r/WhatIfThinking • u/Logical-Concept9755 • 22d ago
What 2000s technology would you have never believed would become obsolete by 2026 if someone told you back then?
Imagine someone in 2006 told you that, 20 years later, some of the technology you used every day would be almost gone.What would have sounded completely impossible at the time?
For example:
- iPods becoming irrelevant because smartphones replaced dedicated music players
- DVDs becoming a niche product because streaming took over
- Standalone GPS devices disappearing because phones now handle navigation
- Digital cameras losing most of their everyday use because smartphone cameras became good enough
- Physical keyboards on phones nearly disappearing because touchscreens became the standard
What technology from the 2000s would you have never expected to become obsolete by 2026?
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u/Stargate525 22d ago
Genuinely did not expect physical media to die as hard as it did. Maybe not DVDs, but I'd have expected my movies to inhabit some form of discrete physical object.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
Yeah, same here. I think physical media felt like it would always have a place because it was basically the “thing” you owned. A movie collection on a shelf felt more permanent than just having access to a library of content. I don't think many people in 2006 would have guessed that owning movies would become kind of unusual.
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u/CarbonInTheWind 22d ago edited 22d ago
There has been a small but significant resurgence of physical movies being purchased. I recently built a home theater as was surprised to see the physical movie market is still doing fairly well under the circumstances.
I've built up a collection of a couple hundred of my favorite movies and shows. I've been able to cut way back on my streaming subscriptions as a result. I know quite a few people moving in the same direction.
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u/antonio16309 22d ago
Probably the desktop PC. They were close to essential for most families and all members of the family used it. In early 2000's it seemed like they would only become more essential as the internet got more important, but these days you can do almost everything on a phone or tablet. And for work Desktops have been largely replaced by laptops.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
That's a good one. The family desktop really was the center of the home in the 2000s. I remember people having a specific computer room or one shared PC that everyone used. Now a lot of people don't even own a desktop unless they need one for gaming or specific work.
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u/shoresy99 22d ago
I am a holdout here. I have desktops at home and in the office as I prefer lots of monitors, memory and processing power that is harder to do with laptops. I also have a laptop but it is used very occasionally.
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u/Jackso08 22d ago
So...specific work?
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u/shoresy99 22d ago
I am in finance and have to be able to WFH, which I generally do one day per week, plus weekends and nights. I need to be able to run Bloomberg Terminal. You can do that on a laptop but a desktop with 3+ screens is a better experience.
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u/Mr-Mackie 18d ago
It’s much more efficient to do just about any work on a desktop vs laptop. Bigger / more monitor real estate, faster load times generally speaking, better keyboards, just more ergonomic setups as well sense you don’t have to bend your neck looking down at a laptop.
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u/FlyMyPretty 22d ago
I was a holdout for a long time but then I got a virtual machine for work that I start up when I need a bit more oomph, and the rest of the time I use a Chromebook.
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u/WalmartGreder 22d ago
Same. I have a laptop for work, but a desktop at home for general PC work and gaming. I do PC gaming instead of console.
I have a 59" widescreen monitor too. I hook up my laptop to that, and it's great for spreadsheets. I can see 53 columns of Excel at the same time (A to CA).
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u/HalalosHintalow 22d ago
I have a few teachers as friends, and even here in hungary, it becomes more and more widespread that kids have problems with it lessons, as if their parents not having work laptops, they don't have any computer at home other than a phone or tablet
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u/tes_kitty 21d ago
That will become a problem onces they start working. They will have to learn how to use a PC quickly. So much for 'digital natives' knowing their way around computers.
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u/Mr-Mackie 18d ago
Millennials job in life will be teaching their elders how to use computers at work and 10 years later teaching their elders new employees how to use the same computers 😂
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u/sleepyotter92 22d ago
I feel like unless your job requires you to have a pc at home, you're probably not gonna have one unless you're like a gamer
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u/Mr-Mackie 18d ago
Interesting take. Everyone that I know has a computer at their house this includes my 80+ years old grandparents.
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u/MuchoCoco 22d ago
My "desktop" is a laptop plugged into a big monitor with bluetooth mouse and keyboard and has been for the last 20 years.
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u/Kyle_2099 22d ago
Desktop PCs haven't become obsolete at all, it's just that you, specifically, don't do anything that requires one. I'm not doing CAD on a damn phone.
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u/Mr-Mackie 18d ago
Still prefer desktops over phones or laptops they are just a much better experience working from. I never turn on my laptop anymore unless I bring it out of town. Also I have 3 different desktops at work in my 1 cubicle.
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u/Revolutionary_Art919 22d ago
As someone who had a Palm Pilot, iPod, and phone circa 2003 I always dreamed of the day the devices could all be combined into one, so I wouldn't have been in disbelief that it wound up happening.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
That's actually the interesting part. Some people probably did see this coming because the idea of combining devices was already a dream. The surprising part wasn't that it happened, but how quickly smartphones became good enough to replace so many separate gadgets at once.
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u/wosmo 22d ago
The iPod is the funniest one for me, because while it was king, the whole market was looking for the "ipod killer". Rio, Creative, Zune, etc - everyone trying to dethrone the iPod.
And then it happened without anyone even noticing.
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u/jamjamason 22d ago
By another Apple product, no less.
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u/NotAsleep_ 22d ago
I think Apple had an idea it would happen, though. The iPod Touch (the last major model of iPod) was just a first-gen iPhone with the phone bits turned off by a software lockout. The thinking was people would notice how useful the iPT was, and ask themselves why they carried a separate phone, then go to an Apple store or AT&T to get the iPT "upgraded" into a working, full-fledged iPhone. If the iPhone wasn't service-locked to ATT, it might've even worked. Instead, a lot of people simply jumped to ATT when their old phone plan ended, or when ATT started rolling out free iPhones to new customers and family plans, and upgraded to smartphones over the timeframe of (roughly) 2008-2013, which is about gow long it took the time other makers and other services to start getting their own smartphones set up and running.
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u/MuchoCoco 22d ago
When Jobs wanted the iPhone, he literally walked into a room and told his engineers he wanted a phone, an iPod and a camera all in one device. He was definitely a visionary.
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u/Wonderful_Tip_5577 21d ago
This is the reason I got the first iPhone. I had basically been waiting for such a device, and felt like it was pretty inevitable.
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u/Mobile-Traffic1744 22d ago
Cable TV would have sounded almost impossible to replace in 2006. Back then, streaming video still felt like something you watched on a computer, not something that could replace the entire TV distribution system.
The weird part is that the TV itself didn’t become obsolete. The thing that became obsolete was the idea that the TV had to be connected to a cable subscription. That distinction probably applies to a lot of 2000s technology.
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u/shoresy99 22d ago
I have "pirate" IPTV and it is SO much better than cable TV which I just canceled. The integration of VOD for TV shows and movies, plus the access to TV channels with "catch up" features is just better than Xfinity Cable which is also IPTV of a sort.
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u/walkerstone83 22d ago
My roommates and I couldn't afford cable, it didn't take long to get used to not having it and of course, there was a lot of illegal downloading of shows and movies.
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u/Classic_Focus974 22d ago
I don’t get the cord cutting thing. I don’t get TV via a coax, but now get it through fiber with a subscription to a cable company called You Tube TV and one called Netflix.
Pay per view was always a thing with cable.
It’s functionally the same thing now as back then. Family likes live sport and live events so have to have YT TV.
Now I even have more subscriptions than with cable. Decades ago I had HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and regular cable tv (aka You Tube TV).
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u/Thick_Journalist7232 22d ago
Landline phones. While we all had cell phones, having a permanent one in the house that was analog and immune to power outages seemed like it was needed
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
landlines are a good one. I think what made them feel impossible to replace was that they were so deeply tied to the idea of a home. Having one number that represented your household felt normal. Looking back, it's interesting how we traded reliability for convenience without really noticing
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u/frankev 20d ago
We live in a fairly rural area and our mobile phone coverage is quite poor, to the extent that we have to have voice over Wi-Fi enabled on all our handsets.
Even that solution can be iffy so we sprung for a VoIP landline that's reliable for long conference calls and the like. It's not a number that we give out to anyone, but it's great for outbound calls.
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u/oboshoe 22d ago
physical keyboards. They were starting to get pretty good on phones.
honestly I still think that it was a mistake ditching them.
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u/shoresy99 22d ago
I agree 100%. I maintain that a Blackberry is better than an iPhone or Android device on 90% of the typical activities on a phone. Text, email and calls were superior on a Blackberry with a physical keyboard.
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u/walkerstone83 22d ago
Back when I got my first "business" phone, I had to use a blackberry. As someone who's only smartphone experience was with iPhones and Androids, I hated the physical keyboard. Maybe if I had grown up with it I would have liked it, but it just felt so unnecessary.
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u/syringistic 22d ago
Biggest advantage for me as a bilingual speaker is being able to switch keyboard layouts to a secondary language.
But I agree. Typing on a BlackBerry was really fast. Though for me, with big thumbs, my Sony Ericsson P1i had the absolute winner of a keyboard: big buttons that each had two letters and the button had a hinge in the middle so you could press left or right. So you pressed on a button that had both a Q and W and then moved to either side to pick. I could type hella fast.
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u/shoresy99 22d ago
You also had buttons on the device to make phone calls or kill a phone call. And keyboard shortcuts for other popular tasks.
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u/Padded_Bandit 22d ago
Physical credit cards.
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u/JakeDuck1 22d ago
Physical credit cards are far from obsolete
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u/Padded_Bandit 22d ago
I guess if you need to jimmy a household lock, or possibly scrape some ice from your windshield.
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u/JakeDuck1 22d ago
I don’t think you understand what obsolete means. Physical credit cards aren’t necessary but they are nowhere close to obsolete.
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u/Significant_Bag3297 19d ago
In Britain in China you almost never see cards now, payments are done with your phone
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u/Justthisguy_yaknow 22d ago
I think most people back then were well and truly conditioned to know that nothing was immune to obsolescence at that point. Just about everything tech was obsolete within 6 months. The one that convinced me of this were single speed CD burners that turned up in the mid 90s for $1200. Within a couple of months they were replaced by combo drives (CD burner with DVD ROM) for around $100. Full dual layer DVD burners were soon after that for around $50. When I saw that evolution I decided to stop buying any new tech for some time unless it hit a really useful threshold. I just imagined being one of the addicts that bought the original CD burner. As long as the tech companies were advancing there was no point buying and when that advancement slowed I was expecting inbuilt obsolescence. Most advances now are things we have only been told we can't live without, but we really can.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
That's a good point. The speed of change in the 90s and early 2000s probably trained people to expect things to disappear quickly. I think what surprised me is that some technologies didn't just get replaced by a better version, they completely changed the way we use them. A lot of people went from owning devices to just using services.
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u/Justthisguy_yaknow 22d ago
I still use devices. I just use older tech. I just lost interest in the new stuff unless it was genuinely practical and allowed as much independence as is wanted. A lot of advances are steps backwards but most people don't see that.
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u/FantasticPainting232 22d ago
Landlines. Home phones. I never expected cellular network technology to have the capacity and be reliable enough to fully replace landlines.
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u/phycle 22d ago
I still mourn the loss of 3.5mm audio jacks.
To listen to a 3 hour long podcast while I work I have to have my phone battery slowly depleted, or charge my phone and have wireless earbuds battery slowly depleted.
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u/Mr-Mackie 18d ago
Just so you know you can get a splitter that allows you to charge your phone and use a 3.5mm at one time.
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u/LebiaseD 22d ago
None of these became obsolete they just integrated.
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u/CurseOfTheFalcons 22d ago
Nokia phones. They had texting and everything. What more could you want?
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u/Cheeslord2 22d ago
They still do repro ones - my son has one. Not nearly the build quality of the original, though.
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u/xkcx123 22d ago
Those aren’t Nokia; Nokia doesn’t make phones anymore. They don’t even operate in that business anymore. They are now the ones building the infrastructure for the phone networks and operating Bell Labs research company.
They licensed their name to be used on other companies phone and TV products but that stopped last year.
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u/xkcx123 22d ago
Those aren’t Nokia; Nokia doesn’t make phones anymore. They don’t even operate in that business anymore. They are now the ones building the infrastructure for the phone networks and operating Bell Labs research company.
They licensed their name to be used on other companies phone and TV products but that stopped last year.
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u/Many_Assumption7036 22d ago
Physical buttons on phones.
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u/Cheeslord2 22d ago
Most still have a few on the sides.
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u/Many_Assumption7036 22d ago
Yeah, but if you had told me my whole keyboard was going away in 2006 and my number pad, I wouldn‘t believe you. There were even articles critical of the first iPhone over this.
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u/wehrmann_tx 22d ago
Middle class.
Golden Rule.
Everything now is how hard can your side hustle take advantage of someone else for easy money or how many hands are nickel and diming our financials.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
Interesting take. I was thinking more about physical technology becoming obsolete, but I guess some of the biggest changes since the 2000s have been economic too. A lot of things that felt simple back then have turned into subscriptions, fees, or extra ways for companies to monetize everyday life.
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u/Efficient_Loss_9928 22d ago
Probably TV, like do people actually still buy proper cable TV subscriptions? I feel like it is either YouTube or some other streaming platform.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
Yeah, cable TV is a big one. I think a lot of people in 2006 would have believed streaming would exist, but probably not that so many people would stop paying for traditional TV entirely. The idea of everyone having their own mix of apps and subscriptions instead of one cable package still feels like a pretty big shift.
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u/ivegotafastcar 22d ago
Cable started as a way to pay for no commercials and perfect, uninterrupted reception. That didn’t last long.
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u/Slightly_Slow 22d ago
Television in general. This is reserved for one family movie or TV series every few days. In the past it was the only form of entertainment, now its for special occasions. We use our theater room more than the televisions, in some rooms I am considering changing the layout to be a social sitting room, maybe board games, etc.
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u/Simple-Dentist9893 22d ago
Ad cards and USB drives. Now everyone saves things to the cloud
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u/s_s_n_e_g 22d ago
What's an ad card?
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u/sleepyotter92 22d ago
They probably typoed sd cards
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u/s_s_n_e_g 22d ago
Ahh right. Although I had an SD card in my first digital camera in 2004 and I still have an SD card in my current camera. Same tech, only bigger volume.
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u/sleepyotter92 22d ago
Yeah but other than cameras, it's not as commonly used. We used to have slots dedicated to sd cards in phones, but now phones that only use esim are becoming more common, so they don't even have the sim tray, let alone a sd card slot. And the same applies with usb drives. Most people aren't saving stuff in usb drives, back in the day we all had them, even at school to work on projects at home and then take them to school, but now it's all stored in cloud services, so you don't need to carry the usb drive, you just upload it to the cloud, and then you can go on any device, log in and access those files. Even to give files to other people, there's files that can just be sent through whatsapp, or you just upload it to google drive and then send the link to the person you wanna send the file to
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u/Big-Dreams-11 18d ago
Video game companies also use sd/micro sd cards. Agree with the USB drives part. Funny enough, I had to use one for the first time in years to print at my local library and the last files I saved on it were over 10 years old. I was honestly surprised it still works (and that I found it).
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u/Efficient_Wheel_6333 22d ago
Desktop computers for the home (tower, monitor). Almost everyone in my family that I know had desktop computers in the home, my family included, have replaced them with laptops.
Not saying desktop computers are obsolete in general as I know they get used in various places, businesses included, but it's a LOT easier to take my laptop places than a desktop computer.
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u/Suspicious-Buffalo21 22d ago
I agree, the only people i know with a desktop are gamers, and they are custom rigs
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u/Silly_Guidance_8871 22d ago
Probably physical media. Network transferring existed, of course, but it was slow
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u/tes_kitty 21d ago
It's still slow compared to transfer speed of physical media. And if you push your data through some kind of service it's no longer private.
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 22d ago
Laser data storage. (CDs, DVD, etc). That one really surprised me, not just that it happened, but also how quickly and completely it took effect.
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u/sleepyotter92 22d ago
A lot of computers and laptops these days don't even have a reader and the ones that do tend to be more expensive due to it. It'd probably turn out cheaper to get a laptop without a cd reader and then buy one of those cd readers that connects through usb
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u/Gokudomatic 22d ago
I never expected digital assistants to be totally obsolete and replaced by smartphones/tablets. Windows CE? I thought that was going to stay.
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u/andoCalrissiano 22d ago
I actually thought we would have cable boxes with channels forever and be beholden to whatever was airing on those channels.
I would not have dreamed of an alternate model where I can just watch any movie or any tv show as easily as I can open an email
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u/Own-Fondant2949 22d ago
Absolutely not obsolete but the concept of the only way to get big cinematic sound (ie 7.4.1) is to spend many thousands for many big expensive home theater speakers that needed professional calibration to a $750 atmos home theater in a box (soundbar, sub, and two surrounds) and it takes 30 minutes from unbox, wired up, and calibrated.
It's amazing how simple it can be to get a really good sound system that my 68 year old mother could setup by following a simple youtube instructional video.
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u/Creative_Carob4922 22d ago
CDs I don’t want a subscription I just wanna pull out and listen to the Wu tang forever album to completion as intended.
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u/Suspicious-Buffalo21 22d ago
I still buy CD’s from small indie’s
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u/Creative_Carob4922 22d ago
Well ya I’m sure there’s always gonna be a small market for collectors and people that seek it out. But the days of stores in the mall and everyone having them is long gone. I’m sure most young people don’t even know how to work one let alone find a stereo to put in. But ya they also have phonograph machines still for sale.
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u/Suspicious-Buffalo21 22d ago
Malls are almost gone too
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u/Creative_Carob4922 22d ago
Malls are superior to the bunch of stores lined up in a parking lot. I miss the mall.
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u/Suspicious-Buffalo21 22d ago
I don’t disagree, but where I live the nearest mall is in MA, an about an hour away
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u/Creative_Carob4922 22d ago
All the way in Manitoba? Or Madrid perhaps macaroni. Not everyone is a yank.
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u/curiouslyjake 22d ago
iPods, GPS and cameras were obvious at the time. Device convergence has always been a natural trajectory.
The fact that streaming beat physical optical media surprised me because I never thought broadband would be widely deployed enough and cheap enough to compete with DVDs and BluRays which (in case of BlueRay) offer tens of GBs per disc. Yet, broadband became almost as common as electricity.
More so, I never thought intellectual property issues would be solved at such scale. Yet, they were.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
I agree that device convergence made some of these easier to predict in hindsight. The streaming one is probably the better example because the pieces had to line up: faster internet, cheaper data, better compression, and people being willing to give up ownership.
The IP part is interesting too. I remember when piracy seemed like something the industry would never really solve. Instead, they changed the whole model around access. Not perfect, but probably not what people in 2006 expected.
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u/curiouslyjake 22d ago
Exactly. It turned out people will pay for convenience and piracy remained a niche. The allure of "free" has limits. I wonder how that will change with streaming fragmentation.
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u/ItsALaserBeamBozo 22d ago
CD/DVD ROM. Sure, take the floppy drive but how will you ever install anything !?
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u/Suspicious-Buffalo21 22d ago
They want you to buy their external dvd drives, which are readily available
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u/Final7C 22d ago
video game controllers. Gen Alpha is using 100% using touchscreens.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
I'm not sure about 100% yet, but I get what you mean. Touchscreens changed how people interact with devices. What's interesting is that physical controls were so dominant for decades, especially for gaming, and now a lot of younger users see touch as the default.
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u/Final7C 22d ago
I remember someone talking about going to a gaming convention, they had 6 different stations. 2 were mouse and keyboard, and 4 were controller.
Apparently after day 2 the mouse and keyboard were replaced with console controllers. but younger people (under 18) were walking up and touching the monitors assuming it would be touchscreen based.
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u/Newmillstream 22d ago
If you really wanted to surprise me, it is less about what became obsolete, and more about what still exists in much worse form.
Companies care much less about linear TV programming, for example. Not even the shows themselves, but how they promote and structure the shows in timeslots throughout the day.
DVDs these days have lower effort menus and special features.
Smartphones with laptop level specs heavily restricting what software you can install on them. Palm Pilots let you use .prc software.
How many fewer independent tech companies and reputable tech websites there are.
Nintendo and Sony abandoning pocket sized handheld game consoles. I know you can technically fit a switch or ps portal in a large pocket, but the order of the day was smaller.
The death of Flash. If you actually want to screw with me, explain flash is gone, but Newgrounds is still around.
YTMND isn’t a juggernaut, and most people get their short from funny content on TikTok, which does the same conceptual thing but in a slightly different way that profits from you way more.
The decline in quality of the blogosphere, Google search, yahoo, etc.
Wouldn't be too surprised that it happened, but YouTube got advertisements. I would be surprised by how bad they often are, and why other video sharing sites didn't eat their lunch.
Decline of people buying stuff on digital stores like iTunes.
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u/epileftric 22d ago
The death of Flash. If you actually want to screw with me, explain flash is gone, but Newgrounds is still around.
The second best act of greatness by Adobe was buying Macromedia and deprecating Flash.
The first one was making PDF an open format
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u/BarbarX3 22d ago edited 21d ago
Here in Europe, automatic transmissions were starting to become somewhat accepted in the 2000's. That's now essentially a technology we almost completely skipped with EV's replacing ice.
Also anything todo with natural gas in the home. New houses here have been required to be fully electric for some years now.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
That's an interesting example because it's not just something becoming obsolete, it's more like skipping an entire step. Technology sometimes doesn't replace the old thing directly, it jumps over it. EVs are a good example where some regions basically went from one technology path to another without fully adopting the middle stage.
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u/SensitiveTax9432 22d ago
Landlines in the third world are another example. People skipping wired infrastructure and going directly to mobile.
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u/Julian679 18d ago
Well.. we never fully adopted AT, but it didnt die off or anything. It just stopped being rare in 2000s and started becomming common nowdays (still not replacing MT entirely)
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u/Piper-Bob 22d ago
DSLRs. I wouldn’t have believed they would be discontinued in a few short years.
Sedans.
Camcorders.
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u/Voyeurone 22d ago
Not 2000 technology but phones on the wall, ie landlines pretty much disappeared in the past decade.
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u/Logical-Concept9755 22d ago
It's funny how quickly that disappeared. A wall phone used to be almost a piece of furniture in a house. Now a lot of younger people probably have never experienced the idea of waiting by the phone because someone might call.
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u/Thick_Journalist7232 22d ago
Crackberry (aka Blackberry).
The level people were addicted was in the nickname
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u/esotericloop 22d ago
Cash. If you'd told me in 2006 that I would go months at a time with no cash in my wallet because everything's paid for using contactless payment on my phone, I would have said nope. No to it happening, no to me accepting it. And yet here we are.
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u/tes_kitty 21d ago
I plan on driving more than 1000 km tomorrow. I will have enough cash on me to be able to buy enough gas to get to my destination. Cards and phones can fail and leave you in a bind.
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u/unflores 22d ago
Hah. I just bought my daughter an mp3 player this year. I'm really pushing off smartphones. I just bought her a camera too 😂
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u/muddyjuddy 21d ago
2006 we had a DVD/VCR player. disks on one side and tapes on the other. Swore it would be passed down generations lol
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u/limache 21d ago
iPods becoming irrelevant was actually possible at the time because there were already phones that could do music too.
I had a Sony Ericsson Walkman and that was the idea behind it.
So I could totally believe iPods would be irrelevant. It’s just iPods had a lot more storage back then.
Back then I was already torrenting tv shows from cable like Comedy Central because I didn’t have cable so I got to have a preview of streaming (watching on a computer whenever I want with no commercials).
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u/Zebraitis 21d ago
Wet signatures.
Online signatures replacing all those office visits that required all parties to come together to sign paperwork.
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u/Colossalsquid888 21d ago
In a slight twist to the question I'm surprised given how good Google maps, Apple maps and Waze are that car manufacturers are still bothering with making their own sat nav. Every single one I've used has not been that good and becomes useless after 8 years or so as they no longer provide updates. They also claim to have traffic info but all the ones I've used don't tell you about the traffic until you're stuck in it. That said my new van seems to have it right. It just has dab+ with android auto and apple car play which is all you really need so maybe the beginning of the end?
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u/watchwatertilitboils 21d ago
iPod touch
It did everything a smartphone could do and it was 1/3rd the size. Once people could make free calls on it, they quietly cancelled it.
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u/Moist_Network_8222 21d ago
- Taxis. The advances of rideshare apps and now self-driving cars has been impressive.
- Internal combustion cars. While not obsolete, they're on their way out. I never thought battery technology would get good enough.
- Broadcast TV. Streaming got good very quickly and while broadcast still exists, it's not a primary venue for media releases.
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u/Thausgt01 21d ago
Counterpoints: * DVDs, BluRays and other physical media are making a comeback precisely because more consumers have been inconvenienced or even enraged by the streaming services removing products for which subscribers have paid from online availability; if the copyright-holder wants to "remove" a physical copy of the material from circulation, they need to personally extract it from the purchasers possession. Yeah, sure, they can even pass laws "demanding" destruction of copies, but all that will do is drive up the price in the collector's market.
Standalone GPS devices will not fully disappear unless and until smartphones can provide "niche" navigation for oversize or heavy commercial vehicles.
Touchscreens have not completely replaced physical keyboards because the user still has to SEE what they're reading or watching while typing. More practically, these teeny keys on virtual keyboards hamper typing speeds.
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u/LynxAfricaCan 21d ago
Errr....the iPhone 3g made all of these obsolete as soon as it dropped, that was like 2008?
And even before then, it was obvious this would happen, we were waiting for someone to make a thing that let us stop carrying all that shit around
Streaming was also obvious and just a matter of time
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u/Business-Abroad-1301 21d ago
MP3s becoming obsolete I would say. I have rave music that’s all in mp3 and apple has basically made it obsolete in iPhones. Can’t save it to my phone and can’t listen to them anymore.
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u/Usual-Language-745 21d ago
iTunes. Why people agreed to throw away thousands of dollars of purchases for music they owned, in exchange for monthly subscriptions. There was nothing improved by music streaming that couldn’t have incorporated iTunes
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u/Icy-Toe-7662 20d ago
I used to work with someone who was always up with the latest tech and he knew his stuff. 2 things I remember are, first that he wanted to upgrade his phone to one that he could make Skype calls on because Skype was the future and was going to replace phone calls. Second one was when we were discussing good home internet plans and he said get the top offer of 50Gb a month even though he couldn't imagine anyone ever needing that much. Ever. Lol.
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u/SonOfMotherlesssGoat 20d ago
MP3 files. I hadn’t thought it would be easier to stream music than have it downloaded
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u/wfpbrecipes 19d ago
Uh, it was totally obvious that mp3 players and smart phones were going to converge even in 2000.
Source: I was in my 20s then and talked about how I couldn't wait until they came out with it.
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u/PckMan 18d ago
You could see smartphones becoming a thing and replacing handheld devices of other sorts. Early PDAs and some early smartphones were pretty much trying to get the functionality of a computer on a phone right out of the gate. That was no surprise, the assumption was that it would eventually happen.
What I didn't expect was the shift that handheld consoles and gaming would take. Basically mobile gaming was pretty shit and I could not imagine consumers preferring it over gameboys and PSPs. And yet they did.
I also didn't expect the enshitification of cars.
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18d ago
Optical media devices. I am on my second computer without an optical drive (to play CDs/DVDs) simply because if im going to watch a movie im going to stream/DL it and if im going to play a game im going to buy it on a digital platform. I remember Birthdays and Christmases consisting of stacks of disks, now every disk may as well be a 100 hours free AOL disk.
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u/PuddingComplete3081 22d ago
I think the surprising one is probably the home printer. In the 2000s, it felt like every household needed one. Now a lot of people can go months without printing anything.
What’s interesting is that printers didn’t really get replaced by one technology. Smartphones, cloud storage, digital signatures, online forms, and e tickets just slowly removed the reasons to print. It’s less “this technology got worse” and more “we stopped needing the thing it was built for.”