As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the pace of change in the world of technology was moving faster than it ever has at any point in the past. In the twenty years since then, that pace of change has accelerated. The internet was still brand new in 1999, and comparatively few people had it in their homes. Now it’s unthinkable that any of us ever got by without it. You’d have been considered lucky to have a smartphone in 1999, and even if you did, the idea of it connecting to the internet was still unthinkable. Here in late 2020, owning a smartphone is almost considered to be a human right.
Because technology is forging ahead so quickly, many of the things that we used to see as essentials are becoming obsolete. Objects that you thought you’d always have in your home, or in your pocket, will soon no longer be required. We won’t just make sweeping statements here, though – we’ve come prepared with examples to prove our point! Here are five pieces of examples of everyday technology that we expect to have disappeared entirely by the end of the decade.
Landline Telephones
When your parents were young, it was extremely unusual to have more than one telephone in your home. It was probably downstairs in a hallway or in the corner of an important room, and it might even have had its own table! By the time you were growing up, it was more likely that there would have been two or three phones in the house placed in strategic locations, but they were still attached to the wall with a cord. That’s no longer the case. Fewer and fewer people have landline phones in their homes, and those that do tend to have cordless ones. Many American families save money on their household bills by doing away with their landlines completely. There’s no reason to have them anymore when everyone’s got a mobile phone, and besides – who wants to pick up a landline when you have no idea who’s calling?
Calculators
The humble calculator has been saving students in exams and helping parents work out their grocery bills as they move through stores for generations. The electronic calculator has barely evolved since it was invented during the 1960s. It hasn’t needed to, because it works perfectly. Punch numbers into the buttons, apply the calculation you need and get an instant result. For a long time, it was hard to imagine a system that would work better, and yet calculators have become another casualty of the smartphone. As every phone comes with an inbuilt calculator, there’s no reason to own a separate device to do your math for you. You can even ask Siri or Alexa to work out multiplications or divisions for you without having to touch a single button!
Desktop Computers
If you’re reading this article on a desktop computer right now, you’re in the minority. You’re still in the minority if you’re using a laptop. Most people now browse the internet on – you guessed it – a mobile phone. While there will always be some specialist jobs that required a fixed, non-portable computer, in the majority of cases, a laptop will do fine. Strangely, we’ve been able to track this change through the emergence and proliferation of online slots websites.
The gambling sector is one of the largest online industries that there is, and for several years they’ve been trending towards mobiles in terms of design. Their statistics show that far more people play playtech slots on mobile phones than they do on laptops or desktops, and so they optimize their websites for mobile displays. As it’s imperative that online slots websites stay ahead of trends so they can continue to make money, they can generally be relied on as an indicator of which way web design is headed. The internet isn’t built for your desktop anymore – and one day, your laptop will be old hat, too.
Fax Machines
Fax machines are already dead. They’ve been dead for at least a decade now. It’s just that the message hasn’t got through to a few businesses. In another ten years, when the people still clinging onto their old fax machines have retired, the last of these noisy, bleeping, unreliable machines will be thrown out and sent for recycling. As digital signatures are now legally valid, and email is much more secure than a fax, there’s no reason to have a big 1980s machine sat in the corner of your office chewing through paper. Even if you find yourself dealing with a company that will only do business via fax, most modern printer/copier units have full fax facilities. The standalone fax machine is going the way of the dodo, and the whole concept of faxes will seem bizarre to the next generation.
CDs
If you’re in your mid-30s or older, you’ll probably remember when CDs replaced cassettes and vinyl as the default choice when buying music. As cassettes and vinyl had been around for so long, you probably assumed that CDs would be the standard vehicle of the music industry for at least the next thirty years. As you now know, you were wrong. It isn’t just CDs that are becoming obsolete – it’s the whole concept of owning the music you listen to. We’re far more likely to stream our favorite songs than we are to purchase it from a store. If we do feel compelled to buy a ‘permanent’ copy of a track or an album, we’ll probably do it as a download. You’ll rarely see CDs for sale in major stores these days. When music fans go out to buy physical copies of music by their favorite artists, they’ll probably go to the retro end of the market and buy it on vinyl. These shiny discs of information that once carried everything from the latest tracks from Britney Spears to the latest copy of Windows are surplus to requirements in the 2020s. Downloads have rendered them obsolete.
As you’ll no doubt have noticed as you read through this article, most of these incidences of obsolescence have been brought about by mobile phones. Look at how much of the technology world they’ve conquered in just twenty years! What else might they be doing for us twenty years from now, and what else might become obsolete because of it?
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