Support NeoGAF

[Arrowgigantic]

Wired Home Internet
No. No no no no no. Google fiber will destroy all.

Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders
No. Vacations, graduations, weddings, etc. You bring the camera because the camera will always make for better pictures. Image quality is in the lens, not the sensor.

Landline Phones
True.

Slow-Booting Computers
True.

Windowed Operating Systems
For casual use? Sure. For people doing actual work? Never. Multi-monitor, but no windows? You'd have to be crazy.

Hard Drives
Yeah, eventually. Not on the specified timeline.

Movie Theaters
Ridiculous. Written by a hermit.

The Mouse
Even more ridiculous. Fingers will always be bigger than pixels.

3D Glasses
True, but not for the reason he thinks. 3D will go away entirely. Again.

Remote Controls
Remotes are convenience. Launching a phone app to act as a remote control is an extra step. Sorry, but you lose, dumb writer.

Desktops
What

Phone Numbers
Phone numbers might be more obscured, but they'll still be around. Like IP addresses.

Primetime Television
People are going to stop watching TV at the best time of day to watch TV because they can? What bullshit.

Fax Machines
I can see phone-based fax going away, but a machine where you put a piece of paper in it and it lets you send an image of that paper to an inbox somewhere is not going to be stopping anytime soon.

Optical Discs
Like hard drives, not in the timeline specified.

 

[Manmademan]

Why do I feel like people are misinterpreting the article? Yes, landline phones will still be around for a while, my parents will probably use them till they die. BUT anyone growing up now will probably have very little experience with optical disks, fax machines, landline phones, cable TV, etc. over the course of their lives. By the time a newborn is old enough to use computers, they won't be using mouse-equipped desktops unless they need to do very rare, specific tasks.

I personally am just young enough that I will never in my entire life pay for a landline phone, or cable TV. And everything else is on its way out for up-and-comings with no previous relationship with technology to latch on to.

I can tell you're not a sports fan. there are several cable companies (Comcast in Philadelphia is one of them) that have monopolies on broadcasting local sports games. This is a Very Big Deal. They also tend to be the ONLY option for non-terrible internet in a lot of places.

Don't expect that to change too much anytime soon. Cable may change the way it operates, but Cable TV as an entity isn't going anywhere.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

I think all of you nay saying this list really underestimate how much shit can change in 10-20 years, which would be the life cycle of this hypothetical newborn son, especially on the world of technology.

 

[TruHero]

Wired Home Internet
No. No no no no no. Google fiber will destroy all.

Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders
No. Vacations, graduations, weddings, etc. You bring the camera because the camera will always make for better pictures. Image quality is in the lens, not the sensor.

Landline Phones
True.

Slow-Booting Computers
True.

Windowed Operating Systems
For casual use? Sure. For people doing actual work? Never. Multi-monitor, but no windows? You'd have to be crazy.

Hard Drives
Yeah, eventually. Not on the specified timeline.

Movie Theaters
Ridiculous. Written by a hermit.

The Mouse
Even more ridiculous. Fingers will always be bigger than pixels.

3D Glasses
True, but not for the reason he thinks. 3D will go away entirely. Again.

Remote Controls
Remotes are convenience. Launching a phone app to act as a remote control is an extra step. Sorry, but you lose, dumb writer.

Desktops
What

Phone Numbers
Phone numbers might be more obscured, but they'll still be around. Like IP addresses.

Primetime Television
People are going to stop watching TV at the best time of day to watch TV because they can? What bullshit.

Fax Machines
I can see phone-based fax going away, but a machine where you put a piece of paper in it and it lets you send an image of that paper to an inbox somewhere is not going to be stopping anytime soon.

Optical Discs
Like hard drives, not in the timeline specified.

Good stuff. I agree with everything.

I can tell you're not a sports fan. .

No kidding. My wife still likes cable TV, but I think the only reason I use it these days is for ESPN/TNT/whatever channel the game is on.

EDIT: Actually, there's a few TV shows I watch, but I don't know if it's worth the $115 I pay for TV & internet each month

 

[lunarworks]

I think all of you nay saying this list really underestimate how much shit can change in 10-20 years, which would be the life cycle of this hypothetical newborn son, especially on the world of technology.

Damn, his son's only gonna live 10-20 years? Poor guy.

 

[Manmademan]

I think all of you nay saying this list really underestimate how much shit can change in 10-20 years, which would be the life cycle of this hypothetical newborn son, especially on the world of technology.

Or, you could say that some of us are old enough to remember wild predictions from 20 years ago about where we'd be by now.

In most cases predictions like this were WAY off- a lot of things (like say, the fax machine) that people were predicting would be long gone are still around.

 

[Levyne]

No kidding. My wife still likes cable TV, but I think the only reason I use it these days is for ESPN/TNT/whatever channel the game is on.

Same, hopefully Comcast finally picks up that Watch espn thing and maybe the nfl will adopt some streamed service of some sort (insert "lol" ad infinitum) and maybe I could drop it for some .tv passes. Haven't done the research though.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

Damn, his son's only gonna live 10-20 years? Poor guy.

In the future that's all you will need to live. Kids will be having sex at 10. They will have experienced all life has to offer.

You guys need to think about how quickly this stuff moves though. There's probably an entire generation of people who will graduate high school this year and enter college who have never used a CD, or who have no idea what a teen-adult life without Facebook is like.

 

[Guerrillas in the Mist]

Hang on, I'm 23 and I vividly remember dial-up.

Additionally, most of these are silly. This reeks of the "tablets will replace everything" mentality, without having much thought put into it. The windows and movie theatre predictions are particularly stupid.

 

[noah111]

I think some people need to re-read the title of the piece... It's "15 current technologies my newborn son won't use" not "15 current technologies my that won't exist for newborns". There's a difference.

I love the Gizmodo hate in trying to find something to disagree with or be opposed to in every write-up of theirs.. obviously what they do is get headlines with interesting titles and speculation.

I enjoyed this though, and agree with most of it.

 

[Manmademan]

Hang on, I'm 23 and I vividly remember dial-up.

Additionally, most of these are silly. This reeks of the "tablets will replace everything" mentality, without having much thought put into it. The windows and movie theatre predictions are particularly stupid.

yep. a large part of the movie theatre experience is just getting out of the house to do something social which isn't going to be replaced by any kind of home theatre or streaming option.

 

[Mike M]

Gizmodo: 15 current technologies your newborn son won't use

But my newborn daughter will.

 

[Divvy]

There are few people who can accurately predict these shifts due to how tech improves on an exponential scale with punctuated developments (like the internet or social media) being inherently unpredictable. Ray Kurzweil is about the only person who gets this kind of stuff even remotely right so I don't really put much faith into the predictions of someone from Laptop Magazine. Could he be right? Of course, but at this point it's like randomly pulling ideas from a hat.

Also Gizmodo lol.

 

[Zaptruder]

With few exceptions, technologies don't die. They become niche and very few will be interested or work on improving those technologies. Where the technology requires large specific infrastructure maintenance, it will end up dying... but if other technologies have piggy backed off it, and have since become dominant, then it'll continue along fine in its niche.

That said... a lot of these technologies are already on their way to becoming niche.

These predictions aren't that bold, and as much as many of you would like to call it full of shit, he's definetly more on point than he isn't.

For me, if you've been reading my various posts here and there, you know that I'd go much further than this guy...

Tech has always been converging - and in our not too distant future (5-15 years) will converge upon the wearable display with camera based motion and voice controls.

Everything that isn't that, or ties into that... will become relegated as a niche status item soon enough.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

yep. a large part of the movie theatre experience is just getting out of the house to do something social which isn't going to be replaced by any kind of home theatre or streaming option.

That used to be a big appeal of arcades, record stores and shopping malls too.

To be honest, the movie theatre one did strike me as the most "out there". There is still a ton of money being made by movie studios, money that right now I can't see being replaced by going straight to streaming or bluray. But I can see a scenario where movie theaters and releases are scaled back big time and pretty much relegated to big event blockbuster movies.

 

[noah111]

Hang on, I'm 23 and I vividly remember dial-up.

Additionally, most of these are silly. This reeks of the "tablets will replace everything" mentality, without having much thought put into it. The windows and movie theatre predictions are particularly stupid.

I'm younger than that and I remember that tone vividly as well. I disagree with that, though. Things are changing, and for that newborn today, they might not be using such things when they're 23. The future is unpredictable, but the dying out of cinema as well as overlapping free-form windows in operating systems, are not that far out of concepts to believe if we're talking on a time scale of several decades.

I generally agree with Zaptruder.

That used to be a big appeal of arcades, record stores and shopping malls too.

To be honest, the movie theatre one did strike me as the most "out there". There is still a ton of money being made by movie studios, money that right now I can't see being replaced by going straight to streaming or bluray. But I can see a scenario where movie theaters and releases are scaled back big time and pretty much relegated to big event blockbuster movies.

True, I don't think it'll die to, but it will certainly be used less and less in the future (imo).

 

[ivysaur12]

Primetime Television

In ancient times, people had to gather around their TVs at a set time each week to watch "Starsky and Hutch." Then VCRs arrived and you could find out whether the Duke boys outsmarted Boss Hogg any time you wanted. DVRs now let us tape shows without using tapes, but because most TV networks make their shows available for free either via Web streaming or cable on-demand, we don't even have to record shows.

Welp, time to switch careers. But really.

 

[lunarworks]

That used to be a big appeal of arcades, record stores and shopping malls too.

With arcades, gamers were never too social to begin with. As online gaming took off, that filled the social need without having to venture out into the scary world of outside.

Record stores and malls couldn't get by on people "hanging out". Music is cheaper online (or free), and products are cheaper at big box stores.

Theatres at least require you to pay to get in.

 

[poppabk]

I think some people need to re-read the title of the piece... It's "15 current technologies my newborn son won't use" not "15 current technologies my that won't exist for newborns". There's a difference.

I love the Gizmodo hate in trying to find something to disagree with or be opposed to in every write-up of theirs.. obviously what they do is get headlines with interesting titles and speculation.

I enjoyed this though, and agree with most of it.

It's unlikely that there will be a fully functional replacement for the keyboard in that space of time though, so a lot of the predictions are fairly unlikely. A touchscreen and a keyboard are not very compatible, a workaround rather than a functional replacement.
I remember 20 years ago being the first person at my high school to write an English essay on a word processor, I understand how quickly technology can be adopted and become the norm but I also understand how intractable a technology that works can be. Even my cellphone 'keyboard' is qwerty.

 

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

Why do I feel like people are misinterpreting the article? Yes, landline phones will still be around for a while, my parents will probably use them till they die. BUT anyone growing up now will probably have very little experience with optical disks, fax machines, landline phones, cable TV, etc. over the course of their lives. By the time a newborn is old enough to use computers, they won't be using mouse-equipped desktops unless they need to do very rare, specific tasks.

I personally am just young enough that I will never in my entire life pay for a landline phone, or cable TV. And everything else is on its way out for up-and-comings with no previous relationship with technology to latch on to.

Exactly. Everyone saying "but my grandma will still use it!" or "professionals will need it" are missing the point.

Remote Controls
Remotes are convenience. Launching a phone app to act as a remote control is an extra step. Sorry, but you lose, dumb writer.

Picking up your smartphone and pressing a button is harder than picking up a remote and pressing a button? Maybe your cable TV remote works much better than, you know, every single one I've ever used, but for me they feel more and more dated every day.

Primetime Television
People are going to stop watching TV at the best time of day to watch TV because they can? What bullshit.

I think you misunderstood him. He means that the whole idea of TV time slots with fade away. When's the last time you said to someone "Sorry, I have to be home at 8:00 to watch my favorite show." To kids being born today, the idea of a show airing at a particular time is going to be unfamiliar and silly, with the exception of sports and whatnot. Of course, people may still watch most of their TV on weeknights around 8pm, but that's not really his point.

 

[Bomber Bob]

I hate mouse but i don't want physical keyboard to go away

 

[Arrowgigantic]

Picking up your smartphone and pressing two buttons is harder than picking up a remote and pressing a button?

.

 

[maxxpower]

What if my son is born next week?

 

[Krogan]

I for one do NOT look forward to waving my hands around to change the channel.

Or imagine two kids fighting over the TV using voice controls.

 

[Manmademan]

That used to be a big appeal of arcades, record stores and shopping malls too.

To be honest, the movie theatre one did strike me as the most "out there". There is still a ton of money being made by movie studios, money that right now I can't see being replaced by going straight to streaming or bluray. But I can see a scenario where movie theaters and releases are scaled back big time and pretty much relegated to big event blockbuster movies.

not really? Who do you know that takes a first (or second) date to an arcade? To a record store? To the shopping mall?

And the movie theatre? Everyone from 8 to 80. Teens, to twentysomethings, to middle aged parents on "date night." Even terrible, HORRIBLE films still have millions of people going to see them every week.

The role of the movie theatre is a lot different than those three. Not that those things weren't social too, but the movie theatre occupies the same niche as "going out to dinner." no matter how cheap or easy microwave dinners get, people are still going to go out to eat, just to "Get away." It might change in the future, but it's going to take a lot longer than 15 years for this to turn around.

 

[Gandie]

First, with large HD televisions going mainstream and 3D sets becoming more affordable, the average home theater is almost as good as the average multiplex theater

Fuck no.

 

[ElectricBlue187]

Good god Gizmodo is crap. All of those are horribly wrong

 

[Hari Seldon]

If MS kills Windowed OSes then I will use one of the 3409238409234 Linux distributions that won't kill it.

 

[Guerrillas in the Mist]

An interesting factoid for you folks: Cinema attendance is actually a good deal higher now than it was 20 or so years ago.

 

[GJS]

Picking up your smartphone and pressing a button is harder than picking up a remote and pressing a button? Maybe your cable TV remote works much better than, you know, every single one I've ever used, but for me they feel more and more dated every day.

A smartphone has a flat screen and you have to look at it to even know where the next channel button is.

You can easily use a TV remote to change channels and stuff without looking at or thinking about it because it has tactile controls.

 

[Zoe]

Landline Phones

As of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 26 percent of U.S. homes had wireless phones only. By the time my son turns 5 in 2017, only a handful of old people and Luddites will continue to own house phones while everyone will likely use cellphones exclusively. By the time my son is 10, most businesses will have done away with their desk phones and saved a lot of money and hassle in the process.

I don't see this happening. Not in 10 years.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

A smartphone has a flat screen and you have to look at it to even know where the next channel button is.

You can easily use a TV remote to change channels and stuff without looking at or thinking about it because it has tactile controls.

In 15 years we're going to be using speech and gestures to control our TVs anyway.

 

[Manmademan]

I don't see this happening. Not in 10 years.

Nope. not at all. As someone who does a lot of inside sales (and is on the phone constantly) doing business exclusively by cellphone...just doesn't work very well- if for no other reason that reliably conferencing and monitoring hundreds of individual cellphone lines is basically an impossibility. And ever try to use a cellphone, or cell data in an emergency situation or extremely high density event? exactly.

POTS lines (via copper) will probably be extinct, but a lot of businesses are installing VOIP hardware in it's place.

Will your newborn use a landline for social use? probably not. Will they run into them the first time they end up taking a job? almost certainly.

 

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

two buttons

Lol, the horror! But seriously, you'll make that time and convenience up very quickly when you actually go to use it. Navigating menus, searching for shows, remembering what channel number ESPN is (and searching for it when you can't), it's all a fucking hassle using a TV remote. Not to mention the existing trend, which is unlikely to go away, of converging to an all-in-one device. Why should I keep an item around the house that does exactly one thing that my smartphone can do better?

 

[sangreal]

Movie Theaters

Pundits have been predicting the death of the movie theater since the first televisions hit the market, but this time, it's really going to happen for a number of reasons. First, with large HD televisions going mainstream and 3D sets becoming more affordable, the average home theater is almost as good as the average multiplex theater. Second, studios and their cable partners have begun releasing some movies for on-demand viewing on the same day they debut in theaters, a trend which is likely to continue.

Finally, the cost of going to a movie theater is so out of control - movie tickets in New York cost around $13 each - that nobody is going to keep paying it. In a world where an on-demand film that's still in theaters costs $7 to rent and one that just left the theater streams for $2.99 from Amazon, who will spend more than $50 for a family of four to go see the same movie surrounded by annoying patrons, dirty seats and overpriced popcorn? Art house theaters that offer specialized films and a sense of community may remain, but the average multiplex will be gone before my son notices it was ever there.

Nonsense. This author just goes to shitty theaters and doesn't like to be around people. Plenty of people still enjoy the experience. We just had a thread on that, in fact.

Landline Phones

As of 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 26 percent of U.S. homes had wireless phones only. By the time my son turns 5 in 2017, only a handful of old people and Luddites will continue to own house phones while everyone will likely use cellphones exclusively. By the time my son is 10, most businesses will have done away with their desk phones and saved a lot of money and hassle in the process.

Desk phones are just being transitioned to voip, which has been happening for a long time. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Desktops

By the time my son is in elementary school, PC vendors will have stopped producing most desktop computers, though all-in-ones with large screens, high-end workstations for people who do industrial-strength computations, and servers (probably in blade form) will remain. As someone who loves to build desktops from parts, I hope the market for PC components remains intact so my son and I will still be able to custom build a computer together, but I fear that option may disappear too.

Yes, desktops will be gone. Except all those desktops.


The rest are probably all on their way out, but will still be around when his kid is a teenager.

 

[noah111]

I think people underestimate the amount of change that can take place in just ten years, let alone twenty. I mean, does anyone remember how things were before the iPhone/iPad in the smartphone/tablet arenas? Things have changed a lot in such a short amount of time, and that's just from one company. Ten years ago the internet was practically nothing in comparison to what it is now. I don't see anything stopping the same amount of change/growth.

Just because you can't predict what will create these future tides of change doesn't mean you can't see that they're on their way.

 

[C.Dark.DN]

I don't agree with these:

Wired Home Internet
Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders
Windowed Operating Systems
Landline Phones
Movie Theaters
The Mouse
Remote Controls
Desktops
Phone Numbers
Primetime Television
Optical Discs


I do agree with these:

Slow-Booting Computers
Hard Drives
3D Glasses
Fax Machines

But any idiot could predict those.

 

[thecheese]

I agree with most of that list. No movie theaters though? Doubt it. But they will have to give us more bang for our buck eventually.

You can't fit good camera technology into a thin phone no matter how hard you try.

Saving this so I can read it again in the future and have a chuckle.

 

[Speevy]

Touch input is worse than buttons for remotes

 

[lunarworks]

A smartphone has a flat screen and you have to look at it to even know where the next channel button is.

You can easily use a TV remote to change channels and stuff without looking at or thinking about it because it has tactile controls.

I'm going to have to disagree. 90% of TV remotes are horribly thought-out pieces of over-designed shit. Too many of the buttons are the same shape, they often have no real logical placement or clustering, and there's twice as many buttons as there should be.

Honestly, a minimal control with an area for multi-touch gestures could come in real handy in this area.

 

[Zaptruder]

Nope. not at all. As someone who does a lot of inside sales (and is on the phone constantly) doing business exclusively by cellphone...just doesn't work very well- if for no other reason that reliably conferencing and monitoring hundreds of individual cellphone lines is basically an impossibility. And ever try to use a cellphone, or cell data in an emergency situation or extremely high density event? exactly.

POTS lines (via copper) will probably be extinct, but a lot of businesses are installing VOIP hardware in it's place.

Will your newborn use a landline for social use? probably not. Will they run into them the first time they end up taking a job? almost certainly.

VOIP isn't what I'd call a land line phone...

But the guy in the article does.

Dunno... it's a bit of a wash. It's the kind of prediction that's heavily predicated on other predictions and ideas panning out.

If they happen... things like HMDs, mobile computing, high speed wireless... the loss of physical telephone handsets (in all their various forms) will largely be incidental to the various other seachanges in tech.

 

[Manmademan]

I agree with most of that list. No movie theaters though? Doubt it. But they will have to give us more bang for our buck eventually.



Saving this so I can read it again in the future and have a chuckle.

Really? How's that zoom on your smartphone camera, chief?

I have a smartphone, but also bought a decent (about $200) standalone camera with a 12x optical zoom, because getting a decent zoom lens on a smartphone isn't happening- not unless you want that smartphone to be absolutely massive.

VOIP isn't what I'd call a land line phone...

Then you aren't familiar with how businesses use VOIP. They function exactly like dedicated landline phones do- complete with chunky handset- only hooked into the company internet connection rather than the copper telephone line.

whether the line is copper or fiber, it's still basically the same service.

 

[sangreal]

using a phone as a remote is awful, but I really think the way we browse for content will change in the near future instead of this ridiculous system of going through 1000 channels

 

[smr00]

Optical Discs

I still remember the first DVD I bought, because it was a copy of "Hard Boiled" that I ordered from a now-defunct website called Urban Fetch. It may take until my son turns 10 for the major entertainment companies to stop publishing in DVD and Blu-ray format, but make no mistake, discs aren't long for this world.

Optical discs will last another decade or so because consumers aren't eager to repurchase films they already own on disc and because there are still a number of old or rare titles you can't find on cloud services like iTunes or Amazon. Yet with the growth in downloadable and streaming video services, all physical media is on the fast track to extinction.

Disc will last longer then a decade, why? because more and more ISPS are implementing bandwidth caps and throttle internet, not to mention a good majority of NA alone doesn't even have high speed internet.

Some things are plausible but most just won't happen because they don't need to go away, like movie theaters and primetime TV, those are going no where anytime soon, same with the mouse. And the controller will never go away, not in our life time. To even think that the controller could even possibly go away in the next 10 or 20 years is just absurd. This brings me back to not everyone owns a smart phone, these companies cater to the average consumer, it's why digital content wont take anytime soon, it's why itunes and mp3s haven't killed the CD industry even though people said it would over 10 years ago, guess what? cds are still selling like hot cakes, why? because the average consumer wants the physical media, people don't have internet, don't want to bother with it etc.


TLDR version: Movies Theaters, Mouses, Physical Media formats (IE cds, dvds, blu-rays) are here to stay for a long long long time.

 

[scosher]

I was surprised when a 23-year-old co-worker told me she didn't remember a time before broadband Internet. At some point, her parents must have had dial-up, but she was so young that she doesn't even remember back that far. Wireless broadband won't dominate the home market until he's 8 to 10, but my son won't remember a world where consumers pay for wired Internet connections.

Ahh, too many fond childhood memories of hearing the 56k modem dialup ring tone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdtXjRPF2DI

A whole generation won't know the sweet satisfaction of hearing that tone over a busy signal...while also hating how loud it was that it'd wake your parents up in the middle of the night.

 

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

A smartphone has a flat screen and you have to look at it to even know where the next channel button is.

You can easily use a TV remote to change channels and stuff without looking at or thinking about it because it has tactile controls.

"Next channel"? Do people still straight-up channel surf? Even so, swipe left to right to channel up, problem solved. Point taken though. Physical buttons have their advantages.

Nonsense. This author just goes to shitty theaters and doesn't like to be around people. Plenty of people still enjoy the experience. We just had a thread on that, in fact.

Yeah, I agree he was pretty off here. Most people still enjoy the experience of going to the theater.

Desk phones are just being transitioned to voip, which has been happening for a long time. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

He doesn't say desk phones though. He says landlines.
Edit: Oh, he says both. The heading is landlines but then he talks about desk phones more generally.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

I plan on having a kid in the next year or so.

The only things I can really agree with are these:

Fax Machines

I barely even had exposure to these when I was growing up and I was born in 1985.

Primetime Television

It will still most likely exist for at least another decade or two in a similar fashion to how it does now, but my household won't have any sort of "live television" hooked up, so my kids will have very little exposure to this.

3D Glasses

Sure. They'll still be around, I bet, but they provide an awful experience so I doubt my kids will use them.

Landline Phones

I haven't used a landline phone since I left my parents' house. I'm sure my kids will encounter them at some point, though. I doubt offices, schools, and other places of business will completely abandon them any time soon.

Dedicated Cameras and Camcorders

Camcorders? Maybe. But dedicated cameras are always going to be around. Maybe just not at the super-low entry level.

The rest is kind of bullshit. Just another short-sighted "writer" that's too hip for his own good and can't imagine anything but tablet computers existing 10 years from now.

Blu-ray and it's eventual successor aren't going anywhere anytime soon unless we start getting amazing broadband across the globe.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

Really? How's that zoom on your smartphone camera, chief?

I have a smartphone, but also bought a decent (about $200) standalone camera with a 12x optical zoom, because getting a decent zoom lens on a smartphone isn't happening- not unless you want that smartphone to be absolutely massive.



Then you aren't familiar with how businesses use VOIP. They function exactly like dedicated landline phones do- complete with chunky handset- only hooked into the company internet connection rather than the copper telephone line.

whether the line is copper or fiber, it's still basically the same service.

I think the big problem for the point and shoot and camera industry in general isn't that smartphone cameras are becoming good, it's that they are becoming good enough. I

 

[Lonely1]

I can't agree with the mouse, at least the part of it being replaced by touch screens. Mouse are faster, effortless and more precise. Touch screen work good on small displays, but on big displays and/or multiple displays? Sorry, but I won't trade my mouse anytime soon.

Also, Windowed OS? Why do "modern trends" hate the multitasking man so much?

 

[Dhx]

Saving this so I can read it again in the future and have a chuckle.

Working on a alternate universe with alien physics?