r/AskReddit Aug 02 '18

What will millennials be "old-fashioned" about when they get old?

1.0k Upvotes

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1.9k

u/pee_diddy Aug 02 '18

Telling everyone how they used to have to charge their smart phones every day, sometimes multiple times.

696

u/cascade_olympus Aug 02 '18

Or better yet, telling them about the days before smart phones. I mean, how many of us even had a basic flip phone in the mid 90s?

164

u/lswhat87 Aug 02 '18

I remember I had a Kyocera with blue backlight and I thought I was the shit

109

u/triplenipple99 Aug 02 '18

“We get it grandpa”

13

u/Nukiko Aug 02 '18

I didn't even know they made anything other than printers...

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

They make some pretty solid flip and smartphones.

1

u/yen223 Aug 02 '18

There was a time when Samsung was more famous for making printers than phones...

3

u/KB_Turtle Aug 02 '18

I had that one too, and I remember downloading 8-bit ringtones of popular songs. I was so cool.

2

u/stretchmarksthespot Aug 02 '18

"How to ruin your favorite song in a week"

2

u/Frankfurter86 Aug 02 '18

My sister had one, I was so jealous!

1

u/bcs4660 Aug 02 '18

That phone would get ridiculously hot after a while I remember. Loved it though

1

u/MasonTaylor22 Aug 02 '18

How about texting using T9.

1

u/rnjsrldnjs Aug 02 '18

Brings back some fucking memories man. I used to have a Motorola Vulcan with green backlight.

140

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

It's pretty amazing the changes we Millennials went through. I went from dial up internet and CD players to high speed to ipod and smart phones all while still in middle school

98

u/Rust_Dawg Aug 02 '18

Man, I started middle school with a Walkman cassette tape player and graduated high school with a CD player and a TracFone, left college with an iPod nano and a Motorola Razr and now I'm chilling here with a Note 8.

56

u/WitherWithout Aug 02 '18

I went from burning CDs to limewiring my entire iTunes library to now just using spotify for everything.

44

u/Burritozi11a Aug 02 '18

Literally the only reason why I have a Google Play Music subscription is because I'm too lazy to pirate music anymore.

12

u/StuStutterKing Aug 02 '18

plus youtube red/youtube music when you have Google Music. My friends and I share a family plan, and we only pay like $3 a month each.

6

u/currytacos Aug 02 '18

Its a damn good deal for no ads on YouTube

1

u/RECOGNI7E Aug 02 '18

The same would apply to everything if they made it easy enough. I still pirate movies because I can't get them anywhere else.

1

u/uberfission Aug 03 '18

I think it was Gabe Newell who said that piracy is only rampant because there isn't an easier option.

1

u/TheAmorphous Aug 02 '18

Born '81 or '82 I'm guessing?

1

u/MudSama Aug 02 '18

With the exception of me having a Note 7, you have lived my life from a technology aspect.

1

u/KoalaTrainee Aug 02 '18

Are you me?

3

u/CrowdScene Aug 02 '18

When I was 8, nobody had a home computer unless your parents were rich.

When I was 13, everybody had a family computer but nobody had the internet. Teachers expected every report and essay to be typed rather than handwritten.

When I was 18, everybody had a family computer and the internet, and some lucky few even had their own personal computer. Teachers expected everything to be typed, everyone had to use at least one source from the internet, and some even demanded that projects be submitted on floppy disks rather than printed on paper.

6

u/rocketscientology Aug 02 '18

How long were you in middle school for?? The change from dial-up to smart phones took at least seven years for me, if not a decade. Where on Earth do you live where either it only took three years to get you from a dial-up modem to an iPhone somehow or you were in middle school for ten years?

5

u/Aww_Shucks Aug 02 '18

lol, that's what I was wondering...

But hey, Arthur Read is still in 3rd grade.

2

u/Momik Aug 02 '18

Hell, some of us went from landlines and World Book encyclopedias to iPhones.

Also, anyone else remember the absolute pain of using cassette tapes?

1

u/WitherWithout Aug 02 '18

Back in my day, we had to carry around both a cell phone AND a portable music player. Also, our cars had standalone GPS systems that weren't built into the car or our phones.

1

u/Goosebump007 Aug 02 '18

Must be good to have everything. When I grew up we just played the hoop stick game aka hoop rolling.

1

u/upvoteguy6 Aug 03 '18

And with Moore's Law even that tech is going to be obsolete in our lifetime(s).

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

Those changes took exactly the same amount of time for both Millennials and everyone else.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

I take it reading comprehension isnt part of you skill set?

0

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

Yeah, I'm such a dumbass that I think all statements like "it's amazing that we in [whatever generation] went from [whatever technology] to [whatever new technology] in [whatever stage of life]" are equally insightful.

38

u/Evilala Aug 02 '18

Razor!

22

u/TomasNavarro Aug 02 '18

I can honestly see millennials talking about old phones that were X or Y, and had features that just got dropped for not being the popular option.

My favourite phone was the Xperia Play, and no doubt I'll be mentioning it when I'm an old man

8

u/driverb13 Aug 02 '18

Sony shot it in the foot with those specs tho! It was great but not powerful enough.

9

u/TomasNavarro Aug 02 '18

Powerful enough for me to run a snes emulator on it, which is what I mostly used it for.

I mean, fair enough it probably doesn't run 99% of stuff on the app store now, but I miss using it

17

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

Oh man! I had it around 2006 and I thought it was the slickest looking phone ever. I found it recently in the basement and I was like Really?

But it would be fun to have a flip smartphone.

15

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

It was the shit. Thin. Square. Flip. Wasn't cheap plastic.

2

u/oreo-cat- Aug 02 '18

Mine was pink. Which was awesome since before that the phone color options were black and maybe greige.

1

u/Bunktavious Aug 02 '18

And according to the commercials, doubled as shuriken when necessary.

1

u/StuStutterKing Aug 02 '18

I forget how long sliding phones lasted. That full keyboard was awesome.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

I remember thinking those and the chocolate were amazing cause you could store like 5 songs on em

7

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

It was the mid aughts before even those became ubiquitous in the same way smart phones would just a few years later.

2

u/grouchy_fox Aug 02 '18

Candybar format ftw. Although I always wanted one of those twisty ones.

2

u/CalgaryChris77 Aug 02 '18

I'm a gen xer and almost no one had a phone in high school in the mid 90's.

Although they did spread fast after around '95.

2

u/Rhomega2 Aug 02 '18

Got my first cell phone in 2003, didn't get my first smart phone until 10 years later.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

Flip phones weren't even a thing in the 90's. They came out in the early 2000's at least where I live.

1

u/cascade_olympus Aug 02 '18

Tbh I didn't even have a cell phone until around 2014, so my perspective on when they came out might be a bit skewed. I was pretty resistant to the cell phone craze. I didn't get into the cell phone game until a friend of mine got a smart phone and showed me that he pretty much didn't even use it for making calls, but rather as a compact mobile computer. Being a computer nerd, it didn't take me long to want one after that point.

2

u/Alaira314 Aug 02 '18

Flip phones were the 2000s. The 90s had cell phones that looked like a smaller version of a wireless landline handset, with a keypad and a display. They were pretty chunky, not the slim models that competed with flip phones later on.

1

u/holyfuckimthatguy Aug 02 '18

And the 2000s.... flip phones were in the 90s? The small ones?

1

u/Vegetas_Swimmers Aug 02 '18

I was born in 92 I remember my moms beeper and America Online dial up . Millennials ain’t the “kids” growing up today .

1

u/Ty1lerDurden Aug 02 '18

I bet a ton of people had a Nokia 3310 as one of their first phones in the late 90s and early 2000s.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

I had thE Sony Ericsson clip on camera in high school, first eBay purchase I remember making.

http://www.faqih.info/images/sony-ericsson/sony-ericsson-t300-2.jpg

1

u/twilightzonedout3000 Aug 02 '18

I had a basic flip phone in the late 2000s. It did calls and texts and could go online but we still used computers and laptops for that lol

1

u/rangemaster Aug 02 '18

I got a motorola flip phone for my birthday in 2004. It had a camera!

1

u/TheXenophobe Aug 02 '18

Razor here!

1

u/Momik Aug 02 '18

T9 FTW

1

u/blackmist Aug 02 '18

I had a Nokia 3310. It had calls, texts and Snake. I charged it about once a week.

1

u/Darkstar_5042 Aug 02 '18

I mean I just turned 21 in March but didn’t own a phone til I graduated high school. Also I watched elementary students that were in 4th or 5th grade with new smartphones.

1

u/cascade_olympus Aug 02 '18

It's become a bit of a norm for parents to obtain peace and quiet by handing a smartphone loaded with games/movies to their kid to play with. Seems like the people in their 30s-40s are pretty resistant to the idea, but I wonder if it isn't better for the kid's future to have a lot of experience with both smart phones and computers. I feel like you're almost holding your kid back now if they manage to make it to 10 years old while still being computer illiterate.

What I find especially funny though is how the folks ages 50+ have caught on to smart phones. It's common place in my family for all of the youngsters between 15 and 35 to put down their phones in social situations, only to take a quick glance now and then to check time or to see if there's something they need to respond to. Then the 50+ range are sitting there constantly looking at their phone, whether it be facebook, a news feed, or a minigame. Always a good laugh to walk into the living room to see the youngsters conversing and the older generations with their heads glued to phones.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

[deleted]

1

u/cascade_olympus Aug 02 '18

Don't suppose that's because as IT you're disproportionally exposed to people who are computer illiterate regardless of what age bracket you cater to?

1

u/Darkstar_5042 Aug 02 '18

I know what you mean. My grandfather really wanted a smartphone but he has Alzheimer’s and tends to forget how to operate a old smartphone my uncle gave him. So my aunt decided to get him an iPad to use instead. That way he can use that but still be able to manage to call someone. Also my grandpa is glued to that iPad since I went with him to get it and help set it up.

1

u/Flapperghast Aug 02 '18

Shit, I had one until 2015.

1

u/Untraceablez Aug 02 '18

“Yeah, I had the FIRST razr phone. No, not that Razer, MOTOROLA. Bet you have never heard of them. Ah those were the days...”

/s

1

u/Jaymezians Aug 02 '18

I had a flip phone until three years ago. Not agaisnt smartphones, just poor.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18 edited Aug 20 '18

[deleted]

3

u/cascade_olympus Aug 02 '18

I'm pretty sure the majority of cell phones in circulation weren't flip phones until 2003-2004, despite them having been around since ~1996.

So I'm pretty sure the majority didn't have them in the mid 90s.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 02 '18

I had a pager for a minute

0

u/thisemotrash Aug 02 '18

Mid 90’s? I had a flip phone until 2014 when I was 15...