like my AirPods, but I’m still pissed off that the duopoly killed the headphone jack. Give me back my headphone jack!!
You guys are only $5 away from the good ole days…
I would love that if it wasn’t another cord that I would absolutely lose.
You can buy headphones with a USB-C connector too. That way you’ll lose the headphones too, so you don’t need an adapter anyway!
Pay phones, Public water fountains, Coffee grinders in grocery stores, all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced, Tons of random accessories for everything were all over stores and eBay but sadly all gone now.
Oh yeah, coffee grinders in grocery stores. I rarely see those anymore, but they used to be everywhere.
all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced
In 2015, at least in Canada, smart phones were already ubiquitous.
Interesting point about the grinders, I’m just realising I haven’t seen any in forever.
The grinder thing is because Keurig K-Cups came out, and the entire industry shifted towards selling those instead.
Dedicated GPS unit in your car
My parents gave me a GPS unit for my car about 20 years ago and I used it for the longest time. It was great help when driving in cities and big towns or locations I had never gone to before. We used it all the time and I think I updated the maps … I think it was a Garmin device … I think I updated the maps 2 or 3 times over the years. Then it went unsupported but I kept using it for the longest time.
Then I started buying better smartphones and my phone just eventually replaced the GPS unit.
I still have it and it still works and the battery on it is still good … I just don’t need it any more and the maps are about 10-15 years out of date.
I have an old garmin gps in my car. Use it all the time combined with a phone. The garmin doesn’t need cell signal so it works everywhere. Funny when going places where the street didn’t exist back then, but it’s kind of cool to see how the city grows. We mainly use it as a backup. It’s also louder than the phone talking and easier to understand.
You can download maps on your phone, so you can use it in areas without service.
Used that when I went to the state’s and didn’t pay for roaming/data. Just downloaded Oregon/Washington.
I have OsmAnd and organic maps and the maps downloaded offline, but the garmin GPS also shows the speed limits, my speed, bigger screen, louder speaker.
I can say the same about my ipod. I used it everyday for the longest time until I realized I can put a 126gb micro sd card in my phone which is more than double what my ipod had. Now it’s sitting in a box somewhere in my closet. Probably still works too.
It’s a shame modern phones have been losing both micro SD card slots and headphone jacks and often don’t have a substantial amount of storage. Still better than carrying multiple devices, however.
True yeah… Garmin devices were so revolutionary for driving when they came out. Then phones with Google maps came along and that was easier
CD’s & Mp3 players
Portable handhelds, I mean form factors like the PSP and Nintendo DS. The downside of the console/handheld convergence is that the handhelds need pretty big screens.
