Posted on 10/19/2011 5:14:47 PM PDT by Jotmo
Which Tech Gadgets Will Be Phased Out This Decade?
Hindsight may always be 20-20, but you don’t need particularly great foresight to know many of the gadgets on today’s market won’t be around in 2020 given how quickly the tech industry keeps changing. In the first half of the 2000s, retailers were buzzing about the prospects of MP3 players and netbooks, but by the end of the decade, those products had largely been replaced by smartphones and tablets.
As tempting as it may be to imagine otherwise, some of the gadgets you may rely on most right now will likely suffer the same fate and be killed off or made obsolete by the end of this decade. Sure, you may still be able to find these products for sale in certain niche stores, but they will no longer be produced for a mass-market audience.
“You can still find and buy VCRs and there are people still using mainframes from 1992, so it’s not like this stuff disappears forever,” says Stephen Baker, an industry analyst at the NPD Group. Baker notes that the main reason retailers continue to market and sell outdated products is to cater to shoppers who buy them for nostalgia’s sake, but for all intents and purposes the market has left these products in the dust. So which popular products today will join the likes of VCRs, cassette players and transistor radios in the next few years? MainStreet asked five tech analysts to offer their thoughts on the gadgets that will largely be phased out by the end of this decade.
(Excerpt) Read more at shopping.yahoo.com ...
Not sure I agree.
I predict a backlash against integrated technology, following some future, massive data breach, of one of the major non-gaming wireless providers.
The thing with technology now, is that it’s all fundamentally linked. Your phone deposits trace information from your gps onto your photos. Your car keeps track of your location. Your information is all loosely associated, and may end up at risk.
A stand-alone gps does not provide information to your your stand-alone digital camera, which does not communicate with your flip-phone.
Dinosaur tech? Or simple, security?
Gotta disagree (partially) on the CD/DVD disappearing. It might disappear for entertainment (which would be stupid), but the computer industry will need permanent media for some time yet. There will always be a need to do an operating system install on the servers that make all the other tech magic happen, and it has to be do-able without a network connection. And USB drives aren’t a viable solution, as they lack the permanence of a properly stored DVD disc.
Yep, I got my wife a Kindle for Christmas. She kept saying she didn’t need it because of the cost, but now she is hooked. In less than a year, she has already got rid of half the paperbacks and has gone almost 100% digital. She takes it everywhere.
Something these all-in-one device people don’t get is many of us want something that does a specific job really well and not an everything device that does it adequate. Same thing with most camera phones, almost any regular digital camera does a better job.
My wife has a laptop she uses some but we both prefer the desktop. Neither of us want to surf the web on a phone. I am far sighted and cannot see to read the display on a phone. I can tell there are words there, but what they say is impossible for me to read.
I am thinking of getting that new Amazon Fire for quick uses like you mention. Cost is good compared to a laptop.
Bought a case of those last week.
I guess I am not the only one paranoid or just careful. Another reason I don’t like to have everything together.
LOL there are at least two of us, anyway.
:)
I cling bitterly to the idea I’m “retro”.
I bought up over a hundred a few months ago when some store was clearing them out. 25 cents for 2 bulbs.
I got seperate mp3 players, seperate GPS, seperate cameras, and I only use my phone to make phone calls (I hate texting).
I also have hundreds of dvds that I can watch when I want and not be at the mercy of the internet connection.
There used to be something about the right to privacy. It rings a bell, but I ain’t quite sure? A little help?
I got 3 books and a library card.
USB 2.0 is pretty good, I benchmarked it at about 20 Megs/S.
Comes in about 80% as fast as my board-mounted hard drives, my machine has dual buses, running at 133 mhz FSB speed.
I am definitely tempted by the Fire. I like the idea of getting magazine subscriptions and being able to see color. Access to streaming movies, etc is somewhat tempting, but we have the PS3, and I have a internet enabled bluray in my room. So it seems more of the same.
Maybe that is my problem with the smaller devices, being farsighted. I also have huge hands and fingers... so I don’t touch the screen exactly right. I had an LG Vu phone for a couple of years, and just got to where I hated it. I spent so much time reworking text mssgs, and forget trying to deal with phone prompts where I had to enter long number sequences.
I have a Samsung slider now with the full keyboard, still make mistakes, but much happier.
I started getting parts ot Seagate’s modular system, against the day they’re no longer made, iow, I have both the desktop and portable FW adapters for their adaptable drive systems.
Good catch.
2. Incandescent bulbs.I love incandescents for the warm, full spectrum, semi-coherent light they produce. I expect that soon materials science will produce quasi full spectrum lighting devices, most likely based on the diode junction, thus being LEDs.3. LED household bulb
I'm not sure if florescent lighting is semi-coherent or not. I suspect it is not. A laser beam is fully coherent light. One check of coherence is the ability to easily read holograms etched on plastic credit cards and driver's licenses.
I'm guessing the types of LEDs used in bulb replacements are semi-coherent. But they are very narrow spectrum. Cold, heartless lighting. Studies are showing significant physiological impacts to that lack of spectrum breadth, lack of analogs in biology and the world.
An incandescent is like a fire. Like the sun.
Florescents are also cold and narrow spectrum, although technology has greatly improved that.
I predict that florescents, but not LEDs, nor even incandescents will disappear. Although the unique shape of the millions and millions of florescent bulb fixtures might mean they last a few generations in capital plant replacement cycles. That is -- about 50 years.
2. Incandescent bulbs. They burn out too fast, cost more to operate, run too hot.
Not in a free market.
3. LED household bulbs — CF bulbs put out more light per watt, and cost a fraction of the LED bulbs. Last thing I need to spend $30 on is an underpowered LED “floodlight”, and I certainly wouldn’t install on outside for fear of theft. If the gubmint required oranges-to-oranges specs on all bulbs sold, there’d be no LED market at all. It’s unlikely that the price of LED bulbs will fall much more, give or take a breakthrought that makes them a one-for-one replacement for CFs, halogens, or incandescents.
CFLs are migraine-inducing mercury hazards.
5. Fighter planes and bombers — UAVs will replace the former, guided missiles have long ago replaced the latter.
Perhaps 2050, but not 2020. Besides, as space becomes a battlefield, weapons UAVs will be compromised.
8. USB 3.0 will replace SATA, eSATA, what’s left of PATA and IDE, what’s left of Firewire 400 and 800, and every other internal and external interface standard that uses wires. USB 4.0 will never come out.
USB hard drives use SATA or PATA connectors internally. USB 3 cannot do what you want. And in 10 years, we will have a faster replacement for USB 3, whether it is USB 4 or something like Lightpeak.
Now that is funny !!!!!
>USB 2.0 is pretty good, I benchmarked it at about 20 Megs/S.
>Comes in about 80% as fast as my board-mounted hard drives, my machine has dual buses, running at 133 mhz FSB speed.
It’s more decent than USB 1.0; I have/had a couple of IOmega’s “Peerless” drives {and the bases for both USB [2.0, IIRC] and FireWire [400, IIRC]} and a couple of USB/FireWire hard-drive enclosures.
In a stress-test running them all on one of the busses, the FireWire beat out the USB 2.0.
Oh, nice; link?
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