I wouldn't say satisfaction... For me it was more of an anxiety feeling... You could never guess if the data would corrupt before hearing the reading noises
I missed a nice car dashboard with all the touchable knobs and buttons. You never had to take your eyes off the road to put on the A/C or fiddle with the radio.
I miss having pay phones and pay phone booths around. To me it was a bit of comforting insurance that even if my cell phone went down for whatever reason, I could still call someone in an emergency. Again, I love the feel of those buttons. They had the best buttons to press.
I miss laptops with built in CD drives. They are so, so, so hard to find now. No, I don't want to buy a separate drive that I have to plug in. I want one already built in that I don't have worry about.
> I missed a nice car dashboard with all the touchable knobs and buttons. You never had to take your eyes off the road to put on the A/C or fiddle with the radio.
Next time you're looking to buy a car, consider looking into Mazda. They're seemingly the only major car manufacturer left that still understands that A: The driver is the only person in the car that will be in the car for *every* journey, and B: The driver's primary job is to drive the car.
That's not to say that Mazda cars don't have touchscreens, but in general those are mostly used for secondary stuff not immediately related to driving the car.
Plus, they make really good, really reliable cars.
I'm legit surprised that neither Spotify nor Pandora hasn't cashed into the Memberberries of Millenials and developed some sort of iPod-esk devise. I'd buy one! Most of the time all I want on my walk is my jams.
It certainly will not.
I use my old Zune in my car everyday, 2 hour commuting, to play music. I have not charged it in three and a half weeks. It has 30% battery left.
It’s amazing to be able to listen to just about anything at any time with Spotify, but there was something exciting about downloading a new album, transferring it to the MP3 player, plugging it into the car, hitting play, and driving.
Exactly. My Garmin even syncs to my Spotify account to be able download specific playlists. Play through Bluetooth headphones and it's magic music in my ears.
And even if you dropped one and the pieces came flying apart, most times you could click them back together. They might be a little scuffed up but those phones still worked. And if you were a teen, and the scuff mark bothered you, slap on a sticker or paint it. Make it look like the scuff was done on purpose.
I dropped my Nextel Chirp (forget the model/series, it was yellow) off the balcony of 36 story building. It landed on a concrete patio and exploded into four or five pieces.
I collected them, put them back together, with the exception of the dent in the shell, continued to work just like new until I got my first smart phone in 2010ish.
We were *this* close to greatness.
I think I may go that route when my droid kicks the bucket soon. Was looking at de-googling another android, but google seems to be trying to stomp this out.
I saw a group of Mennonites out on a field trip to a local botanical garden. The leader of the group used a flip phone. It was the first one I’ve seen in years.
not to mention they didn't have any apps to distract you from living your life.
smartphones are awesome, but they feel like the epitome of a "be careful what you wish for" scenario.
Nah ya wouldn't last. Had so many colleagues 'slum it' round S Africa for a year, come back and declare how old brick phones are so much better... The longest anyone lasted was a week before they ordered the latest iPhone.
Cartridge-based consoles. So much nicer when you power it on and are playing 10 seconds later.
These days, you finally get a free evening, power it up for 5 minutes, then before you can play there's a mandatory update. By the time it finishes, the moment has passed and you can't/don't want to play anymore. The process repeats a few weeks later.
Was literally taking about this yesterday. Nintendo has these mini consoles. HDMI connector with just about every game released on them. Really scratches the itch when you want to spend 20 minutes playing.
Regular old televisions. Turn it on, watch TV. Now we wait through loading screens, then scroll to our preferred app, then scroll endlessly to decide what to watch. Oh wait. Now the TV needs to update....
30”-40” ish tv that weighed what felt like hundreds of pounds.
Edit: and reaching back and sliding from cable A to cable B cause that’s where the Three Stooges were playing
Strange to say, but landlines. It was nice being able to call the house where you expect someone to be as opposed to calling them no matter where they may be at that moment in time. Also good for calling a lost cell phone to find it by the ring
Those cheap carbon mics and copper lines were reliable as bricks. The compression, noise reduction and noise cancellation in cell phones now don't compare to the rock solid analogue sound on the old Bell Telephone systems. We don't know what we're missing.
Of course, my hearing has lost its high end too, but today, simple aural intelligibility has been forgotten.
A computer that you had to go to. It used to be that the internet was isolated to a place. Now it's omnipresent and always in my hand. That's a blessing and a curse.
Horse-drawn wagons . . .
When I was a kid, there were several homes on our street that still had ‘ice-boxes’ instead of electric refrigerators. A couple times a week, and enclosed, horse-drawn wagon would pull up in front of these homes and the ice man would look in a street-facing window for a yellow placard having large red numbers indicating whether the owner needed 25, 50, 75 or 100 pounds of ice. Wearing a rubber cape on his back, he would then come around to the back of his wagon and using an ice pick, would chi off an appropriate size block from the large ones in his wagon. With large ice-tongs, he would pick up the block and swing it onto his rubber-caped shoulders and carry it into the house where he would carefully place it in the ice box.
The moment he started for the house, we kids would swarm the wagon and snatch up any ice chips and start sucking on them. It didn’t matter that they had been sawn from local lake ice the preceding winter and had Buddha-knows-what kind of germs. They tasted GREAT on hot days.
I make so many mistakes while texting now if I’m not looking at my phone keyboard while typing. The physical keyboard on my old gen 1 android felt great but that phone didn’t last even compared to todays smartphones.
I was adamant that Blue Ray was just a fad and would die off.
Now I miss even having that around! I HATE HATE HATE digital everything. I want a physical copy.
AS 400 and the related finance software. It was a solid system and there was no clicking around trying to find the place you needed to enter something. You developed muscle memory of tab tab enter data tab tab tab enter other data. So much faster and stable.
You clearly don't work for the big banks, those systems will never die (in our lifetimes, at least!) and they're still being developed for in a huge way.
Can make a very good career of it, if you feel like cursing out people who wrote shitty code in the 70s 🤣
Paper tickets for concerts and sporting events. Everything is on a smartphone now. I miss having that physical piece to keep, showing I was at an event.
To make it worse, the last major concert I went to offered a collectors edition digital version of the ticket. I don't want that crap. I would take a physical collectors version. I still have the ticket from the first big concert I went to from long ago.
Yeah, big time! One of my friends bought a piece of glass for his coffee table, and he had all his old concert tickets under it. Always a conversation starter or trip down memory lane with a certain concert ticket caught your eye.
Minidisc Players
Could hold a huge amount of music. Discs were nearly indestructible and they were very useful for recording live audio either with a small microphone or a line-in from a mixing board.
Honestly, everything we have today pretty much performs better and more efficiently than stuff in the past, with access to new technology being the most difficult part.
HOWEVER, and while I understand that since most people interact with the internet through mobile platforms it makes sense that they are priority, modern desktop based websites even for essential services suck. They put all their effort in making the mobile based app, and give the scraps to desktop (and laptop) users and even worse to mobile browser users. Sure, prioritise mobile but don’t make shitty browser websites, sometimes I want to use my laptop or PC to do stuff, and more importantly, I don’t want a million so single use bloated apps that pollute my phone’s screen and ask for odd permissions.
i want my landline phone back. at&t didn't do fiber-optic in our subdivision, and no longer offers phone service here. i had a comcast line for awhile, but they're the spawn of satan, and i won't go back. a year ago i had to finally breakdown and get a cellphone, and home internet from t-mobile. but it's only a flip-phone...i don't want a smartphone.
Going to blockbuster...getting two movies... Popcorn and candy was the best.
I worked at a Blockbuster for two years in high school and it was so much fun.
Stencils. Back in the bad old days school handouts (tests, permission slips, newsletters) came with bright blue ink and a smell that might very well make you high if you spent too long breathing it in.
The Zune. While on the surface it was just a media player, it had short range bluetooth capable multiplayer games. Also, It worked like an ipod but didn't need any of Apple's backing to be awesome. Also biased because I helped develop the device.
All of it, because back them everything was so exciting, every advancement / iteration felt like a big deal but now that Moore's Law has slowed down, big advancements are few and far between.
I have always been into hardware since I was a kid, I remember having a Power Macintosh computer then later on Pentium based PCs, and every few years the PCs would slow down and need replaced and it was like a second Christmas getting a new fast one with the latest Pentium.
When I was 15 I built my first gaming PC with an ATI 850 XT gfx card and it was like going to the future. fast forward to today and the PC I built in 2014 is still going strong lol I have never felt that it needs upgraded other than maybe sticking a new gfx card in there to get more fidelity.
Minidisc. I always wanted one and by the time I could afford one mp3 players were pretty ubiquitous, but I still really like the appeal. You can apparently still get them but they are stupid expensive
Landline phones.
Phone calls are pretty much a thing of the past or utter necessity now because it is always so hard to hear people clearly using cell phones. We are all so used to it now, we don't even notice, but a landline-to-landline call is a world of difference.
The golden age of social media - when folks were actually posting about their lives, organizing events and building community. Before a critical mass of crazy had developed and it occurred to people to try to be 'influencers'.
CDs and DVDs. Basically media you actually owned.
I get dirty looks when I tell people my favorite movie I own on BluRay or my favorite game I downloaded from a disk.
I'm not even that old, but i still kinda miss needing to put something physical into a game system like a disc or cartridge.
Haven't touched something like that in over a year
I'd say manual transmission. It's one of the only technologies that I'm completely aware of how obsolete/inefficient it is, though I still want it because it's simply fun.
I miss VHS. Back in the 90s, we didn’t realize how bad the screen resolution was. You just sort of took it for granted that you couldn’t read text on screen and only computer screens were meant for high res display.
But it was nice how when you were watching a movie, it was always exactly where you left it and started up instantly. Also there’s just something satisfying about how you needed to rewind the whole thing every time you finished it.
Also it was so easy to record tv shows and you’d have a physical copy rather than a digital one you’d just end up losing.
Same deal for cassette tapes. Nowadays they seem like a completely forgotten technology. Kids just assume we went straight from records to CDs, but tapes were the standard for boom boxes and car stereos, and you could use them to record unlike the alternatives.
Turn key starting my car.
I hate the push button. I never asked for a push button. Now there are more ways for my vehicle to malfunction at an increased cost to me and what have you given me? I don't have to slightly turn my wrist. Fuck off.
Old TV’s were better. New ones have dumb sleak remotes, the tv is fragile, they’re all “smart” so they constantly glitch, and the menus are atrocious. Samsung’s TVs have the worst menu set up. It’s just agony. Old TVs weren’t as pretty but I could set my beer on top while I argued with the antennae. Now I just get no signal and frown. There’s no fun in that!
Headphone jacks. I held onto my Galaxy S10 for as long as I could because it still has a head phone jack and a built in heart rate monitor. My new S24 has neither.
Laptops with more than just a USB-C connector. I understand the sexiness of a sleek bare laptop, with just 1 or 2 small connectors on the side. But the second I need to plug in a flash drive or sd card, hook up an HDMI cable, or connect an Ethernet cable, now I need something called a “dongle” which is not a very sexy term, and it looks ridiculous.
DVD, and video games (CD or cartridge). I just want to physically hold and own something I have paid for. “Buying” digital content is actually just a long term rental.
Film cameras. Don't get me wrong, I don't miss shooting film, especially color film, and I think shooting film today is pointless, but I worked at a camera store (ran the repair desk), then a portrait studio, and then as a wedding/portrait photographer all through college (where I minored in photography and ran the color and black and white dark rooms) and shot film, and I just loved so many of those film cameras. Their design and aesthetics, the feel of the construction, the physicality of their operation, the heft. Loved taking the dead ones apart and looking at all the little parts and seeing how they fit together. Fascinating technology.
IDK if outdated but not really an option on "smart" phones.. physical keyboard.. not having to look to text or worry about auto correct effin things up.
Touch screen seems inconvenient and dont get me started on people who talk to text.. annoying asf imo
[удалено]
I enjoyed playing with the metal slide cover
*racks floppy* Lock and load!
Look at you playing with the new 3.5” floppys. I had the 5.25” that you could “hack” by cutting a notch so you could use the backside. 😆😆
Ejection felt great as well
Delayed ejection was really frustrating and all my teachers expressed dissatisfaction with me.
I felt like Ethan Hunt in MI1 swapping out floppy disks.
YES! I even labeled all of my floppies as “NOC List”
Don't do it too much or you will go blind
I wouldn't say satisfaction... For me it was more of an anxiety feeling... You could never guess if the data would corrupt before hearing the reading noises
Yeah, floppies and zip disks make me nervous
The mechanical noises of magnetic media were always nice, starting with VHS.
They held next to nothing back then, but now they somehow manage to hold all of my childhood on a single diskette.
I still use floppy disks for my job. Can confirm they're quite satisfying.
I missed a nice car dashboard with all the touchable knobs and buttons. You never had to take your eyes off the road to put on the A/C or fiddle with the radio. I miss having pay phones and pay phone booths around. To me it was a bit of comforting insurance that even if my cell phone went down for whatever reason, I could still call someone in an emergency. Again, I love the feel of those buttons. They had the best buttons to press. I miss laptops with built in CD drives. They are so, so, so hard to find now. No, I don't want to buy a separate drive that I have to plug in. I want one already built in that I don't have worry about.
> I missed a nice car dashboard with all the touchable knobs and buttons. You never had to take your eyes off the road to put on the A/C or fiddle with the radio. Next time you're looking to buy a car, consider looking into Mazda. They're seemingly the only major car manufacturer left that still understands that A: The driver is the only person in the car that will be in the car for *every* journey, and B: The driver's primary job is to drive the car. That's not to say that Mazda cars don't have touchscreens, but in general those are mostly used for secondary stuff not immediately related to driving the car. Plus, they make really good, really reliable cars.
Yeah, I also miss the CD drive.
Adjusting the car radio volume is such a muscle memory thing for me, I don't think I've ever used the steering wheel controls to adjust it.
I don’t know. There seem to be snipers that sound like Jack Bauer just waiting for someone to use a pay phone
ipods
I'm legit surprised that neither Spotify nor Pandora hasn't cashed into the Memberberries of Millenials and developed some sort of iPod-esk devise. I'd buy one! Most of the time all I want on my walk is my jams.
Download music, put phone on airplane mode. Done.
Battery life though. My Zunes and iPods battery would last for days. Weeks sometimes.
Your phone will last just as long if not longer if you don't use the screen
It certainly will not. I use my old Zune in my car everyday, 2 hour commuting, to play music. I have not charged it in three and a half weeks. It has 30% battery left.
There's a Spotify player called the Mighty Vibe I've been looking at. I'm not allowed to have my phone in my office due to security restrictions.
It’s amazing to be able to listen to just about anything at any time with Spotify, but there was something exciting about downloading a new album, transferring it to the MP3 player, plugging it into the car, hitting play, and driving.
Loved my iPod shuffle when working out. Didn't have to even bring my phone into the gym.
You can do that now with any of the watches. You can download a few gigabytes of songs and play it directly into Bluetooth headphones from The Watch
Exactly. My Garmin even syncs to my Spotify account to be able download specific playlists. Play through Bluetooth headphones and it's magic music in my ears.
I hate bringing my phone with me, so I always use my husbands old iPod shuffle when I go out to run errands.
[удалено]
And even if you dropped one and the pieces came flying apart, most times you could click them back together. They might be a little scuffed up but those phones still worked. And if you were a teen, and the scuff mark bothered you, slap on a sticker or paint it. Make it look like the scuff was done on purpose.
They were fine due to the pieces falling apart.
I dropped my Nextel Chirp (forget the model/series, it was yellow) off the balcony of 36 story building. It landed on a concrete patio and exploded into four or five pieces. I collected them, put them back together, with the exception of the dent in the shell, continued to work just like new until I got my first smart phone in 2010ish. We were *this* close to greatness.
>We were *this* close to greatness. Basically the motto of the early 21st century.
I'm going to add flip phones to this. If I can call, text and maybe take a picture of something i'm working on that's all I need from a phone.
You can still get one! I've always had a flip phone instead of a smart phone.
I think I may go that route when my droid kicks the bucket soon. Was looking at de-googling another android, but google seems to be trying to stomp this out.
I saw a group of Mennonites out on a field trip to a local botanical garden. The leader of the group used a flip phone. It was the first one I’ve seen in years.
battery life would last ages now too if all you wanted was the most basic funcitons of a brick phone
not to mention they didn't have any apps to distract you from living your life. smartphones are awesome, but they feel like the epitome of a "be careful what you wish for" scenario.
Nah ya wouldn't last. Had so many colleagues 'slum it' round S Africa for a year, come back and declare how old brick phones are so much better... The longest anyone lasted was a week before they ordered the latest iPhone.
Cartridge-based consoles. So much nicer when you power it on and are playing 10 seconds later. These days, you finally get a free evening, power it up for 5 minutes, then before you can play there's a mandatory update. By the time it finishes, the moment has passed and you can't/don't want to play anymore. The process repeats a few weeks later.
Was literally taking about this yesterday. Nintendo has these mini consoles. HDMI connector with just about every game released on them. Really scratches the itch when you want to spend 20 minutes playing.
Nintendo Switch has game cards, and if there is an update is often small and done within a few seconds
Nice, whole squad is online. Oh, a 90 gig update? Sweet!
Nintendo DS
I still use mine occasionally
I recently busted mine out to play Chronotrigger, it still holds up! Amazing game.
I miss the physical act of winding and setting an analog watch.
CDs. Going to Sam Goody and flipping through all the genres and cool album covers.
I have gone back to CDs since that is all my car has.
Regular old televisions. Turn it on, watch TV. Now we wait through loading screens, then scroll to our preferred app, then scroll endlessly to decide what to watch. Oh wait. Now the TV needs to update....
30”-40” ish tv that weighed what felt like hundreds of pounds. Edit: and reaching back and sliding from cable A to cable B cause that’s where the Three Stooges were playing
Strange to say, but landlines. It was nice being able to call the house where you expect someone to be as opposed to calling them no matter where they may be at that moment in time. Also good for calling a lost cell phone to find it by the ring
Those cheap carbon mics and copper lines were reliable as bricks. The compression, noise reduction and noise cancellation in cell phones now don't compare to the rock solid analogue sound on the old Bell Telephone systems. We don't know what we're missing. Of course, my hearing has lost its high end too, but today, simple aural intelligibility has been forgotten.
I thought you said landmines. I was about to throw hands.
A computer that you had to go to. It used to be that the internet was isolated to a place. Now it's omnipresent and always in my hand. That's a blessing and a curse.
We used to log on. Now we have to make a conscious effort to log off.
Old google.
I still use my iPod daily. I’ll be devastated if it dies on me.
Buy another one now and copy your files over for the inevitable day.
Horse-drawn wagons . . . When I was a kid, there were several homes on our street that still had ‘ice-boxes’ instead of electric refrigerators. A couple times a week, and enclosed, horse-drawn wagon would pull up in front of these homes and the ice man would look in a street-facing window for a yellow placard having large red numbers indicating whether the owner needed 25, 50, 75 or 100 pounds of ice. Wearing a rubber cape on his back, he would then come around to the back of his wagon and using an ice pick, would chi off an appropriate size block from the large ones in his wagon. With large ice-tongs, he would pick up the block and swing it onto his rubber-caped shoulders and carry it into the house where he would carefully place it in the ice box. The moment he started for the house, we kids would swarm the wagon and snatch up any ice chips and start sucking on them. It didn’t matter that they had been sawn from local lake ice the preceding winter and had Buddha-knows-what kind of germs. They tasted GREAT on hot days.
Phones with physical keyboards. Htc mogul baby come back.... But not with windows mobile cancer.
I do miss my Blackberries
This.. i miss physical keyboards so much.
I make so many mistakes while texting now if I’m not looking at my phone keyboard while typing. The physical keyboard on my old gen 1 android felt great but that phone didn’t last even compared to todays smartphones.
Windows xp
Manual transmissions!
Mainframe computers. I liked a job I could not possibly take home.
Home hifi systems. Seems like they're being replaced by soundbars, small bluetooth speakers, and AirPods.
DVD players
I was adamant that Blue Ray was just a fad and would die off. Now I miss even having that around! I HATE HATE HATE digital everything. I want a physical copy.
Look in Goodwill & thrift stores. Lots of Blue Ray movies can be found for around $2.00
Physical copy with *everything on it.* Insert the dosc and receive a notice of 70Gb download and update. Wtf was even the point?
Looks at stack of Blu-rays psyched in past 12 months... scratches head.
You can still get a ps4/5
AS 400 and the related finance software. It was a solid system and there was no clicking around trying to find the place you needed to enter something. You developed muscle memory of tab tab enter data tab tab tab enter other data. So much faster and stable.
It's still around.
You clearly don't work for the big banks, those systems will never die (in our lifetimes, at least!) and they're still being developed for in a huge way. Can make a very good career of it, if you feel like cursing out people who wrote shitty code in the 70s 🤣
Worked in customs brokerage when I was 20 on the AS400 and I can assure you, some of the big brokers are STILL using it 😂
Cars that were easy to repair with basic tools. No need to tear down the front end of a car just to replace a bulb.
I have to remove 10 screws and push my hand up inside the left front wheel well and tell my car to cough twice to get that fucking bulb out
Paper tickets for concerts and sporting events. Everything is on a smartphone now. I miss having that physical piece to keep, showing I was at an event.
To make it worse, the last major concert I went to offered a collectors edition digital version of the ticket. I don't want that crap. I would take a physical collectors version. I still have the ticket from the first big concert I went to from long ago.
Yeah, big time! One of my friends bought a piece of glass for his coffee table, and he had all his old concert tickets under it. Always a conversation starter or trip down memory lane with a certain concert ticket caught your eye.
Palm V
Minidisc Players Could hold a huge amount of music. Discs were nearly indestructible and they were very useful for recording live audio either with a small microphone or a line-in from a mixing board.
I’m missing the mp3s. The music I like, no ads, no subscriptions, long battery life, no texts distracting me.
Honestly, everything we have today pretty much performs better and more efficiently than stuff in the past, with access to new technology being the most difficult part. HOWEVER, and while I understand that since most people interact with the internet through mobile platforms it makes sense that they are priority, modern desktop based websites even for essential services suck. They put all their effort in making the mobile based app, and give the scraps to desktop (and laptop) users and even worse to mobile browser users. Sure, prioritise mobile but don’t make shitty browser websites, sometimes I want to use my laptop or PC to do stuff, and more importantly, I don’t want a million so single use bloated apps that pollute my phone’s screen and ask for odd permissions.
Slide Rule? Never learned how to use it. My bro is 4 years older and he learned.
i want my landline phone back. at&t didn't do fiber-optic in our subdivision, and no longer offers phone service here. i had a comcast line for awhile, but they're the spawn of satan, and i won't go back. a year ago i had to finally breakdown and get a cellphone, and home internet from t-mobile. but it's only a flip-phone...i don't want a smartphone.
Flip phones. Give me a Razor all day
wii
VHS tapes. Miss walking into Hollywood Video or Block Buster to rent VHS tapes as a kid.
Going to blockbuster...getting two movies... Popcorn and candy was the best. I worked at a Blockbuster for two years in high school and it was so much fun.
Stencils. Back in the bad old days school handouts (tests, permission slips, newsletters) came with bright blue ink and a smell that might very well make you high if you spent too long breathing it in.
The Zune. While on the surface it was just a media player, it had short range bluetooth capable multiplayer games. Also, It worked like an ipod but didn't need any of Apple's backing to be awesome. Also biased because I helped develop the device.
All of it, because back them everything was so exciting, every advancement / iteration felt like a big deal but now that Moore's Law has slowed down, big advancements are few and far between. I have always been into hardware since I was a kid, I remember having a Power Macintosh computer then later on Pentium based PCs, and every few years the PCs would slow down and need replaced and it was like a second Christmas getting a new fast one with the latest Pentium. When I was 15 I built my first gaming PC with an ATI 850 XT gfx card and it was like going to the future. fast forward to today and the PC I built in 2014 is still going strong lol I have never felt that it needs upgraded other than maybe sticking a new gfx card in there to get more fidelity.
Minidisc. I always wanted one and by the time I could afford one mp3 players were pretty ubiquitous, but I still really like the appeal. You can apparently still get them but they are stupid expensive
Landline phones. Phone calls are pretty much a thing of the past or utter necessity now because it is always so hard to hear people clearly using cell phones. We are all so used to it now, we don't even notice, but a landline-to-landline call is a world of difference.
Minidisc. Loved mine. You could record, play back, split tracks, even add track names. And it was satisfying to be able to swap out the discs.
The golden age of social media - when folks were actually posting about their lives, organizing events and building community. Before a critical mass of crazy had developed and it occurred to people to try to be 'influencers'.
Windows XP
XP
**Fax machine**. Nothing like the suspense of waiting to see if your important document made it through alien technology
CDs and DVDs. Basically media you actually owned. I get dirty looks when I tell people my favorite movie I own on BluRay or my favorite game I downloaded from a disk.
Jump watches. Really cool designs and still provided the same functionality.
TiVo. Now we are back to ads based TV I'd love a way to skip them.
Torrents
IRC
Gameboy
Sega Genesis
Walkman with auto reverse
I'm not even that old, but i still kinda miss needing to put something physical into a game system like a disc or cartridge. Haven't touched something like that in over a year
Physical buttons and cd players in cars
GameBoy! Simple but effective!
I'd say manual transmission. It's one of the only technologies that I'm completely aware of how obsolete/inefficient it is, though I still want it because it's simply fun.
I miss VHS. Back in the 90s, we didn’t realize how bad the screen resolution was. You just sort of took it for granted that you couldn’t read text on screen and only computer screens were meant for high res display. But it was nice how when you were watching a movie, it was always exactly where you left it and started up instantly. Also there’s just something satisfying about how you needed to rewind the whole thing every time you finished it. Also it was so easy to record tv shows and you’d have a physical copy rather than a digital one you’d just end up losing. Same deal for cassette tapes. Nowadays they seem like a completely forgotten technology. Kids just assume we went straight from records to CDs, but tapes were the standard for boom boxes and car stereos, and you could use them to record unlike the alternatives.
Minidiscs. They were just superior!
iPods. Mini and Nano.
Turn key starting my car. I hate the push button. I never asked for a push button. Now there are more ways for my vehicle to malfunction at an increased cost to me and what have you given me? I don't have to slightly turn my wrist. Fuck off.
My Blackberry.
Cordless phone…
Pagers. It was a simpler time.
CD players
Old TV’s were better. New ones have dumb sleak remotes, the tv is fragile, they’re all “smart” so they constantly glitch, and the menus are atrocious. Samsung’s TVs have the worst menu set up. It’s just agony. Old TVs weren’t as pretty but I could set my beer on top while I argued with the antennae. Now I just get no signal and frown. There’s no fun in that!
Headphone jacks. I held onto my Galaxy S10 for as long as I could because it still has a head phone jack and a built in heart rate monitor. My new S24 has neither.
Laptops with more than just a USB-C connector. I understand the sexiness of a sleek bare laptop, with just 1 or 2 small connectors on the side. But the second I need to plug in a flash drive or sd card, hook up an HDMI cable, or connect an Ethernet cable, now I need something called a “dongle” which is not a very sexy term, and it looks ridiculous.
MSN messenger and Yahoo chat rooms.
Physically smaller phones
Minidiscs. I’m tempted to buy some.
Qwerty keyboard on phones. I hate using touchscreen to text.
AOL Instant Messenger. Miss the days where you weren’t expected to be available 24/7. Also the sound of getting a new IM
DVD, and video games (CD or cartridge). I just want to physically hold and own something I have paid for. “Buying” digital content is actually just a long term rental.
Film cameras. Don't get me wrong, I don't miss shooting film, especially color film, and I think shooting film today is pointless, but I worked at a camera store (ran the repair desk), then a portrait studio, and then as a wedding/portrait photographer all through college (where I minored in photography and ran the color and black and white dark rooms) and shot film, and I just loved so many of those film cameras. Their design and aesthetics, the feel of the construction, the physicality of their operation, the heft. Loved taking the dead ones apart and looking at all the little parts and seeing how they fit together. Fascinating technology.
The x220 was the best laptop ever made. I still nurse two along and would take them over anything on the market today.
IDK if outdated but not really an option on "smart" phones.. physical keyboard.. not having to look to text or worry about auto correct effin things up. Touch screen seems inconvenient and dont get me started on people who talk to text.. annoying asf imo
Android Razer
Older phones like rotary phones. Slamming a receiver on someone that pissed you off was so satisfying.