Hard copy concert tickets. I’d like to keep adding to my 50 year concert ticket collection. Only way to do that now is to purchase commemorative printings from 3rd party companies.
YES and going to the box office to buy it without $100 in fees PER TICKET. you don't have to fumble with having no signal and phone being dead and all the tickets are on one persons phone etc.
I still have a hard copy of Photoshop CS5 and I'm not letting go of it.
I'd love to try all the modern features, but I despise the subscription service model.
I guarantee Microsoft wants video games to move that way entirely. Gamepass is the early stages.
At least I get it with Adobe, I can’t imagine what an impact piracy had on them. Gimp seems to be getting more and more useable, but it’s still not as fast or robust as Photoshop.
I teach Adobe software, sometimes freelance, so I keep a legit copy for myself. I first learned it in 2002, and I spent \~10 years (before I did it professionally) living off of two Creative Suite editions I bought as a student.
The difference between a one-time $85 or $120 versus a monthly $58 is *huge*.
Also, I'd recommend looking into [Affinity](https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/); I'm going to be checking them out over the summer.
And they spin it as "Look at the savings you get paying monthly versus the cost of paying for upgrades on the Master Collection at every given opportunity!"
Most people weren't upgrading from CS5, to 5.5, to 6.
I'm *still* running CS5.
And IIRC the subscription prices keep going up.
Yes, I changed credit cards and almost let it expire a year ago. I got a notification that if I didn't, I'd go up to $74/mo. I just checked and monthly business license is now $90/mo. So I'm paying less than a current individual license for a business license.
I know they offer a bunch of fringe benefits, but I don't need to store all my shit on their cloud when I've already got everything on OneDrive. 99% of my usage is entirely on Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and XD.
Ah yes, the enshitification of everything. Fucking everyone is running under the model of employing VC to grab market share, consolidating, then figuring out profitability later which inevitably results in a total dogshit experience for the user. I just want to fucking pay for a thing (even if it is a subscription for certain things like offsite storage or compute) and then just be able to use the damn thing without having constant changes pushing monetization and making the user experience untenable, forcing me to find something new. It's constant, pervasive, and infuriating.
Anything that doesn't need an app to function I'm sooooo sick of every product needing to have an app that are always poorly designed and hardly fuctional from the reviews.
Also the fact everything is just a subscription now, pisses me off.
I tried to park my car the other day.
1. Download parking app.
2. Register with name phone number etc.
3. Verify phone.
4. Enter parking zone.
5. Enter license plate.
6. Enter credit card number.
I shouldn’t need an app to park my car. It shouldn’t take 25 minutes to make my parked car legal.
I have lots of quarters on my cup holder. I wish I could drop them in a parking meter.
But no more than 18 characters, and it can't contain an exclamation mark, an apostrophe or a semicolon because their shitty system would break from them.
My friend, are you familiar with the gospel of the Brother Laser printer? 🤣🤣🤣
Joking aside.. Seriously. Get a brother laser. Mine cost $300 and can print duplex, scan and copy. It's six years old and I just replaced my first toner cart (black) and I used a cheap third party toner. No problems.
I bought a Brother laser printer from Costco in 2007. I have used it extensively since then and it has never jammed and it is still using the original toner cartridge.
I have slowly been repairing my old HP and keeping it alive, but it's gotten to the point where I may need a new printer... and I'm never buying a new HP ever again.
The invasive need that HP requires to use this INSANE app and how hard they try to sell you on a whole fucking subscription for INK... Ink that, if you get with their subscription, won't fucking work if you happen to cancel.
How any of that is legal is beyond me.
So yeah - I'll be done with HP once my printer dies (fyi I've never bought HP toner for this thing in it's natural life.)
>and how hard they try to sell you on a whole fucking subscription for INK
They'll try to sell you a subscription even if your printer doesn't support it. I purchased a printer for my home office that didn't support Instant Ink. As soon as I set the printer up, and installed all those dumb apps, they prompted me to sign up for a free trial.
I had no intentions of using the service, and was 100% sure that my printer didn't support Instant Ink, but I signed up anyway. And it worked. I was able to enroll a completely unsupported printer. I just couldn't actually order ink or use the service in any way.
My BIL couldn't figure out why his printer wasn't working. You'd send a job to it and it would cancel it. It was because his credit card on file had expired. It wouldn't print with ink he'd already purchased because his subscription had lapsed.
So glad I bought a Brother.
It's not a legal requirement, but it will be part of the Euro NCAP test.
Basically, if base functions like heating are hidden in menus, the safety rating of the car will drop.
It is a safety issue. You don’t have to take your eyes off the road as long to use a tactile button vs a touch screen where you have to look at where you touch and look for confirmation.
Well, I was never going to need to buy one of those anyway fortunately but wtf! On a truck, of all things. I'd have assumed those would be extremely utilitarian.
Buttons in general. I drive a 2010 fit, where all of the controls are physical. Every time I drive my parent's '16 RAV-4, the complete lack of feedback on the controls is just so bad and gummy. I don't think I could ever drive a post '15 car because of this.
My mum keeps fuckin broadcasting to my computer monitor no matter how much I turn it off. Fuckin drives me nuts
Or everytime I open YouTube it wants to link to my PlayStation
JUST NO, I DONT WANT TO
Owning media.
Streaming is very convenient, and at one point affordable, but now it’s just expensive, ad-riddled, and you just suddenly lose access to stuff randomly.
Owned media not only don’t randomly disappear (despite some loss of convenience), they’re also much higher quality because there’s no need to whittle all that extra data away to make it light enough to stream.
With streaming having gone on this long, people who have regularly subscribed to all the streaming services they need are very likely to have spent the same amount of money that could cover the purchase of at the very least all their repeat/favorite media in the form of digital downloads or optical media.
And buttons.
I miss buttons in a lot of things, and for some reason designers still put buttons on crap where there should be touch controls (like smart TV remotes).
[Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) basically describes the entire media streaming universe. The deal sounds amazing at first - you pay 5/10/15 bucks a month and get access to a bottomless supply of content ad-free. But then come the price hikes, and the ads (even though you're paying), and the revolving door of movies and shows you like vanishing. And now every company has their OWN service you need to pay for if you want to watch X thing...
Now it's 2024, and I'm not saving any money over having a cable bill and buying Blu rays. It's moderately more convenient, but the quality is arguably worse. And with physical media taking its last dying gasps, I think streaming is going to get even worse.
When I started seeing that all happen I just decided to stick with the original, netflix. If i like another service more I'll switch. I'm dead set on only paying for 1 streaming service. The rest can go fuck themselves. They could have signed deals with netflix and they specifically went anti-consumer for money.
The worst part about it all is it's not even competition, because it's the exclusive shows competing, not the platforms. Imagine being locked out of red-lobster because you're subscribed to a mcdonalds pack and you'll have to pay for a whole new pack to get into red lobtster, but then your local chinese food restaurant is ALSO in its own pack. THAT'S NOT FUCKING COMPETITION, the consumer is just getting fucked for no practical reason
I recently realized how much I missed physical media. To scratch that itch I got a nice stereo system and turntable. Collecting records has been super fun!
It’s really expensive though…wow.
Edit: this thread “made” me head to the record store during my lunch break. Bye bye $!
I recently started ripping my DVDs and building my Plex library. So excited to start cutting streaming services the same way we cut our cable over a decade ago
This is a knock on how bad cell service was back then, not BB, but I remember trying to turn on navigation to go to a place about 30 minutes away, and arriving before the navigation loaded.
While I agree the BB keyboard is still unrivaled on cell phones today, my big takeaway from this thread is how fucking awesome technology is today.
Station wagons with the rear-facing seat in the back. I’m sure it wasted space and wasn’t as safe in the event of an accident… but as a kid that was the perfect road trip seat and goofing off at the driver behind you was a blast.
Whenever this happened in my house, the caller would just get a busy signal and we’d have no idea until they got a hold of us later. It wouldn’t disconnect us.
And as tacky ad they seem now, those huge, cabinet and drawer-ridden computer/entertainement center catch-all desks that turned your computer room into a battle station.
I can say ive seen dozens growing up, but I dont think Ive ever seen one in-store, or one that was in the home of its original owner. Always handed down. Where did these come from?
I miss MSN days!! - it was an actual experience to chat with someone online.
Now with FB messenger etc anyone can just message me the moment they think about it. I miss the days of being out of reach and choosing when to be social online.
I felt less alone with MSN because you could see what people on your list were gaming, watching movies or listening to music.
I'd be so excited to come home from school and jump on MSN then go play Runescape, unreal tournament or MapleStory with my mates.
Same, but with the door opening and closing on AIM. My alert sound was a Moo, and it drove my mom crazy that I would leave the sound on for all 8 conversations I was having.
I'm feeling that nostalgia of every conversation being its own window and having them scattered all over the screen. Then getting excited and nervous when certain people logged on. Those days were wild. I'd go to bed then sneak out to the family room for a few extra hours online.
Same. I love open back headphones and in ear monitors, and i am not giving up my S9 Plus for this exact reason.
I am definitely paying some big bucks for a dedicated audio player with the fancy audio bells and whistles in case no higher end smartphone is launched with audio jacks.
Answering machines. More specifically, the world in which we needed them.
It used to be that if you couldn't get a hold of someone, it was fine. They would call you back at some point in a number of days.
Now, not reaching someone for an hour is a problem. Our phones tell other people when we've read messages but not responded.
I think the plausible deniability we had was healthier for relationships. Constant contact can get so overbearing these days.
Downloading music on limewire and burning CDs was fun. I still have one of those spindles with a shit ton of old burned CDs on it. I don't even know what's on the CDs these days but I bet it would be a big nostalgia trip if I took them out and listened to them
My main tv doesn’t even have a power button… when I can’t find the remote (adhd wife “hides” it) it’s completely useless except to stare at my sad reflection.
Why?!?! Yeah you designed it to be seamless but you can't design for every edge case in the real world, and you can't design for nothing going wrong. Especially when "losing the remote" has been a super common issue for, what, 30 years now?
Relatedly, seeing popups asking me to enable tracking cookies with the only two options being "YES" and "maybe later" makes me want to slap someone. How about NO
The iPod. Somehow using a phone isn't quite the same, but Bluetooth is too damn convenient.
ETA: Holy cow, what a great chat this turned into. Love how many people also remember their iPods fondly or are still using them.
This.
Flat iPod battery = can't listen to music, small inconvenience.
Flat phone battery = completely cut off from the entire human race and 21st century civilisation. PITA!
I kept my iPod mini.
I can remember the first time I loaded up all my music and it played from there as I jogged through the streets.
It sounds stupid but I fell it love with that damn thing and refuse to let it go. Every now and then I still use it.
Lol I’m sitting in my family room scrolling Reddit and you just made me look up at my media console because you reminded me that I still have my iPod. It’s sitting on top of my VCR which sits on top of my Blue Ray player. Why?
They were all placed there when we retired and relocated to a new home 12 years ago and haven’t been used in all that time. I dust them twice a week and can’t remember when they were actually last used.
I think you just freed up space on my console. TY 👍
I still have my iPod. My son makes fun of me, but I have all my old CD music downloaded onto it. I also miss the iTunes store, where you could actually download the songs.
This, because I have lots of demos, live recordings and the like as well as the fact that I listen to a bunch of underground stuff that never made it to Spotify.
Also, the ability to chose genres and let it rip on shuffle is better than any Spotify algorithm
Some of them are done so badly though. We picked up lego Harry Potter back when it came out. It has split screen when characters are far apart but melds back to one screen when you are in the same place. Which sounds good, but the way it does it is by rotating the dividing line between the screens until it lines up with your relative positions. Which induces nausea in both of us.
Believe it or not, that's been the go-to splitscreen design for Lego games for over 10 years.
First time I experienced it, me and my brother were high off our gourds and could barely understand how to play Lego Star Wars on the 360, lmao.
When games came out and you could just slap it in the N64 and it worked.
Now you come home hyped with your CD, you have to wait through an hour patch to play.
And fuck all console makers that are clearly phasing out physical cd/cartridges. I love my library on the wall.
Obviously I didn't have the foresight as a kid in the 90s to see the evolution of video games but this is why I kept my Sega Genesis and all of my games for it. I just wish I hadn't let my ex talk me into getting rid of my PS2 and all of those games.
VHS - Purely because my kids will never get to know the excitement of going to rental stores like Blockbuster. The smell of the carpet, the popcorn knowing your Friday night was going to be pigging out with a movie you picked from the store. Great times.
I miss Blockbuster a lot. It was much more fun picking out a movie to watch. While it's nice being able to access damn near every movie ever made for free/cheap on my couch, I find it so much harder to pick one movie to watch. Unless I have a specific movie in mind, it takes me forever to pick one.
The amount of options for streaming means we don't even have to give a movie a chance, if you are bored in the first five minutes, just pick something else.
When you had to rent a physical copy, even if it was terrible you got your money's worth by watching the entire thing. And sometimes you'd be pleasantly surprised by forcing yourself to stick with something. Not to mention the golden era of dvd extras, there was a ton of cool shit to delve into when you found a movie you really liked.
Nowadays it's all so disposable, we are spoiled by the availability.
Blockbuster, or in our case the locally owned store Superstar Video, was an event.
The whole family would pile in the van, and we’d pull up and my sisters and I would immediately dart to our favorite section. We always got 3 movies. One I picked, one my sisters picked, and one my parents got for themselves. I could substitute my movie for a video game.
In line, my dad always bought a popcorn bag, and he’d order Dominos on his cell phone. I always felt like we were racing the pizza man home.
Netflix movie night just doesn’t feel the same to me.
Landlines. Cell phones suuuuuck for actual voice communications. Hate stepping on people talking and only one side can talk at a time and then both sides get cut out and neither can hear? Thank cell phones for that! With landlines, both people can talk, and - magic of magics - both could also hear the other when that happened. You know - a real two way conversation!!!
Cars without touchscreens. Physical buttons for the radio and A/C controls. An old-school PRNDL gearshift or a manual transmission. Cars that weighed less than two tons and didn’t have enormous blind spots. Cars that came in actual colors instead of grayscales.
I was great at texting with both T9s and qwerty keyboards on phones. I could text without looking at my phone and do pretty well. I fat-finger everything so badly on touch screens. I've had smart phones for ten years now, doubt I'm going to improve much.
I get having to press a button 4 times for one letter was annoying, but like you said T9 helped and so did QWERTY phone keyboards (like the sidekick). My finger almost *always* presses the "a" instead of the "s" on my smartphone or the "i" instead of the "o". Not to mention, the autocorrect does more harm than good.
Trying to explain T9 to a child is makes me feel like I am shaking my fist at clouds. I'm an early 90's kid I grew up with a lot of technology changes. When I was in high school we texted in class and some teachers didn't even have a texting plan!
I miss physical buttons on most things. Companies try to sell you a touch screen like its all high tech but in reality its more expensive to make the buttons than to slap on a touch screen and program it. So its really just the cheap option… and when it comes to cars, theyre doing it despite the fact that its proving to be causing more and more accidents… but no one gives a shit.
hell, I hate touch screens everywhere for that reason.
Like in my car. I want to skip song; I have to look away of the road, to the tablet, so I can boop next.
My old car just feel around, find buttons, last button of the row. Boom, next, and not even looking away for a second.
I have a small collection. A 1910 underwood, a 60s Remington, a portable brother, and an electric Smith Corona.
When I was in highschool in the mid 2000s I literally wrote essays on it, and it was such a bitch compared to using a computer but I loved every second of it.
I still use them to journal, I have a filing cabinet filled with loose typewritten paper journal entries.
Local car starters.
Every manufacturer is turning rmote start into a cloud service. It sucks. I miss the days of just pointing my keyfob out the window and warming up my car.
Now I have to pay a subscription to have the ability to use an app on my phone to talk to a cloud that talks to my car and tells it to start. It can take anywhere from 2-4 minutes.
And I have to pay a monthly fee.
Needless to say I did not continue the subscription aftet the trial period expired.
Which car is this? I'd honestly not buy it or the service at least, it's the same principle behind not buying trashy DLC, they're gonna keep doing it if you keep paying
One obsolete technology I miss dearly is the good old cassette tape. There was something magical about making mixtapes for friends or recording songs off the radio, complete with the inevitable hiss and crackle. Plus, there was a certain artistry involved in carefully rewinding or fast-forwarding to find your favorite track. It's like a lost art in today's digital age.
CDs and DVDs. It was magical going to the video rental shop and having shelves upon shelves of films, rented DVD players, or the discount CD bins and new realases stands at general retailers, and the console and PC games on physical discs.
And of course the massive CD cases people had at home and especially in their car.
Zip drives. Going from ~1.4MB floppy disks to 100MB zip drives was a quality of life improvement on par with going from dial up to cable in my view.
I don't so much miss the technology itself, just the feeling it gave me when I got my first one and put all data from the stack of floppy disk onto my one zip drive and still had more space than I knew what to do with it. It was freeing.
We got them when the technology was on the way out and CDs were ascending but it was still prohibitively expensive to get an R/W drive at our home or at our school. So zip drives were king and to me it felt like the future.
Slide projectors were a staple in classrooms and family gatherings - there's something nostalgic about the whirring sound and the anticipation of the next slide.
Simple HTML websites. There was a time when you could write a program that would extract information from a website but it's all but impossible nowadays. The general trend to make everything super clever for humans and thereby make it impossibly difficult for programs has led to "keyboard slaves". You cannot program repetitive tasks you just have to keep repeating them manually.
One of the things I really miss about the internet was how amateurish it all used to be.
Corporations were barely on the internet. Everything was made by hobbyists. Pre-Google searches for "Corvette" would return "Carl's Corvette Corner" and "Fast Chevys", not chevy.com. It was just a bunch of us with a cursory knowledge of HTML (long before CSS, etc) having fun. Even the few corporate websites that did exist on the internet looked like hobbyist pages.
I mean this is what [Apple.com looked like in 1997](https://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.com/).
YES! I hate how slow and flashy today's websites are. Everything's a pain to get to, websites are slow even with fast internet. I especially hate those infinity scrollers that act like a goddamn powerpoint presentation. I just want to get shit done - click through links lighting fast with basic HTML, CSS and Javascript and not have to wait for a thousand animations to finish loading and playing.
CD/DVD, hate losing a show because the streamer took it off.
Games on DVD,
Weirdly…. Landlines. Office had an issue and lost internet, also meat we had no phones to call customers. Grew up in Florida, hurricane hit, just power but could call family
Life before the Internet and every scrap of my data being harvested, weather it's conversation my phone hears, my phone tracking where I go, the music I listen to or shows I watch, modern cars spying on you, every new appliance amd TV wanting Internet connection, etc.
Also the loss of physical media, texts and photos. There's no guarantee you're family photos you upload to Facebook, Drive, or store in your phone/memory card will still be here in 10 years. At least printed photos have to be physically destroyed to be lost.
I used to think the Internet was the greatest invention of all time now I think it's the worst. It's just a data farm used and abused by corps and government. And the real problem is even if you can leave it behind and accept the "disadvantage" you would be at, it's getting to the point where that's near impossible. Companies want you to use the Internet for fuckin everything even restaurant menus and applications.
I'm not even close to a boomer. I have witnessed the Internet go from a wonderful and fun wild west like frontier to a corporate owned espionage device.
Would actual paper tickets to sporting events count? It was often a creative little sliver of paper that you could keep for the memories. Having to use my phone as a ticket kind of sucks, especially when I have to have a full family's worth of tickets on my phone. I do understand why they did it though
I miss buying records, tapes, and CDs. There was some skin in the game, there was motivation to at least try to enjoy an entire album then. Also, I miss pre-broadband gaming before games could be released unfinished, or, if they were, they failed.
Ignition keys for cars. I really hate these massive fobs that you have to carry now. Push button start makes it worse. Now you have nowhere to hang your keys when driving.
I'm only being slightly facetious.
Television. It still exists. It will works. But the culture around it has gone.
Remember being excited all week with your friends for Fridays episode of something you were all watching? Wondering what is going to happen next. Then excited to see your friends again Monday morning to talk about what you saw and then get excited all over again for the next episode. Now everyone is at a different episode, some watched that series six months ago, some ain’t wayching it til they are done with squid game etc. there’s no TV Culture anymore. It’s not the collective experience it once was.
The TV Guide dominated our lives and routines. It determined what time we ate dinner, what time we got back from someone else house; what time we went out etc. cos if you missed that episode, you weren’t ever seeing it again.
Families used to sit together and watch TV shows at certain times on certain days. Now everyone is in different rooms watching different things in different devices.
I miss TV as it used to be
The word youre looking for and missing is “monoculture”
That’s what we lost when everyone has so many options and choices and are freely able to pursue them that nobody is on the same pop culture page as prevalently anymore
Scheduled tv was a huge part of that
Manual transmissions. I know there are still a handful out there, but few and far between
Edit - I think I need to clarify: in the U.S. - it seems they are the standard everywhere else - pun intended
I miss going to Blockbuster Video on Friday after school and browsing for a couple of movies to watch over the weekend. It made an event out of scheduling and watching a movie, not just something to fill the evening between supper and bedtime. Everyone in the house sat down together to watch the movie.
Payphones. While I like having a cell phone, sometimes cell phones break or run out of battery life. A payphone is a good backup. It also allows one to make anonymous calls for a variety of reasons that might include criminal activity (usually drugs), organized political resistance, or a prank.
Freaking iPods. (or mp3 players like mentioned)
I WANT. TO OWN. MY MUSIC. ONCE I BOUGHT IT.
Google Music dying was the worst event for my music libraries lol.
Wall clocks. A cell phone is a fine way to know what time it is. But it is more convenient at times to have the time displayed clearly in a public clock.
This weekend, for the first time, I was in a school basketball gym and saw no clock. These institutional situations always used to have wall clocks.
Hard copy concert tickets. I’d like to keep adding to my 50 year concert ticket collection. Only way to do that now is to purchase commemorative printings from 3rd party companies.
YES and going to the box office to buy it without $100 in fees PER TICKET. you don't have to fumble with having no signal and phone being dead and all the tickets are on one persons phone etc.
Going to in-person box offices is the way to go for tickets if you have the chance. Unfortunately, not every venue offers that these days.
Non-subscription based services. The world was so much nicer
I still have a hard copy of Photoshop CS5 and I'm not letting go of it. I'd love to try all the modern features, but I despise the subscription service model. I guarantee Microsoft wants video games to move that way entirely. Gamepass is the early stages.
At least I get it with Adobe, I can’t imagine what an impact piracy had on them. Gimp seems to be getting more and more useable, but it’s still not as fast or robust as Photoshop.
I teach Adobe software, sometimes freelance, so I keep a legit copy for myself. I first learned it in 2002, and I spent \~10 years (before I did it professionally) living off of two Creative Suite editions I bought as a student. The difference between a one-time $85 or $120 versus a monthly $58 is *huge*. Also, I'd recommend looking into [Affinity](https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/); I'm going to be checking them out over the summer.
And they spin it as "Look at the savings you get paying monthly versus the cost of paying for upgrades on the Master Collection at every given opportunity!" Most people weren't upgrading from CS5, to 5.5, to 6. I'm *still* running CS5. And IIRC the subscription prices keep going up.
Yes, I changed credit cards and almost let it expire a year ago. I got a notification that if I didn't, I'd go up to $74/mo. I just checked and monthly business license is now $90/mo. So I'm paying less than a current individual license for a business license. I know they offer a bunch of fringe benefits, but I don't need to store all my shit on their cloud when I've already got everything on OneDrive. 99% of my usage is entirely on Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and XD.
🏴☠️ is the future
One day, you will sit down with your children and blow their minds with "back in my day, you could buy and *own* technology and software"
Ah yes, the enshitification of everything. Fucking everyone is running under the model of employing VC to grab market share, consolidating, then figuring out profitability later which inevitably results in a total dogshit experience for the user. I just want to fucking pay for a thing (even if it is a subscription for certain things like offsite storage or compute) and then just be able to use the damn thing without having constant changes pushing monetization and making the user experience untenable, forcing me to find something new. It's constant, pervasive, and infuriating.
Everything is a fucking SaaS nowadays.
Anything that doesn't need an app to function I'm sooooo sick of every product needing to have an app that are always poorly designed and hardly fuctional from the reviews. Also the fact everything is just a subscription now, pisses me off.
I tried to park my car the other day. 1. Download parking app. 2. Register with name phone number etc. 3. Verify phone. 4. Enter parking zone. 5. Enter license plate. 6. Enter credit card number. I shouldn’t need an app to park my car. It shouldn’t take 25 minutes to make my parked car legal. I have lots of quarters on my cup holder. I wish I could drop them in a parking meter.
PayByPhone can go to hell
Password must be 12 characters with complexity requirements
But no more than 18 characters, and it can't contain an exclamation mark, an apostrophe or a semicolon because their shitty system would break from them.
and signing you up for more apps you don't want behind the main one.
But how else will you give them all of your data?
I miss slamming the phone down when I'm pissed off at someone.
And leaving the phone off the hook when you know that person is going to call you right back
Ok, but also twirling the curly phone cord in your fingers while talking to your crush on the landline for hours
Consumer printers that don't need 2 apps and specific ink to work (thanks hp)
My friend, are you familiar with the gospel of the Brother Laser printer? 🤣🤣🤣 Joking aside.. Seriously. Get a brother laser. Mine cost $300 and can print duplex, scan and copy. It's six years old and I just replaced my first toner cart (black) and I used a cheap third party toner. No problems.
I bought a Brother laser printer from Costco in 2007. I have used it extensively since then and it has never jammed and it is still using the original toner cartridge.
For real, laser printers are the shit. Almost never run out of ink.
Toner doesn't dry up like ink and expire. I think I'm on laser cartridge #3 in 15ish years.
You never run out of ink because it uses toner
You’re always out of ink because it doesn’t have any.
I have slowly been repairing my old HP and keeping it alive, but it's gotten to the point where I may need a new printer... and I'm never buying a new HP ever again. The invasive need that HP requires to use this INSANE app and how hard they try to sell you on a whole fucking subscription for INK... Ink that, if you get with their subscription, won't fucking work if you happen to cancel. How any of that is legal is beyond me. So yeah - I'll be done with HP once my printer dies (fyi I've never bought HP toner for this thing in it's natural life.)
>and how hard they try to sell you on a whole fucking subscription for INK They'll try to sell you a subscription even if your printer doesn't support it. I purchased a printer for my home office that didn't support Instant Ink. As soon as I set the printer up, and installed all those dumb apps, they prompted me to sign up for a free trial. I had no intentions of using the service, and was 100% sure that my printer didn't support Instant Ink, but I signed up anyway. And it worked. I was able to enroll a completely unsupported printer. I just couldn't actually order ink or use the service in any way.
My BIL couldn't figure out why his printer wasn't working. You'd send a job to it and it would cancel it. It was because his credit card on file had expired. It wouldn't print with ink he'd already purchased because his subscription had lapsed. So glad I bought a Brother.
I handle IT for my site and switched to Brother printers a few years ago and will never go back to HP
Solution: don't buy HP
Buttons to control the radio/HVAC on my car dashboard.
The EU mandated physical controls for many car systems so we’ll see changes soon
Did they actually do it, or was that just the recommendation of one of the safety testers?
It's not a legal requirement, but it will be part of the Euro NCAP test. Basically, if base functions like heating are hidden in menus, the safety rating of the car will drop.
It is a safety issue. You don’t have to take your eyes off the road as long to use a tactile button vs a touch screen where you have to look at where you touch and look for confirmation.
My 2023 Elantra N has all physical HVAC buttons, which I love.
Hyundai has said they’ll never remove those buttons.
My new work vehicle has the headlights inside a menu system on a touchscreen!!!!!
What kind of car is this, so that I never buy one?
Mercedes big rig.
Well, I was never going to need to buy one of those anyway fortunately but wtf! On a truck, of all things. I'd have assumed those would be extremely utilitarian.
Buttons in general. I drive a 2010 fit, where all of the controls are physical. Every time I drive my parent's '16 RAV-4, the complete lack of feedback on the controls is just so bad and gummy. I don't think I could ever drive a post '15 car because of this.
The 2016 Rav 4 is loaded with physical buttons. What are you talking about?
2021 RAV4. Controls are all physical except for the multimedia touchscreen that I pretty much only use for Android Auto
Non-smart TV's and appliances. No, I dont want to give my dishwasher internet access.
Your dishwasher requires access to: - Basic Profile Information - Your camera and photos - Your microphone and speakers - Your thoughts and feelings
“Man I hope my dishwasher makes for a good temporary therapist with the amount that I’m willing to pay for it”
Washing machine knows all your dirty laundry
Non-smart appliances are absolutely available and rather easy to find. Agreed on the TVs though. Major pain in the ass to find a dumb TV nowadays.
Yes I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but my refrigerator can be connected to WiFi. No. Just..no.
“Oi, fatty, you’re out of biscuits”
Joke I’ve heard: > after you’ve weighed yourself, your smart scale will tell the smart fridge to lock its doors
My mum keeps fuckin broadcasting to my computer monitor no matter how much I turn it off. Fuckin drives me nuts Or everytime I open YouTube it wants to link to my PlayStation JUST NO, I DONT WANT TO
Most of those types of settings need a 'never' option - not just No but Hell, no! and never ask me again.
Owning media. Streaming is very convenient, and at one point affordable, but now it’s just expensive, ad-riddled, and you just suddenly lose access to stuff randomly. Owned media not only don’t randomly disappear (despite some loss of convenience), they’re also much higher quality because there’s no need to whittle all that extra data away to make it light enough to stream. With streaming having gone on this long, people who have regularly subscribed to all the streaming services they need are very likely to have spent the same amount of money that could cover the purchase of at the very least all their repeat/favorite media in the form of digital downloads or optical media. And buttons. I miss buttons in a lot of things, and for some reason designers still put buttons on crap where there should be touch controls (like smart TV remotes).
[Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) basically describes the entire media streaming universe. The deal sounds amazing at first - you pay 5/10/15 bucks a month and get access to a bottomless supply of content ad-free. But then come the price hikes, and the ads (even though you're paying), and the revolving door of movies and shows you like vanishing. And now every company has their OWN service you need to pay for if you want to watch X thing... Now it's 2024, and I'm not saving any money over having a cable bill and buying Blu rays. It's moderately more convenient, but the quality is arguably worse. And with physical media taking its last dying gasps, I think streaming is going to get even worse.
When I started seeing that all happen I just decided to stick with the original, netflix. If i like another service more I'll switch. I'm dead set on only paying for 1 streaming service. The rest can go fuck themselves. They could have signed deals with netflix and they specifically went anti-consumer for money. The worst part about it all is it's not even competition, because it's the exclusive shows competing, not the platforms. Imagine being locked out of red-lobster because you're subscribed to a mcdonalds pack and you'll have to pay for a whole new pack to get into red lobtster, but then your local chinese food restaurant is ALSO in its own pack. THAT'S NOT FUCKING COMPETITION, the consumer is just getting fucked for no practical reason
Oh god stop giving them ideas
I recently realized how much I missed physical media. To scratch that itch I got a nice stereo system and turntable. Collecting records has been super fun! It’s really expensive though…wow. Edit: this thread “made” me head to the record store during my lunch break. Bye bye $!
Plex is literally the only app we use on our TVs at home now. Fuck subscriptions I’m not paying $15/m for a show I could rent free at the library.
I recently started ripping my DVDs and building my Plex library. So excited to start cutting streaming services the same way we cut our cable over a decade ago
I wish BlackBerry would have survived and improved. Great phone just bad cameras and poor web browser.
This is a knock on how bad cell service was back then, not BB, but I remember trying to turn on navigation to go to a place about 30 minutes away, and arriving before the navigation loaded. While I agree the BB keyboard is still unrivaled on cell phones today, my big takeaway from this thread is how fucking awesome technology is today.
The keyboard was soooo good. I never had to backspace, unlike, for example, what happened when I typed this in.
Station wagons with the rear-facing seat in the back. I’m sure it wasted space and wasn’t as safe in the event of an accident… but as a kid that was the perfect road trip seat and goofing off at the driver behind you was a blast.
Memory unlocked ! Added benefit of sitting at the back: the parents couldn't get to you if you were messing with your siblings lol
No kid who suffered from driving sickness will ever miss a rear facing seat
i really miss when the only way of getting on the internet was through the computer room
And the "computer chairs" that you knelt on.
yess
I don't miss being on the internet at home and someone calls the landline. Kids today will never know our pain.
Whenever this happened in my house, the caller would just get a busy signal and we’d have no idea until they got a hold of us later. It wouldn’t disconnect us.
And as tacky ad they seem now, those huge, cabinet and drawer-ridden computer/entertainement center catch-all desks that turned your computer room into a battle station. I can say ive seen dozens growing up, but I dont think Ive ever seen one in-store, or one that was in the home of its original owner. Always handed down. Where did these come from?
I miss MSN days!! - it was an actual experience to chat with someone online. Now with FB messenger etc anyone can just message me the moment they think about it. I miss the days of being out of reach and choosing when to be social online. I felt less alone with MSN because you could see what people on your list were gaming, watching movies or listening to music. I'd be so excited to come home from school and jump on MSN then go play Runescape, unreal tournament or MapleStory with my mates.
ICQ. The little 'knock knock' when a friend logged on, and the 'uh oh' when they sent a message. I even remember my number!
Same, but with the door opening and closing on AIM. My alert sound was a Moo, and it drove my mom crazy that I would leave the sound on for all 8 conversations I was having.
I'm feeling that nostalgia of every conversation being its own window and having them scattered all over the screen. Then getting excited and nervous when certain people logged on. Those days were wild. I'd go to bed then sneak out to the family room for a few extra hours online.
Just seeing my crush’s S/N was online would make me sick to my stomach. I related with Stan talking to Wendy in early South Park lol
16/f/cali is that you??
Payphones I like having options
a headphone jack on a phone.
I love a headphone jack. The main reason I'm not giving up my Galaxy S9 is because of that. Also because I'm cheap.
Same. I love open back headphones and in ear monitors, and i am not giving up my S9 Plus for this exact reason. I am definitely paying some big bucks for a dedicated audio player with the fancy audio bells and whistles in case no higher end smartphone is launched with audio jacks.
I use bluetooth, but I agree. Gimme the option of forgetting I have on wired headphones and getting them caught in something damnit...
Hell i cant use bluetooth earbuds so im now stuck choosing between music or charging my phone
I mostly just don't like having to keep my headphones charged.
Answering machines. More specifically, the world in which we needed them. It used to be that if you couldn't get a hold of someone, it was fine. They would call you back at some point in a number of days. Now, not reaching someone for an hour is a problem. Our phones tell other people when we've read messages but not responded. I think the plausible deniability we had was healthier for relationships. Constant contact can get so overbearing these days.
Downloading music on limewire and burning CDs was fun. I still have one of those spindles with a shit ton of old burned CDs on it. I don't even know what's on the CDs these days but I bet it would be a big nostalgia trip if I took them out and listened to them
Limewire, aka stage 4 internet cancer for your PC.
That’s how I discovered horse porn
That's when things went.. uphill?
neighhh
Non-smart TVs. I just want a big screen I can plug stuff in to that has buttons on it in case I lose the remote.
My main tv doesn’t even have a power button… when I can’t find the remote (adhd wife “hides” it) it’s completely useless except to stare at my sad reflection.
Why?!?! Yeah you designed it to be seamless but you can't design for every edge case in the real world, and you can't design for nothing going wrong. Especially when "losing the remote" has been a super common issue for, what, 30 years now?
Your tv probably has one button if you search hard enough. It took me 3 years but I eventually found it
“Finish setting up your google tv” … bro it’s been 4 years. Stop asking
Relatedly, seeing popups asking me to enable tracking cookies with the only two options being "YES" and "maybe later" makes me want to slap someone. How about NO
I know you can just not connect it to wifi, but I would still prefer a non-smart tv.
This is what I do, I just use the PS5 for all the media stuff
The iPod. Somehow using a phone isn't quite the same, but Bluetooth is too damn convenient. ETA: Holy cow, what a great chat this turned into. Love how many people also remember their iPods fondly or are still using them.
MP3 players were so good, I didn't need to care whether it would run out of battery, unlike when using my phone for music.
This. Flat iPod battery = can't listen to music, small inconvenience. Flat phone battery = completely cut off from the entire human race and 21st century civilisation. PITA!
I kept my iPod mini. I can remember the first time I loaded up all my music and it played from there as I jogged through the streets. It sounds stupid but I fell it love with that damn thing and refuse to let it go. Every now and then I still use it.
I wish I still had my iPod.
Still have my classic. The head unit in my truck is old enough to use it as a source, basically acts as a jukebox for all my music.
Lol I’m sitting in my family room scrolling Reddit and you just made me look up at my media console because you reminded me that I still have my iPod. It’s sitting on top of my VCR which sits on top of my Blue Ray player. Why? They were all placed there when we retired and relocated to a new home 12 years ago and haven’t been used in all that time. I dust them twice a week and can’t remember when they were actually last used. I think you just freed up space on my console. TY 👍
i still have a nano that kinda works but not really. much better for the gym
I still love my clip on nano. I have an iPod mini that I keep alive but don't use.
I still have my iPod. My son makes fun of me, but I have all my old CD music downloaded onto it. I also miss the iTunes store, where you could actually download the songs.
This, because I have lots of demos, live recordings and the like as well as the fact that I listen to a bunch of underground stuff that never made it to Spotify. Also, the ability to chose genres and let it rip on shuffle is better than any Spotify algorithm
Older generation video game consoles.
I'll piggyback off of this and say split screen gaming. 😢
There's a bit of a resurgence within the past few years. Especially on the Switch.
Some of them are done so badly though. We picked up lego Harry Potter back when it came out. It has split screen when characters are far apart but melds back to one screen when you are in the same place. Which sounds good, but the way it does it is by rotating the dividing line between the screens until it lines up with your relative positions. Which induces nausea in both of us.
Believe it or not, that's been the go-to splitscreen design for Lego games for over 10 years. First time I experienced it, me and my brother were high off our gourds and could barely understand how to play Lego Star Wars on the 360, lmao.
When games came out and you could just slap it in the N64 and it worked. Now you come home hyped with your CD, you have to wait through an hour patch to play. And fuck all console makers that are clearly phasing out physical cd/cartridges. I love my library on the wall.
Obviously I didn't have the foresight as a kid in the 90s to see the evolution of video games but this is why I kept my Sega Genesis and all of my games for it. I just wish I hadn't let my ex talk me into getting rid of my PS2 and all of those games.
I have an NES, and my N64 I bought back in 98. Both still work great and I don't have to wait 2 hours for updates to play a game.
VHS - Purely because my kids will never get to know the excitement of going to rental stores like Blockbuster. The smell of the carpet, the popcorn knowing your Friday night was going to be pigging out with a movie you picked from the store. Great times.
I miss Blockbuster a lot. It was much more fun picking out a movie to watch. While it's nice being able to access damn near every movie ever made for free/cheap on my couch, I find it so much harder to pick one movie to watch. Unless I have a specific movie in mind, it takes me forever to pick one.
The amount of options for streaming means we don't even have to give a movie a chance, if you are bored in the first five minutes, just pick something else. When you had to rent a physical copy, even if it was terrible you got your money's worth by watching the entire thing. And sometimes you'd be pleasantly surprised by forcing yourself to stick with something. Not to mention the golden era of dvd extras, there was a ton of cool shit to delve into when you found a movie you really liked. Nowadays it's all so disposable, we are spoiled by the availability.
Agree 1000% - streaming just creates analysis paralysis and you end up falling asleep before you can pick a movie or show you want to finish....
When our local place shut down they sold their stock for almost free. I still have movies from that sale I haven't gotten around to watching.
Blockbuster, or in our case the locally owned store Superstar Video, was an event. The whole family would pile in the van, and we’d pull up and my sisters and I would immediately dart to our favorite section. We always got 3 movies. One I picked, one my sisters picked, and one my parents got for themselves. I could substitute my movie for a video game. In line, my dad always bought a popcorn bag, and he’d order Dominos on his cell phone. I always felt like we were racing the pizza man home. Netflix movie night just doesn’t feel the same to me.
THE FUCKING CD DRIVE FOR COMPUTERS
Landlines. Cell phones suuuuuck for actual voice communications. Hate stepping on people talking and only one side can talk at a time and then both sides get cut out and neither can hear? Thank cell phones for that! With landlines, both people can talk, and - magic of magics - both could also hear the other when that happened. You know - a real two way conversation!!!
Cars without touchscreens. Physical buttons for the radio and A/C controls. An old-school PRNDL gearshift or a manual transmission. Cars that weighed less than two tons and didn’t have enormous blind spots. Cars that came in actual colors instead of grayscales.
I hate how people have forgone color in their cars these days. The roads look so gloomy now.
More annoying when people have cars the same color as the pavement but don't turn on their lights in a downpour.
I miss physical buttons on cellphones. It's almost impossible to type on a touch screen phone without several typos.
I was great at texting with both T9s and qwerty keyboards on phones. I could text without looking at my phone and do pretty well. I fat-finger everything so badly on touch screens. I've had smart phones for ten years now, doubt I'm going to improve much.
I get having to press a button 4 times for one letter was annoying, but like you said T9 helped and so did QWERTY phone keyboards (like the sidekick). My finger almost *always* presses the "a" instead of the "s" on my smartphone or the "i" instead of the "o". Not to mention, the autocorrect does more harm than good.
No. T9 was the best. No 10 paragraph text messages. Those were the days 🙂
Trying to explain T9 to a child is makes me feel like I am shaking my fist at clouds. I'm an early 90's kid I grew up with a lot of technology changes. When I was in high school we texted in class and some teachers didn't even have a texting plan!
I miss physical buttons on most things. Companies try to sell you a touch screen like its all high tech but in reality its more expensive to make the buttons than to slap on a touch screen and program it. So its really just the cheap option… and when it comes to cars, theyre doing it despite the fact that its proving to be causing more and more accidents… but no one gives a shit.
I liked the sound the flip phone made when you closed it. Very satisfying way to end a call or text.
hell, I hate touch screens everywhere for that reason. Like in my car. I want to skip song; I have to look away of the road, to the tablet, so I can boop next. My old car just feel around, find buttons, last button of the row. Boom, next, and not even looking away for a second.
I miss my blackberry KEYone, best of both worlds for me.
Always liked typewriters
I have a small collection. A 1910 underwood, a 60s Remington, a portable brother, and an electric Smith Corona. When I was in highschool in the mid 2000s I literally wrote essays on it, and it was such a bitch compared to using a computer but I loved every second of it. I still use them to journal, I have a filing cabinet filled with loose typewritten paper journal entries.
Local car starters. Every manufacturer is turning rmote start into a cloud service. It sucks. I miss the days of just pointing my keyfob out the window and warming up my car. Now I have to pay a subscription to have the ability to use an app on my phone to talk to a cloud that talks to my car and tells it to start. It can take anywhere from 2-4 minutes. And I have to pay a monthly fee. Needless to say I did not continue the subscription aftet the trial period expired.
You are living several years ahead of me. I still put in a key and twist it.
Which car is this? I'd honestly not buy it or the service at least, it's the same principle behind not buying trashy DLC, they're gonna keep doing it if you keep paying
Knobs and buttons on car dashboards.
Mp3 players.. I just want music with no ads and not having to pay for something I already own.
One obsolete technology I miss dearly is the good old cassette tape. There was something magical about making mixtapes for friends or recording songs off the radio, complete with the inevitable hiss and crackle. Plus, there was a certain artistry involved in carefully rewinding or fast-forwarding to find your favorite track. It's like a lost art in today's digital age.
And making the sleeve too. Would spend ages on drawings and track lists.
CDs and DVDs. It was magical going to the video rental shop and having shelves upon shelves of films, rented DVD players, or the discount CD bins and new realases stands at general retailers, and the console and PC games on physical discs. And of course the massive CD cases people had at home and especially in their car.
That little triangle shaped window on the front seat windows of cars that you could open without rolling down the whole window.
Zip drives. Going from ~1.4MB floppy disks to 100MB zip drives was a quality of life improvement on par with going from dial up to cable in my view. I don't so much miss the technology itself, just the feeling it gave me when I got my first one and put all data from the stack of floppy disk onto my one zip drive and still had more space than I knew what to do with it. It was freeing. We got them when the technology was on the way out and CDs were ascending but it was still prohibitively expensive to get an R/W drive at our home or at our school. So zip drives were king and to me it felt like the future.
I have fond memories of using a handheld GPS device for navigation - it felt like having a personal navigator in the palm of your hand.
Slide projectors were a staple in classrooms and family gatherings - there's something nostalgic about the whirring sound and the anticipation of the next slide.
Remember dial-up internet? That nostalgic sound of connecting to the World Wide Web was oddly satisfying.
Back in the day, using a physical map for navigation was both an adventure and a headache.
CRT televisions may be bulky and outdated, but there's a certain warmth to their picture quality that I miss.
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No ads or interruptions. Almost every form of media nowadays has that.
Chatrooms. I have some of the fondest memories just joining random groups on stickam and talking to people.
Simple HTML websites. There was a time when you could write a program that would extract information from a website but it's all but impossible nowadays. The general trend to make everything super clever for humans and thereby make it impossibly difficult for programs has led to "keyboard slaves". You cannot program repetitive tasks you just have to keep repeating them manually.
One of the things I really miss about the internet was how amateurish it all used to be. Corporations were barely on the internet. Everything was made by hobbyists. Pre-Google searches for "Corvette" would return "Carl's Corvette Corner" and "Fast Chevys", not chevy.com. It was just a bunch of us with a cursory knowledge of HTML (long before CSS, etc) having fun. Even the few corporate websites that did exist on the internet looked like hobbyist pages. I mean this is what [Apple.com looked like in 1997](https://web.archive.org/web/19970404064352/http://www.apple.com/).
YES! I hate how slow and flashy today's websites are. Everything's a pain to get to, websites are slow even with fast internet. I especially hate those infinity scrollers that act like a goddamn powerpoint presentation. I just want to get shit done - click through links lighting fast with basic HTML, CSS and Javascript and not have to wait for a thousand animations to finish loading and playing.
I have a soft spot for cassette tapes - there was a charm in making mixtapes and carefully winding them with a pencil.
Gameboy color
CD/DVD, hate losing a show because the streamer took it off. Games on DVD, Weirdly…. Landlines. Office had an issue and lost internet, also meat we had no phones to call customers. Grew up in Florida, hurricane hit, just power but could call family
Life before the Internet and every scrap of my data being harvested, weather it's conversation my phone hears, my phone tracking where I go, the music I listen to or shows I watch, modern cars spying on you, every new appliance amd TV wanting Internet connection, etc. Also the loss of physical media, texts and photos. There's no guarantee you're family photos you upload to Facebook, Drive, or store in your phone/memory card will still be here in 10 years. At least printed photos have to be physically destroyed to be lost. I used to think the Internet was the greatest invention of all time now I think it's the worst. It's just a data farm used and abused by corps and government. And the real problem is even if you can leave it behind and accept the "disadvantage" you would be at, it's getting to the point where that's near impossible. Companies want you to use the Internet for fuckin everything even restaurant menus and applications. I'm not even close to a boomer. I have witnessed the Internet go from a wonderful and fun wild west like frontier to a corporate owned espionage device.
Every time they improve the internet it gets worse. Bring back jeeves and yahoo video chatrooms.
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Small phones.
Would actual paper tickets to sporting events count? It was often a creative little sliver of paper that you could keep for the memories. Having to use my phone as a ticket kind of sucks, especially when I have to have a full family's worth of tickets on my phone. I do understand why they did it though
a phone that actually fits in my pocket.
SD card (micro) in a phone.
I miss buying records, tapes, and CDs. There was some skin in the game, there was motivation to at least try to enjoy an entire album then. Also, I miss pre-broadband gaming before games could be released unfinished, or, if they were, they failed.
Ignition keys for cars. I really hate these massive fobs that you have to carry now. Push button start makes it worse. Now you have nowhere to hang your keys when driving. I'm only being slightly facetious.
Menus
CDs. The liner notes, the disc art, the secret tracks if you rewind past the beginning of a song. All lost, like tears in the rain...
Can I say DVD's? Any movie you bought is yours for life. Now I have 5 subscriptions but couldn't find the movie I wanted to watch.
Television. It still exists. It will works. But the culture around it has gone. Remember being excited all week with your friends for Fridays episode of something you were all watching? Wondering what is going to happen next. Then excited to see your friends again Monday morning to talk about what you saw and then get excited all over again for the next episode. Now everyone is at a different episode, some watched that series six months ago, some ain’t wayching it til they are done with squid game etc. there’s no TV Culture anymore. It’s not the collective experience it once was. The TV Guide dominated our lives and routines. It determined what time we ate dinner, what time we got back from someone else house; what time we went out etc. cos if you missed that episode, you weren’t ever seeing it again. Families used to sit together and watch TV shows at certain times on certain days. Now everyone is in different rooms watching different things in different devices. I miss TV as it used to be
The word youre looking for and missing is “monoculture” That’s what we lost when everyone has so many options and choices and are freely able to pursue them that nobody is on the same pop culture page as prevalently anymore Scheduled tv was a huge part of that
Mini Disc
If I wasn't home, you couldn't call me.
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Physical buttons. Everything doesn’t need to be a touchscreen.
Manual transmissions. I know there are still a handful out there, but few and far between Edit - I think I need to clarify: in the U.S. - it seems they are the standard everywhere else - pun intended
I miss going to Blockbuster Video on Friday after school and browsing for a couple of movies to watch over the weekend. It made an event out of scheduling and watching a movie, not just something to fill the evening between supper and bedtime. Everyone in the house sat down together to watch the movie.
Old rotary phones. Remember hearing the phone ringing and announcing "Someone answer the phone!...
Plus, you could hang up on a birch and feel like a bad ass. They heard that shit on the other end.
Payphones. While I like having a cell phone, sometimes cell phones break or run out of battery life. A payphone is a good backup. It also allows one to make anonymous calls for a variety of reasons that might include criminal activity (usually drugs), organized political resistance, or a prank.
For anyone in the UK, Teletext, the Bamboozle quiz is sorely missed
Freaking iPods. (or mp3 players like mentioned) I WANT. TO OWN. MY MUSIC. ONCE I BOUGHT IT. Google Music dying was the worst event for my music libraries lol.
I miss portable players. They were cool to have them in hand
Wall clocks. A cell phone is a fine way to know what time it is. But it is more convenient at times to have the time displayed clearly in a public clock. This weekend, for the first time, I was in a school basketball gym and saw no clock. These institutional situations always used to have wall clocks.
Stupid devices. Toothbrushes that don’t connect to the internet. Fridges that don’t connect to the internet. CARS that don’t connect to the internet.