For that matter, it felt like a peak for the rest of the internet, and everybody loved silicon valley and wanted to be Steve Jobs. Then the enshittification started.
Maybe 1/100 people I see using headphones have wired headphones, certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago. Bluetooth technology and quality has come a long way.
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I'm not sure if I even have a choice anymore tbh... Really I only use my phone for music and text/call. A dandy map if I need one, but not usually.
I compared a tonne of flagship smart phones not that long ago. The Sony Xperia series was the only one to still have an audio jack. They're quite expensive tho, so ended up with a phone sans the jack. I miss it dearly.
Did that. Still annoying. Have to bring it everywhere. Will wear out the Usb C jack faster (pretty hard to wear out an audio jack tho). Can't charge and listen to audio.
USB-C puts the springy bits that can wear out in the connector end, not the jack. The jack is just a piece of circuit board with bare traces on it, it's very sturdy.
You don't have to bring it everywhere, you attach it to your headphones and then it's part of the headphones that you want to wear.
Fair point about the sprongs. But. Coz phones are so big, when phone+dongle is in my pocket it often puts a lot of pressure on the USB. Which A, doesnt seem good and B, can easily cause the jack to very slightly disconnect and pause the song. Also, when the sprongs fail on the dongle it starts doing crazy shit like play/pausing song or adjusting volume.
I'd need to buy like 3 more dongles in that case...
I'd much rather just have an audio jack on my phone.
A decent set of headphones will have an effectively all-day battery, and most people probably aren't listening to their headphones for 8+ hours a day.
I've had my headphones for about 7 years now and they still last for several hours on a single charge, and they support fast charging. If they're at 0%, I can plug them in for 10 minutes and they'll have about 2 hours worth of charge. I charge them maybe once a week with casual use.
They usually charge themselves in their case (small pods) or have big batteries (over ear). I use my pods probably 8 hours a day, and just need to charge the case once or twice a week.
Got the AirPods Pro 1st Gen in 2019, still going strong. Usually have to recharge every 1,5-2 days and I use them pretty every day for commute from home to work and back (in total about 1,5H).
I'm sure that's true, but I've never managed to keep a pair of earpods for more than a couple of years. I always end up losing them, generally while travelling.
I had to fill out the number for my HR department on some paperwork. Tried to look it up. My large employer doesn't have a phone number at all for any department - even HQ.
while a straight dvi-d to dvi-d cable is quite uncommon to need today, i have used a bunch of hdmi to dvi-d adapter cables the last couple months to hook up new desktops to older displays that had vga and dvi-d inputs.
I have a number of older monitors hooked up to two GPUs and use just about every modern interface and adapter to make it all work. VGA, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort. Technically it may not be the best and some monitors may refresh slower or something, but it works for me.
I'm stilling rocking my GTX 1080 I bought in 2017, and when I had to switch the DVI cable for my smaller monitor, I had some fun looking for the thing. Partly because of how uncommon they've become... partly because there's a lot of them DVI types and I think I bought the wrong one the first time.
My parents gave me a GPS unit for my car about 20 years ago and I used it for the longest time. It was great help when driving in cities and big towns or locations I had never gone to before. We used it all the time and I think I updated the maps ... I think it was a Garmin device ... I think I updated the maps 2 or 3 times over the years. Then it went unsupported but I kept using it for the longest time.
Then I started buying better smartphones and my phone just eventually replaced the GPS unit.
I still have it and it still works and the battery on it is still good ... I just don't need it any more and the maps are about 10-15 years out of date.
I can say the same about my ipod. I used it everyday for the longest time until I realized I can put a 126gb micro sd card in my phone which is more than double what my ipod had. Now it's sitting in a box somewhere in my closet. Probably still works too.
It's a shame modern phones have been losing both micro SD card slots and headphone jacks and often don't have a substantial amount of storage. Still better than carrying multiple devices, however.
I have an old garmin gps in my car. Use it all the time combined with a phone. The garmin doesn’t need cell signal so it works everywhere. Funny when going places where the street didn’t exist back then, but it’s kind of cool to see how the city grows. We mainly use it as a backup. It’s also louder than the phone talking and easier to understand.
I have OsmAnd and organic maps and the maps downloaded offline, but the garmin GPS also shows the speed limits, my speed, bigger screen, louder speaker.
I’ll watch the whole video later and check out the other features, I just watched the first 30 seconds or so. It’s something I could see myself picking up, but I’m not sure I’d use it as a portable very much since it’s kind of larger. Maybe keeping it in my purse or book bag would work.
This is the one I’ve been looking at, but I need to look into reviews first. I love that both of these have a slot for a card.
The one technology was obsolete before I could buy it, though when I first bought an Oculus Quest I tried ripping 3D Blu-rays and realized ~12 fps per eye is pretty shit quality anyway.
i had a usb from 2016ish-19, so i was using a university school computers for writing resumes and applying to job sites, plus, and sneaking in a game installer, since the school computer blocked it that the time the usb bypasses it.
I bought a 5-pack of 8GB USB drives for making live USBs, many years ago it feels like, and have somehow managed to hold onto all of them. I tend to use Green and Black the most for file transfers and they have started to fail pretty regularly but I can't throw them out, they're a family. Funnily enough Purple, the one that got assigned "Permanent Ubuntu Live USB" duty and has seen more than its share of writes, is still rock solid.
If you're not re-burning the iso image to the drive then changes are it isn't really writing to it, I think on live distros the source filesystem is RO
You are correct, I guess "Permanent Ubuntu Live USB" isn't really accurate as I tend to distro hop. I picked Purple because I was using Ubuntu at the time, then I came to associate that one with "current linux image" and the others were more situational. This was about the same time I came to realize that for 99% of file transfers it was easier to just scp things across the network rather than dig a USB drive out of the drawer, so pretty soon after I bought them the only thing I used them for was bootable images, and for whatever reason Purple has been the first choice for that task, so I'm pretty sure it has had more writes than the other four put together.
They weren't quite ubiquitous anymore, but looking for a payphone wasn't a sign of someone being a time traveler. The last one near me hung on until a couple years ago.
Here in Australia, they are all free now. I presume the phone company realised nobody was using them and preferred to keep them as free billboard spaces.
Portable handhelds, I mean form factors like the PSP and Nintendo DS. The downside of the console/handheld convergence is that the handhelds need pretty big screens.
10 years isn't far enough in the past. I can't think of a single thing ubiquitous to every day living that doesn't still exist in the same capacity now. 2025 is barely different from 2015.
I am sure there might be plenty of niche or specialized tech that fits. But nothing that was widespread and now just gone.
I'm probably an exception, but my interest in physical media has increased this year as streaming services have become increasingly consumer-hostile. It's unfortunate that many movies and shows have incomplete physical media representation. Some have only DVDs. Others lack even those, too.
I'd say audio CDs, but those have been back on the upward trend since streaming and download services started getting hostile and people started wising up to that hostility, in other words, people want to own their music again and so started buying CDs again recently vs. having a streaming or download service randomly yank content they paid for from their libraries.
Pay phones,
Public water fountains,
Coffee grinders in grocery stores,
all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced,
Tons of random accessories for everything were all over stores and eBay but sadly all gone now.
But 5G phones still comes with 4G antennas and 4G cell towers are still being used to cover areas 5G cant reach (since 5G hass less range). I don't even have a steady 5G connection where I live lol (its not even that rural, I live in a US City ffs).
I would rather say 3G cellphones.
LTE is still widely in use today, while being mainly common in higher-end devices in 2015.
3G/UMTS on the other hand still was the mainly used one in 2015, also because of pricing, while 3G networks are completely switched off by now.
My phone supports 5G, but I never got to try it yet because I'd have to pay extra to my provider (Austria, Magenta (T-Mobile)). Fuck that, 4G is fine by me. Besides, I could still use 3G and aven 2G, although that'd be a bit insane.
I'll take the opposite view... what technologies are ubiquitous today that will be irrelevant in a few years?
Smartwatches. Nobody needs this shit, they're mostly just toys for fat people who want to "monitor their health", and for gadget-goofs that need everything shiny, new and overpriced, regardless of the actual utility in their lives.
People (normal people) like having their messages, facebook comments, whatever else coming up somewhere even more accessible than their phone in their pocket.
The transition from pocket watches to wrist watches was for similar reasons, although it took a (first) world war for the convenience to be fully appreciated.
I loved having a smartwatch, for the brief period of time I had one. They fell to (IMO) the pitfalls of being annoying to charge and being tied to massive smartphone walled gardens. After a few years my smartwatch couldn't even hold a charge through a single day, and had lost support from the manufacturer anyway, and was hard to keep synced with my phone, and eventually the hassle became too much for it to be worth it.
But if we had a standard API for wearables that smartphone companies adhered to, and I didn't have to charge it every night, I would love to have another smartwatch. They're so convenient.
Optical disks. It was almost a necessity on laptop to have an optical drive, now there's maybe one or two models out there that comes with one.
Even 10 years ago, disc drives seemed to be out of fashion. But if you laptop was 5 years old, it likely have one anyways.
10 years ago was 2015. I went to buy a laptop from Dell in 2014, and they didn't have any models with a disc drive. I looked.
Search engines that work.
Even when you get to the actual website results you now have to wade through the AI slop sites
Oh god, yes.
I could type in a question ten years ago and could usually get an answer in the first page or so.
I asked a question yesterday (about floor tiling) and got "Tiles? You want tiles? We've got tiles! Get your tiles here!"
"No, I want an answer about flooring."
"FLOORING? You want flooring? We've got flooring! Get your flooring here!"
"Ok, fucking hell. Ok how do I join 2 types of substrate together..."
"MUTHERFUCKING, substrate? You want substrate? We've got..."
Then I gave up looking. Maybe it was always like this and I used to be more tenacious looking for answers.
For that matter, it felt like a peak for the rest of the internet, and everybody loved silicon valley and wanted to be Steve Jobs. Then the enshittification started.
Maybe 1/100 people I see using headphones have wired headphones, certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago. Bluetooth technology and quality has come a long way.
I'd still have wires IF MY PHONE HAD A PLACE TO PLUG THEM IN.
I refuse to buy a phone without a headphone jack. I'm not sure if I even have a choice anymore tbh... Really I only use my phone for music and text/call. A dandy map if I need one, but not usually.
I compared a tonne of flagship smart phones not that long ago. The Sony Xperia series was the only one to still have an audio jack. They're quite expensive tho, so ended up with a phone sans the jack. I miss it dearly.
See how they massacred my boy...
People really will copy anything Apple does.
Buy a USB-C to headphone jack dongle. They’re about $5 and work on any phone.
Did that. Still annoying. Have to bring it everywhere. Will wear out the Usb C jack faster (pretty hard to wear out an audio jack tho). Can't charge and listen to audio.
USB-C puts the springy bits that can wear out in the connector end, not the jack. The jack is just a piece of circuit board with bare traces on it, it's very sturdy.
You don't have to bring it everywhere, you attach it to your headphones and then it's part of the headphones that you want to wear.
Fair point about the sprongs. But. Coz phones are so big, when phone+dongle is in my pocket it often puts a lot of pressure on the USB. Which A, doesnt seem good and B, can easily cause the jack to very slightly disconnect and pause the song. Also, when the sprongs fail on the dongle it starts doing crazy shit like play/pausing song or adjusting volume.
I'd need to buy like 3 more dongles in that case...
I'd much rather just have an audio jack on my phone.
I do like my AirPods, but I'm still pissed off that the duopoly killed the headphone jack. Give me back my headphone jack!!
You guys are only $5 away from the good ole days…
I would love that if it wasn't another cord that I would absolutely lose.
You can buy headphones with a USB-C connector too. That way you’ll lose the headphones too, so you don’t need an adapter anyway!
I could NOT be bothered with charging headphones daily.
A decent set of headphones will have an effectively all-day battery, and most people probably aren't listening to their headphones for 8+ hours a day.
I've had my headphones for about 7 years now and they still last for several hours on a single charge, and they support fast charging. If they're at 0%, I can plug them in for 10 minutes and they'll have about 2 hours worth of charge. I charge them maybe once a week with casual use.
They usually charge themselves in their case (small pods) or have big batteries (over ear). I use my pods probably 8 hours a day, and just need to charge the case once or twice a week.
The battery will wear our within a few years and become unusable. My Bluetooth headphones now last about 30 minutes.
Got the AirPods Pro 1st Gen in 2019, still going strong. Usually have to recharge every 1,5-2 days and I use them pretty every day for commute from home to work and back (in total about 1,5H).
I'm sure that's true, but I've never managed to keep a pair of earpods for more than a couple of years. I always end up losing them, generally while travelling.
I got my headphones over 6 years ago, the battery last as long as it always has. And I use them a few hours every day.
My Marshall on-ears have a battery life of like 80 hours or so...
Bluetooth isn't the technology that's come a long way, it's still the same shit it was decades ago. It's batteries.
That's just not true, Bluetooth codecs have improved sound quality DRAMATICALLY.
And I say this as someone who's not a big fan of wireless.
The engineers at Bluetooth SIG busting their ass to give us Bluetooth 6.1: "am I a joke to you?"
Kinda, yeah.
Office phones.
Sounds about right. Last time I had an office phone at my desk was 2021.
I have an office phone, which is at least 10 years old at this point. One call every couple of months and it is spam.
I had to fill out the number for my HR department on some paperwork. Tried to look it up. My large employer doesn't have a phone number at all for any department - even HQ.
Sysadmin at my last gig, ushered in VOIP phones as I was starting in 2019. Only tech support used them, rest of us used our cell phones or Zoom.
When COVID hit and we all went WFH, almost no one took their phone home. :) I thought about it, but why?
Hell - I question if home phones are really hanging in there.
Our home phone is an extra line on the cell plan. That phone sits at home most of the time, and is a games phone for when kids come over with parents.
ITT: People not realizing 10 years ago was nearly the end of 2015 and listing technologies that were popular 20+ years ago.
2015 still feels like a date from the future to me
while a straight dvi-d to dvi-d cable is quite uncommon to need today, i have used a bunch of hdmi to dvi-d adapter cables the last couple months to hook up new desktops to older displays that had vga and dvi-d inputs.
You’re giving me flashbacks to all the different DVI standards, and whatever you were plugging in never matched the type you had.
I have a number of older monitors hooked up to two GPUs and use just about every modern interface and adapter to make it all work. VGA, HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort. Technically it may not be the best and some monitors may refresh slower or something, but it works for me.
I'm stilling rocking my GTX 1080 I bought in 2017, and when I had to switch the DVI cable for my smaller monitor, I had some fun looking for the thing. Partly because of how uncommon they've become... partly because there's a lot of them DVI types and I think I bought the wrong one the first time.
Dedicated GPS unit in your car
My parents gave me a GPS unit for my car about 20 years ago and I used it for the longest time. It was great help when driving in cities and big towns or locations I had never gone to before. We used it all the time and I think I updated the maps ... I think it was a Garmin device ... I think I updated the maps 2 or 3 times over the years. Then it went unsupported but I kept using it for the longest time.
Then I started buying better smartphones and my phone just eventually replaced the GPS unit.
I still have it and it still works and the battery on it is still good ... I just don't need it any more and the maps are about 10-15 years out of date.
I can say the same about my ipod. I used it everyday for the longest time until I realized I can put a 126gb micro sd card in my phone which is more than double what my ipod had. Now it's sitting in a box somewhere in my closet. Probably still works too.
It's a shame modern phones have been losing both micro SD card slots and headphone jacks and often don't have a substantial amount of storage. Still better than carrying multiple devices, however.
True yeah.. Garmin devices were so revolutionary for driving when they came out. Then phones with Google maps came along and that was easier
I have an old garmin gps in my car. Use it all the time combined with a phone. The garmin doesn’t need cell signal so it works everywhere. Funny when going places where the street didn’t exist back then, but it’s kind of cool to see how the city grows. We mainly use it as a backup. It’s also louder than the phone talking and easier to understand.
You can download maps on your phone, so you can use it in areas without service.
Used that when I went to the state's and didn't pay for roaming/data. Just downloaded Oregon/Washington.
I have OsmAnd and organic maps and the maps downloaded offline, but the garmin GPS also shows the speed limits, my speed, bigger screen, louder speaker.
Independent portable media players. Most of those functions have been susumed by phones.
Which makes me frustrated that all the manufacturers have gotten too cheap to toss a miniscule DAC and headphone jack in phones anymore.
Headphone jack and micro SD cards and the biggest losses for me.
I don't think it's about them being cheap, it's that they want to sell you the matching wireless headset
and it's much easier to DRM
Well there are excellent DACs that you can use with USB-C and Lightning straight from your phone...
The functions of this player have not been subsumed into a phone.
That’s pretty nifty! I’ve been looking at a personal AMFM radio/MP3 player recently, but I really like the CD ripping function of that one.
I haven't tried the CD ripping, but my jaw was on the floor the first time I saw the feature list. Decent build and battery too.
I’ll watch the whole video later and check out the other features, I just watched the first 30 seconds or so. It’s something I could see myself picking up, but I’m not sure I’d use it as a portable very much since it’s kind of larger. Maybe keeping it in my purse or book bag would work.
This is the one I’ve been looking at, but I need to look into reviews first. I love that both of these have a slot for a card.
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/home-collection-pocket-digital-am-fm-radio-with-lcd-screen-mp3-player/J2FPCPVL5Z
It has nubs
disk players
I miss when laptop computers usually had disk players
USB external optical-disc players are available to plug into any computer.
URL shorteners, AMP? Micro USB?
Edit:
Thinking of things that weren’t made obsolete but just unprofitable…
Physical menus at restaurants, useful search results, human support staff, non-subscription software, open APIs, useful product reviews
I hate with a burning passion QR code scan menus.
Haven't watched such an episode yet, but the developer likely said “Works fine on my machine!”, LOL.
Love it
Ive been on a restaurant where that happened
QR codes are great! They let hackers replace it with their own so they can infect your phone 🫠.
Bonus points if they offer an app to download and really get at stealing your data. /s
I almost never came across a restaurant without physical menus here in Germany🤔
Plasma TVs, DVRs, DVD players
Adding onto this: 3D TVs
The one technology was obsolete before I could buy it, though when I first bought an Oculus Quest I tried ripping 3D Blu-rays and realized ~12 fps per eye is pretty shit quality anyway.
You bought the wrong tv silly head
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time...
Headphone jacks. They certainly still exist but every device I owned that made sounds had one in 2015, no longer the case
For PC gaming and any sort of production/studio environment they're still ubiquitous. Although yeah, not a daily driver for the public nowadays.
We class this as breakage and an indication of products to avoid until the product line is fixed.
USB drives, dvd/blu ray.
I'll die before I let go of my 5 USB drives (yes I use them all)
i had a usb from 2016ish-19, so i was using a university school computers for writing resumes and applying to job sites, plus, and sneaking in a game installer, since the school computer blocked it that the time the usb bypasses it.
I bought a 5-pack of 8GB USB drives for making live USBs, many years ago it feels like, and have somehow managed to hold onto all of them. I tend to use Green and Black the most for file transfers and they have started to fail pretty regularly but I can't throw them out, they're a family. Funnily enough Purple, the one that got assigned "Permanent Ubuntu Live USB" duty and has seen more than its share of writes, is still rock solid.
If you're not re-burning the iso image to the drive then changes are it isn't really writing to it, I think on live distros the source filesystem is RO
You are correct, I guess "Permanent Ubuntu Live USB" isn't really accurate as I tend to distro hop. I picked Purple because I was using Ubuntu at the time, then I came to associate that one with "current linux image" and the others were more situational. This was about the same time I came to realize that for 99% of file transfers it was easier to just
scpthings across the network rather than dig a USB drive out of the drawer, so pretty soon after I bought them the only thing I used them for was bootable images, and for whatever reason Purple has been the first choice for that task, so I'm pretty sure it has had more writes than the other four put together.They weren't quite ubiquitous anymore, but looking for a payphone wasn't a sign of someone being a time traveler. The last one near me hung on until a couple years ago.
There's a payphone by one of the elementary schools here. I wonder if it's more likely that a kid without a cellphone is more likely to use it?
Here in Australia, they are all free now. I presume the phone company realised nobody was using them and preferred to keep them as free billboard spaces.
They tend to have free wifi too so are somewhat useful.
I think I tried that once and you needed to download a Telstra app or something so I noped out. Ive seen the signs though.
fun fact: they don't have private numbers anymore, so you can gather a bunch of random payphone's numbers for shenanigans.
Actual prepubescent children, in my experience, no longer recognise something without a touchscreen as a phone.
I much prefer some of the QR code restaurants we have in my city. I don't want a waiter hassling me throughout my meal.
Most places that have QR menus also have printed menus if you just go up and ask for one. Usually it becomes counter service then.
I was in the mainland. They lead to a "mini-program" within WeChat instead of your web browser so you cannot even auto translate that.
It's worse in China. They lead to a "mini-program" within WeChat instead of your web browser so you cannot even auto translate that
Portable handhelds, I mean form factors like the PSP and Nintendo DS. The downside of the console/handheld convergence is that the handhelds need pretty big screens.
Tablets? Those seem to have really fallen out of fashion and have been replaced with regular smartphones becoming quite a lot bigger.
I recently got a tablet so I could take handwritten notes during meetings. I thought I'd use it for a bunch of other stuff but I do not.
Not to mention, the
OCR handwriting recognitionmy handwriting is really bad.I like my tablet for ancestry research and not much else. But I think maybe still good for artists?
I see them often used in universities, maybe not as much elsewhere as ten years ago but still a regular occurrence
10 years isn't far enough in the past. I can't think of a single thing ubiquitous to every day living that doesn't still exist in the same capacity now. 2025 is barely different from 2015.
I am sure there might be plenty of niche or specialized tech that fits. But nothing that was widespread and now just gone.
Thumb drives were a form of currency ten years ago. I go months without using one now, and even then it’s installing an OS for a RPi.
I have an external SSD for backups, but not for sneakernet.
Doing remote tech support for my company, "Just load this on a USB drive."
😕
"Don't have one? Not any kind?"
🫤
This was at a software company.
To be fair, at my last company, you needed a special exemption from my manager up to the CEO to plug in a thumb drive.
Probably for the best.
This drives me nuts. I used to pirate stuff for a fee (still do occasionally) and I would only do transfer with thumbdrives.
In 2015, UK consumers spent approximately £1.5 billion on physical entertainment media, including DVDs, Blu-rays, and CDs.
By 2025, that figure has plummeted to under £400 million, with DVDs and Blu-rays now representing less than 10% of total video spend.
In 2015, streaming was growing but still secondary. Netflix had around 5 million UK subscribers, and Spotify Premium was under 2 million.
By 2025, streaming dominates:
2015: Physical Media ~£1.5 billion, Streaming ~£500 million 2025: Physical Media <£400 million, Streaming >£2.5 billion https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/multi-sector/media-nations/2025/media-nations-2025-uk-report.pdf
https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/Industries/tmt/research/digital-consumer-trends.html
I'm probably an exception, but my interest in physical media has increased this year as streaming services have become increasingly consumer-hostile. It's unfortunate that many movies and shows have incomplete physical media representation. Some have only DVDs. Others lack even those, too.
Yeah, I was going to say zip drives, or optical disks, but you really need to go back 20 years for them to be ubiquitous.
USB-A, maybe? Consumer 2.5" form disk drives?
USB-A is still ubiquitous.
I'd say audio CDs, but those have been back on the upward trend since streaming and download services started getting hostile and people started wising up to that hostility, in other words, people want to own their music again and so started buying CDs again recently vs. having a streaming or download service randomly yank content they paid for from their libraries.
Cd roms. Network ports on laptops
Pay phones, Public water fountains, Coffee grinders in grocery stores, all the hundreds of gadgets that our smart phones replaced, Tons of random accessories for everything were all over stores and eBay but sadly all gone now.
In 2015, at least in Canada, smart phones were already ubiquitous.
Interesting point about the grinders, I'm just realising I haven't seen any in forever.
The grinder thing is because Keurig K-Cups came out, and the entire industry shifted towards selling those instead.
TIL.
Oh yeah, coffee grinders in grocery stores. I rarely see those anymore, but they used to be everywhere.
Headphone jacks and Micro SD Card Readers.
CD's & Mp3 players
4G cellphones.
But 5G phones still comes with 4G antennas and 4G cell towers are still being used to cover areas 5G cant reach (since 5G hass less range). I don't even have a steady 5G connection where I live lol (its not even that rural, I live in a US City ffs).
I would rather say 3G cellphones.
LTE is still widely in use today, while being mainly common in higher-end devices in 2015.
3G/UMTS on the other hand still was the mainly used one in 2015, also because of pricing, while 3G networks are completely switched off by now.
My phone supports 5G, but I never got to try it yet because I'd have to pay extra to my provider (Austria, Magenta (T-Mobile)). Fuck that, 4G is fine by me. Besides, I could still use 3G and aven 2G, although that'd be a bit insane.
I'll take the opposite view... what technologies are ubiquitous today that will be irrelevant in a few years?
Smartwatches. Nobody needs this shit, they're mostly just toys for fat people who want to "monitor their health", and for gadget-goofs that need everything shiny, new and overpriced, regardless of the actual utility in their lives.
Yeah nah.
People (normal people) like having their messages, facebook comments, whatever else coming up somewhere even more accessible than their phone in their pocket.
The transition from pocket watches to wrist watches was for similar reasons, although it took a (first) world war for the convenience to be fully appreciated.
Love my smart watch
I go jogging and leave my big bulky phone behind. I can still track my jog, listen to music, and check my heart rate, but at 1/20th the weight.
I loved having a smartwatch, for the brief period of time I had one. They fell to (IMO) the pitfalls of being annoying to charge and being tied to massive smartphone walled gardens. After a few years my smartwatch couldn't even hold a charge through a single day, and had lost support from the manufacturer anyway, and was hard to keep synced with my phone, and eventually the hassle became too much for it to be worth it.
But if we had a standard API for wearables that smartphone companies adhered to, and I didn't have to charge it every night, I would love to have another smartwatch. They're so convenient.