The newest, fastest and best technology that some of us grew up with have become relics. Some products last just a few years, and others endured for decades. But, one thing is certain — obsolescence is often inevitable.
Here’s my list of 25 products I never thought would become obsolete.
ALARM CLOCK
Prior to the year 725, no one was ever on time for anything. But that year in China, Yi Xing invented the first known alarm clock, and the descendants of his contraption have been startling slumberers out of dreams both good and bad ever since. It was actually the rise of the clock radio that spelled the beginning of the end for the standalone alarm clock, but in the end it was cell phones that rendered the single-function timed noisemaker a relic of a bygone era.
ENCYCLOPEDIAS
In 2010, the Encyclopedia Britannica published its final print edition. It was a massive, 32-edition collection that followed in the footsteps of the seven million similar sets purchased by academics, students and hobbyists throughout the company’s 244-year history. The encyclopedia met its demise in the form of the Internet, which offered knowledge at the click of a button.
FILM
In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre shocked the world by freezing a moment in time when he snapped the world’s first photograph. Film photography would dominate for more than 150 years. Although the first digital camera was created in 1975, the 1999 Kodak DC210 truly signaled the beginning of the digital camera revolution — and the beginning of the end for film. In May 2018, Canon announced it had finally sold its last film camera, eight years after it stopped making them — it took that long to deplete the unsold inventory.
FAX MACHINE
It’s hard to believe that fax machines have clung to the bottom rung of the office tech ladder for as long as they have. Although facsimile machines aren’t quite dead, they are certainly a dying breed, at least compared to the technology’s peak of popularity in 1997 when 3.6 million of the loud, bulky machines were sold. Faxing was perfected to near-modern standards in the early 1900s, but the technology was so expensive that it was out of reach for most businesses until the 1980s. Today, services like FaxZero, launched in 2006, allow anyone with an email address and an internet connection to send faxes for free, which doesn’t bode well for the future of the fax machine. U.S. sales of fax machines fell by more than half from $181 million in 2005 to $70 million in 2010.
SLIDE PROJECTOR
Scrolling through photos now requires nothing more than a few flicks of the finger across the smooth glass of a smartphone screen. If you need to turn those shows into a presentation, you have your choice of apps that let anyone create slick and seamless slideshows. There was a time, however, when that ability required actual slides. And those slides had to be projected via massive, loud machines that ran hot and came with little remote controls that were often beyond the understanding of the person running the show.
TYPEWRITER
In 2011, the world’s last remaining manual typewriter manufacturer closed for good in Mumbai, India. It was the demise of an office and literary icon. Typewriters met their end, however, thanks to the arrival word processors, followed closely behind by personal computers.
LANDLINES
Alexander Graham Bell revolutionized human communication when he made the first phone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson. The landline was born and it dominated for more than a century. The mobile era, however, signaled the end for the old-fashioned landline. In 2017, lawmakers in Illinois finally voted to allow AT&T to stop serving the state’s 1.2 million remaining landline customers.
PHONE BOOTHS / PUBLIC PHONES
Before phones were pocket-sized supercomputers, people had to stop if they wanted to make calls on the go. The places they stopped to make those calls were called phone booths. Once a familiar sight phone booths — like the landlines and phone books contained within — phone booths were dealt a mortal blow by the arrival of cell phones. Just 100,000 pay phones remain compared to 2 million in 1999.
These can still be found in Costa Rica
PHONE BOOKS
In 2007, Bill Gates predicted that “Yellow Page usage among people, say, below 50, will drop to zero — near zero — over the next five years.” More than a decade later, the 20th century relic refuses to die, with bound white and yellow paper directories of business and residential phone numbers still showing up on doorsteps across the country. But while they are still being produced, how often are they actually used in the era of smartphones and Google? Their biggest users, however, appear to be YouTubers attempting to tear them apart in video stunts.
ROAD MAPS
The first road maps appeared at the dawn of the automotive era to help drivers of “horseless carriages” navigate the few horrendous roads that existed. Around a century later, GPS became available to the masses, which eventually led many states to reduce print runs or even stop printing the traditional American highway map altogether.
BENCH SEATS IN CARS
Chevrolet introduced the bench seat in 1911, which was cheaper and allowed more occupants than individual seats. By the mid-1980s, however, cupholders and center consoles arrived, which would signal the downfall of the classic bench seat.
ROTARY TELEPHONE
Although Bell developed a primitive version in 1950, it took until 1975 for push button phones to make an impact. Tone-enabled features like call waiting and three-way calling signaled the beginning of the end for the slow, clumsy, rotary dialing system, which had ruled since 1919.
VINYL ALBUMS
Although vinyl records would play for a few more years — mostly in jukeboxes and on DJ turntables — the vinyl album was all but extinct by 1993, thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of the compact disc. Although plenty of music lovers continue to cling to the easily scratchable black disks to this day and vinyl loyalists have helped drive a recent resurgence in production and sales (though still low by past standards), the rise of CD spelled the end for the record, which Columbia Records first introduced in 1948.
PAGERS
The first pager was originally developed for a hospital in 1949. One-way pager use hit its peak in 1998, and then began a rapid downward spiral. The arrival of the two-way cell phone quickly rendered the technology — long a mainstay of drug dealers and doctors — a relic as the digital age drew near.
8-TRACK
8-track players emerged in the 1950s, and revolutionized how people listened to music while in the car . No longer at the mercy of the radio, drivers could now cruise and listen to whatever they wanted whenever they wanted — until 1982, that is, when cassette tapes proved to be cheaper, smaller, and better quality.
CONSOLE TV
By the mid-1950s, half of America had a television in the home. For decades starting with the earliest color models, televisions were designed as furniture, partly to make the TV the focal point of the home. Today, televisions are bigger than they’ve ever been, but the design concept has done a 180 from the days of the so-called console TV. Instead of being a bulky focal point, today’s giants are sleek, unassuming, and built to blend.
ANSWERING MACHINE
In 1971, the world met the telephone answering machine with the debut of the PhoneMate Model 400. Now that you didn’t actually have to be home to know who called and what they wanted, the devices changed telephone communication forever. Then along came voicemail, which instantly made countertop machines with little tapes inside feel primitive. Then came cell phones. Then came smartphones. There are still some answering machines left in service, but they are the last of their kind.
THE POLAROID SX-70
The world was introduced to instant photography in 1972, when a Polaroid executive snapped five snapshots in just 10 seconds with the game-changing SX-70. Over the decades, the game changed again, and then yet again. Although you can still pick up an SX-70 brand new from Polaroid, provided you’re comfortable with a $400-plus price tag, the iconic devices are living relics. Like other things in the realm of picture taking, these have been made largely obsolete with the advent of smartphones and digital photography.
CALCULATOR WATCH
Long before smartphones put clocks and calculators in our pockets, in 1975 the calculator watch debuted as the ultimate in geek chic. Wristwatch and number-cruncher all-in-one, the calculator watch soon fell victim to the PDA and early cell phones in the 1980s.
VHS
The world met the Video Home System (VHS), and the video cassette recorders that brought them to life in 1977. In one of the greatest rivalries in the history of technology, VHS would eventually spell the death knell for Sony’s rival Betamax. Although the VCR and VHS tape were largely rendered obsolete by the turn of the millennium, the once-revolutionary tech limped into the digital age, until the Washington Post officially wrote its obituary on Aug. 28, 2005.
THE WALKMAN
Few devices are as iconic as the vaunted Sony Walkman, which made on-the-go stereo sound possible for the masses long before MP3 players and iPods. The Walkman cassette player debuted in 1979 and sold 220 million units over the course of three decades, even as CDs and other digital technology wiped out classic tapes. Finally, in 2010, Sony announced that it was ceasing production of one of the defining devices of the 1980s — it was the same year Sony stopped making 3.5-inch floppy disks.
FLOPPY DISK
Although Sony would continue to sell them in Japan for another 12 years, in 1981 the floppy disk — with its massive 1.44 MB of storage — received a fatal blow in 1998. That’s when Apple unveiled the iMac G3, which introduced the first USB port — and dropped support for the aging floppy disk.
COMPACT DISCS (CDs)
If you’re like me, you still have them around. But when was the last time you played one? In 1982, Billy Joel’s “52nd Street” became the first commercially available compact disc. MP3s, streaming music services, and the internet would eventually render obsolete the little shiny disc that killed the records and tapes that came before. In 2013, Kanye West released the album “Yeezus” in a transparent case with no record art, which the rapper claimed was an open casket funeral for the CD.
DIAL-UP MODEM
I miss the sound the dial-up made. Somehow it made me fell connected. Do you want to use the phone or the computer? At the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s, this was the decision you would have faced if you wanted to get online. As early as 2004, Newsweek reported on the “Death of Dial-Up,” which was on the decline thanks to the arrival of broadband. By 2013, just 3 % f the U.S. was still shackled to dial-up — a drop of 15% over the year prior.
GPS DEVICES
In 2009, two years after Apple ushered in the era of the smartphone, PCWorld ran an article titled “Google Maps Will Not Kill Standalone GPS.” Just three years later, Wired ran an article with the headline “Apple, Google Just Killed Portable GPS Devices.” The second article was right. Advances in smartphone-based GPS apps, GPS platforms built into vehicles, and the rise of the unlimited mobile data plan quickly rendered dashboard-mounted bricks sold under brands like Garmin and TomTom redundant and obsolete.
