hey remember home phones?

Submitted by neku in just_post

Is there any other mainstream, common consumer product that became entirely superceded by new technology? It feels like all the companies that made home phones are like, totally unheard of now. Apparently at one point the Uniden corporation produced a wireless home phone every 3.2 seconds. The market totally evaporated, and it feels like it happened pretty much overnight. Obviously it was gradual as phones and phone plans got better, but like... one day I just looked up and home phones were gone

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devtesla wrote

There's thousands of dollars worth of things that people used to buy that got replaced by cell phones: personal cameras and camcorders, portable game machines, PDAs, car GPS systems, mp3 players, etc. Bluetooth speakers have replaced non-networked hi-fi except for niche stuff, I feel like complete replacements happen all the time in audio equipment. I bet if I went back to a 60s kitchen I'd find so much stuff we never use anymore. Go back even further and life looks totally different.

Consumption habits keep changing all the time, and we're gonna see a lot of things die as resources dry up.

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flabberghaster wrote

Especially with everything being wireless now I kinda wish we would go back. I just don't want all my signals bouncing through the air when they could be going through nice clean cables. Less radio interference, more secure, less things to break or just flakily get disconnected... I am such a Luddite. I just wish we would stick with what works.

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voxpoplar wrote

Fax machines come to mind as a big one too.

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__1 wrote

Funny thing about faxes was that so many large institutions continued to use them, i used to know someone who worked in harm reduction and housing, and the amount of times it was expected for someone facing homelessness to fax something was absurd, so of course a big part of that job was making sure the government got faxed the stuff so people didn’t lose access to services they were entitled to.

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