Dead Tech Walking
Some was murdered, some needs to DIE 😵
Before the smartphone swept us all off our collective feetsies (footsies?), the world was full of special purpose gadgets. Sure, some tech has become obsolete and needs to die (more on that later), but there were so many cool gadgets!
Here are a few that I used to love, so now I can’t get rid of.
I didn’t really use this first one — I think it’s my Grandpa’s from the old country. The epitome of analog, this pocket compass needs no power — just the Earth as a giant magnet and a needle balanced on low-friction pivot. Sure the Compass App on my phone does a lot more than just point North, but this thing makes me want to go on a quest for Moby Dick.
Did you know your phone has a teeny magnetometer chip smaller than a grain of rice that detects the Earth’s magnetic field!? It also has an accelerometer, a gyroscope, gravity sensor, barometer, humidity sensor …
“Is that a PC in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” The stylus took the ‘iPAQ’ up a notch. This was before touchscreens — more like poke and press.
If there were a million Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) designs like the Pocket PC, there were a zillion MP3 players. I never had an iPod but I did go through a full stable of Zune music players. I got rid of all of those, but not this little guy - it’s designed to fit in your palm with your thumb where the controls are.
Rock out while you work out.
These sexy backgrounds? Yes, AI. Two years ago, I was thrilled with how easy it was to save a logo I created without a background. A year ago, I was thrilled with how easy it was to remove the background from an image or touch it up. Magic! Now, it’s easy to combine the two and take it further - have AI create the background based on the image and a little coaching.
I went through a couple of these Flip Video cameras. One is full of adventures in India, the other has every one of R’s high school basketball games. Unfortunately I can’t get either to power on anymore so they are lost to the bytes of time …
There’s so much more — from your trusty flashlight to an egg timer to the GPS that used to sit on your dash — the smartphone is the ultimate MIXMASTER but I’m keeping these artifacts from a forgotten realm.
On the flip side, there’s plenty of tech still kicking around that needs to DIE. Why is faxing still a thing? Discussing it with the woman who told me I had to fax her a bunch of stuff, I asked, “Would you consider email?”
She said, “Oh no, that technology is too new for us to switch over.”
I imagine a powerful fax lobby hard at work sustaining the byzantine bureaucratic business processes that still require fax machines.
E-mail might be old, but it will never die, because while we all hate a full inbox and spam and junk, e-mail is the great equalizer, delivered through and around every tech walled garden thanks to universal standards. The postal service has been around 250 years, email is a comparative youngster at 50 — I think it’s good for another 200 years.
I’ve written about some other tech I’d put out a hit on: Printers, CAPTCHAs, Cookies, Passwords. Passwords are by far our greatest current scourge but there is a notable positive shift here as biometric passkeys are gaining momentum.
It’ll all change, such is the circle of tech — in 20 years, someone will be waxing poetic about the Cosmic Orange iPhone they once loved.
"I imagine a powerful fax lobby hard at work sustaining the byzantine bureaucratic business processes that still require fax machines". That would be Japan. I read an article a couple months ago about how behind they are with moving away from the fax. The government has been slowly transferring their information. There are restaurants that still use fax machines to take food orders. And the last company that was still providing support for faxes, folded a couple of months ago. Why? Because the culture is too old and conservative for change. If it still works, why change is their motto.
BTW, I never got an MP3 player, but some cool people got me one of the first XM radios.
I feel this one acutely. The Sidekick II I started using about 20 years ago still gives me strong nostalgia, and I sincerely think many of those design features are still superior to today's smartphones, including programming in longer phrases you us a lot, and having a killer QWERTY pad.