What are your technology mispredictions?
I think that it's interesting to look back at calls that were wrong to try to help improve future ones.
Maybe it was a tech company that you thought wouldn't make it and did well or vice versa. Maybe a technology you thought had promise and didn't pan out. Maybe a project that you thought would become the future but didn't or one that you thought was going to be the next big thing and went under.
Four from me:
-
My first experience with the World Wide Web was on an rather unstable version of
lynxon a terminal. I was pretty unimpressed. Compared to gopher clients of the time, it was harder to read, the VAX/VMS build I was using crashed frequently, and was harder to navigate around. I wasn't convinced that it was going to go anywhere. The Web has obviously done rather well since then. -
In the late 1990s, Apple was in a pretty dire state, and a number of people, including myself, didn't think that they likely had much of a future. Apple turned things around and became the largest company in the world by market capitalization for some time, and remains quite healthy.
-
When I first ran into it, I was skeptical that Wikipedia would manage to stave off spam and parties with an agenda sufficiently to remain useful as it became larger. I think that it's safe to say that Wikipedia has been a great success.
-
After YouTube throttled per-stream download speeds, rendering
youtube-dlmuch less useful, theyt-dlpproject came to the fore, which worked around this with parallel downloads. I thought that it was very likely that YouTube wouldn't tolerate this --- it seems to me to have all the drawbacks ofyoutube-dlfrom their standpoint, plus maybe more, and shouldn't be too hard to detect. But at least so far, they haven't throttled or blocked it.
Anyone else have some of their own that they'd like to share?
In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment. Basically the opposite has happened.
Man I think all of us mistakenly thought this. The early internet had such promise.
I think the Internet still has lots of promise. We just did a capitalism on it. If we can get the cancer out it'll be an amazing thing again.
But I do think some of that early promise was overestimated because mostly smart people were on it then. We thought it was the medium, but it was just techies or people with hobbies or interest that made it that special place, now that your average Joe is there it's mostly shit, but go somewhere with a little barrier to entry (like Lemmy) and it is pretty cool again.
I really think social media algorithms+profit motives are a big part of what did it. Suddenly there's both the desire and the means to manipulate users into whatever pattern the business wants. Engagement-based algorithms pushed incendiary content creating a feedback loop of more and more extreme and hateful views being normalized, but also engagement-based algorithms plus monetization encouraged new forms of farmed content like brainrot and AI boomer slop which has zero (or realistically net-negative) value to society as a whole.
I'm really hoping the analogue/physical media trend continues because that might actually be what breaks the cycle. Normies may have simply had it with social media platforms owning them...I write on social media at midnight instead of going to bed on time...
it was like that for a few. now AI will definitely make people braindead, how many years of brainrot can the mind endure?
I often think about an Arthur C. Clarke book—I think Songs of Distant Earth?—that has a colony of humans that solves all the big debate questions facing their society anonymously through the internet, which has completely solved the problem of judging ideas based on who said them.
Bless the optimists.
came here to see this
considers
I've been in a couple conversation threads about this topic before on here. I'm more optimistic.
I think that the Internet has definitely democratized information in many ways. I mean, if you have an Internet connection, you have access to a huge amount of information. Your voice has an enormous potential reach. A lot of stuff where one would have had to buy expensive reference works or spend a lot of time digging information up are now readily available to anyone with Internet access.
I think that the big issue wasn't that people became less critical, but that one stopped having experts filter what one saw. In, say, 1996, most of what I read had passed through the hands of some sort of professional or professionals specialized in writing. For newspapers or magazines, maybe it was a journalist and their editor. For books, an author and their editor and maybe a typesetter.
Like, in 1996, I mostly didn't get to actually see the writing of Average Joe. In 2026, I do, and Average Joe plays a larger role in directly setting the conversation. That is democratization. Average Joe of 2026 didn't, maybe, become a better journalist than the professional journalist of 1996. But...I think that it's very plausible that he's a better journalist than Average Joe of 1996.
Would it have been reasonable to expect Average Joe of 2026 to, in addition to all the other things he does, also be better at journalism than a journalist of 1996? That seems like a high bar to set.
And we're also living in a very immature environment as our current media goes. I am not sold that this is the end game.
There's a quote from Future Shock --- written in 1970, but I think that we can steal the general idea for today:
That's just to drive home how extremely rapidly the environment in which we all live has shifted compared to how it had in the past. In that quote, Alvin Toffler was talking about how incredibly quickly things had changed in that it had only been six lifetimes since the public as a whole had seen printed text, how much things had changed. But in 2026, we live in a world where it has only been a quarter of a lifetime, less for most, since much of the global population of humanity has been intimately linked by near-instant, inexpensive, mass communication.
I think that it would be awfully unexpected and surprising if we would have immediately figured out conventions and social structures and technical solutions to every deficiency for such a new environment. Social media is a very new thing in the human experience at this scale. I think that it is very probable that humanity will --- partly by trial-and-error, getting some scrapes and bruises along the way --- develop practices to smooth over rough spots and address problems.
Consider, say, the early motorcar, which had no seatbelts, windscreen, roof, suspension, was driven on a road infrastructure designed for horse-drawn carts to travel maybe ten miles an hour, didn't have a muffler, didn't have an electric starter, lacked electric headlights and other lighting, an instrument panel, and all that. It probably had a lot of very glaring problems as a form of transportation to people who saw it. An awful lot of those problems have been solved over time. I think that it would be very surprising if electronic mass communication available to everyone doesn't do something similar.
unfortunately the internet democratized the creation of information, which is one part of the the problem. Now everyone and their creepy uncle can say whatever they want and post it everywhere. Good info is drowned out by a firehose of misinformation.
The other part of the problem is access to information is definitely not democratized; it's controlled by billionaires, state troll mills, and bots. People are not equipped to deal with that. This is what you get with libertarian ideals, might makes right.
It kinda did that for a few wonderful years.
It wasn't just you, this was the general sentiment in the west. Cory Doctorow (now of "enshittification" fame) wrote "The Net Delusion" about it
Yeah. Didn't we all. Although I've met several smart young people that self educated themselves in to a impressive degree.
Then again I've met dozen times more dumb-dumbs that have made their idiocy much much worse and are spreading it around.
Polarizing as always. Sorry to say, on average for the worse.
The profit motive killed this dream. Capitalism seems to wither anything it touches.
It did that, but we had an overly rosy view of what “democratize” meant. We thought that citizen journalists would leaven the bulky corporate media of the time. And they did. But there was also a torrent of bullshit. We have no excuse for not seeing this. The Greeks and Romans spent a great deal of thought on what would happen if the rabble were given a voice. We dismissed their ideas as gatekeeping oligarchy, but it turns out that populism is moatly a dirty word.
Same, except mid-00s.
Yeah I never thought how it would be the hot bed of spreading misinformation....
I sold all of my Apple stock because they wanted to make a phone and I thought that would end poorly, so I should take my profits while I could.
I mean, the Newton hadn't done well. The Pippin hadn't done well. The eMate hadn't done well. What were the odds of Apple doing a really successful new consumer electronics product?
The iPod did well. Your point?
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
The ROKR did not
Even after seeing it, I was sure the iphone would fail. I thought, "Why would anyone use a crappy computer on a tiny screen instead of a laptop or desktop?"
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
"What's a computer?"
"Why doesn't the touchscreen work? "
Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers' fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.
Around 2009 I predicted that very soon, Linux smartphones you can plug into a docking station to use as a desktop PC would become the standard consumer computing device.
It's so obvious, I wish they had caught on! I remember there was a failed Ubuntu phone Kickstarter for exactly this...
Sapphire screen....
Samsung even had a feature in their phones copying this. Looks like its still present but was left to rot though
Randomly tripped across this over NYE. Was hoping to share something on a Samsung TV at a cabin and when it synced it was showing a full desktop I could navigate using my screen as a mousepad and keyboard. Blew my mind.
I don't know if I'd sat left to rot. I still use it almost every other day, and Google is working on a version for the Pixel phones as well.
I think the Moto Atrix and Dex were probably a bit ahead of their time, but likely going to make a comeback soon.
And I can't really understand why we aren't there yet. Do we really need 8 cores to phone and read IMs? And isn't there an OS that works both on mobile and desktop? I'm baffled.
I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.
I still mourn the loss of the timeline where the Atrix was successful. Our phones are every bit powerful enough for 95% of the computing most of us do, so why can't we just drop them in a slot and have them be a laptop?
Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.
I'm not sure it's actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It's certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don't cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.
The nearest thing we have is the Steam Deck dock.
Quite a few phones have desktop modes now, and they work alright. I wish my phone had it. My iphone 16 supports USB dp alt mode but only a direct mirror.
Dock it in a laptop shell. And then the phone being the touchpad for the mouse. This was my prediction too. I'm still hoping.
Still hoping…
My Steam Deck is basically that.
There's a few Android phones that have it, old and new. I have an iPhone 16 at the moment and while it works with a dp-alt mode dock, it only mirrors the screen and nothing else. I think there's some things you can do to trick the phone into enabling stage manager and other ipad features.
I'm still salty that Apple crooked my 6th gen iPad mini by not allowing Stage Manager on it to allow it to work with an external display. Like the iPhone, it just mirrors, which is bullshit. I don't even care if it shuts off the built in screen because it can only run one display, I just wish it could be used as a portable computer.
iPadOS 26 brought actual Stage Manager to it, but it's a gimped version that still doesn't work properly with an external display.
As a result, I don't really use my iPad these days.
I thought drones were just going to be a fad, but they've become huge, especially in terms of government and corporate surveillance. I should have realized the way it was going when America started using them militarily. American military inventions almost always end up becoming popular consumer products/applications.
They've not even started for most of the domestic and consumer uses. They're only just scratching the surface of commercial and military application.
In 30 years people will have subscriptions to a drone service that will take x# of packages for them within their city/geography per month/year with weight tiers. Etc. errands and single use car trips and commercial trips in the last mile will drastically decrease.
The skies will never be as they are again. The generation growing up right now will be the last to have been able to look up at the vast expanse without some buzzing. Whirring distraction.
Of all things, the war in Ukraine will probably be the thing that sets the stage for what our drone-filled future might look like. Not something I would've predicted 5 years ago!
This is the city of Lyman following a battle. Those are fiber optic strands, used for long distance wired (therefore can't be jammed by radio signal) control of the drones by their operators. Every one of those strands had a drone at the end of it.
This is what present day warfare looks like now, its all flying buzzing drones attacking people and other drones. And what happens after the peace treaties are signed? A ton of that engineering and tooling for making this tech will get refocused into consumer and commercial products.
Autonomous tractors are already commercial products, reducing the number of people needed to complete a task on a farm. Many new non-autonomous tractors these days already have whats effectively cruise control on steroids, where the tractor will follow a predetermined path with the driver just sitting in the cab to monitor and take over if anything happens. And of course at home the robot vacuum cleaners are available from many brands. I've even seen one of those floor mopping machines adapted to run autonomously at my local Menards (which shocked me as I live in a pretty small town with about as low of a cost of living as it gets really) and while visiting family in LA I saw a robot waiter which both (optionally) took orders and would serve as a mobile food/plate tray. I saw a security robot making the rounds at a convention center in Florida while on a business trip. A Coworker told me about a robot working at a hotel he stayed at in San Francisco which would transport ordered/requested items to guests' rooms. And there's those dog sized food delivery robots in many cities. The more I think about it, wheeled and legged robots are probably what we will see a lot more of, since many already do exist in real commercial applications, and the legal, logistical and ethical barriers to their integration into our lives is much lower than flying robots.
Yeah, I've run into these. That being said, I'd call them currently a novelty...but I also remember when using touchscreen kiosks for ordering instead of cashiers was a rarity.
When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).
There are dozens of us who still aren't convinced.
Never stopped hating being forced to use that piece of monopolistic trash ever since I was on dialup when HL2 released. I buy everything I can on GOG.
I especially resent how closed off the Steam Workshop has made the mod ecosystem for a lot of games.
I get it and was very skeptical at the time... But soon after I began to believe they'd stick around, and my annoyance at installing through multiple discs (and also putting discs in the tray to play a game) won out.
"Nintendo should admit defeat and focus on making games for other platforms and mobile devices." - Me, after the Wii U and a little before the Switch launched.
"No parent is going to buy a Wii because of the stupid name" -me, 2005
“Revolution” was a better name.
Unless you are a Nintendo insider or a time traveler, the name of Wii was announced on April 2006. Gamasutra reported it.
Oh no, they were off a year for something that happened 20 years ago!
I thought the switch was gonna end up with the same depressing library as the 3DS, if that’s any consolation.
I guess we can't be friends. ☹️
I have the 2DSXL, and have played about half of those. I was just sad it was primarily limited to mostly online (Pushmo’s servers are dead) and first-party titles. I was a GBA/DS kid so expected wider variety beyond that.
It’s a fantastic little device for modding though!
When the 3DS came out I was sure it would be a stepping stone to 3D TVs that didn't require glasses.
3D TVs basically died out by now.
That's an inherent limitation of that sort of technology. It can only work for 1 pair of eyes.
that's ok, i only have one pair.
Haha well TVs are generally meant to be watched by >1 pair.
My dad's TV works for everyone, they just need to wear glasses. I don't know why you wouldn't want that, it looks cool
We were specifically discussing TVs that didn't require glasses...
But I still don't understand why people didn't Luke them. They were a more immersive experience
A lot of people it makes physically ill. But I agree, I quite enjoy them.
The problem is the lack of content, they released very few 3d blue rays
I know nobody else cares, but I really like the 3D on it and the eye-tracking technology! My nephew just got one for Christmas and he loves it too...
In the late nineties, I thought the availability of online knowledge would make universities obsolete.
I mean you're not wrong, for some people in some cases. But it's not so easy to teach yourself how to learn, nor why to learn it.
I thought Apple/most smartphones would never move to USB-C, or away from proprietary chargers. Pleasantly surprised - thank you EU.
I thought wireless controllers were going to be a fad, or at least garbage in their reliability/connection strength.
I thought VR was finally going to take off as the next major gaming experience when the Vive came out. Unfortunately it remains niche.
I thought Linux was going to be unusable for gaming/mainstream use cases for much longer, but Valve has made huge strides on that with Proton, and OSS devs making things like Heroic for other stores has been awesome. Also shoutout to KDE for, well, everything. Krita, KDE connect, Plasma. LibreOffice has also come a very long way.
I also thought we’d never get another steam controller. Also pleasantly surprised.
I think another major factor for Linux gaming beyond Valve was a large shift by game developers to using widely-used game engines. A lot of the platform portability work happened at that level, so was spread across many games. Writing games that could run on both personal computers and personal-computer-like consoles with less porting work became a goal. And today, some games also have releases on mobile platforms.
When I started using Linux in the late 1990s, the situation was wildly different on that front.
It was more that graphics hardware got a lot more flexible. Less fixed functionality meant that DXVK (DirectX 8-11 to Vulkan translation layer) was a lot more viable as you were able to emulate old behaviour on the GPU through Vulkan.
Graphics APIs are a lot more „thinner“ these days as well. Creating a Vulkan renderer from scratch is like „first one must enumerate the universe“. But it means that DX12<->Vulkan translation is relatively straightforward, and all the crazy stuff is done in shaders which can be recompiled for different APIs.
The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.
Most popular shit in the history of everything.
I wrote a term paper once about how twitter would enable citizen journalism and lead to a more informed public and a healthier, more direct democracy. I got an A.
I was a pretty huge fan of Zune and I still miss it.
I never had one but IMO Zune was one of the few Microsoft hw wins. And their mice.
And the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick. Came out in 1998 and people still build USB adapters today to make it work in modern racing games and flight simulators.
Using light sensors was wild back then, the successor didn't use them anymore because they cheaped out.
Now that you mention it I have one of those too. Somewhere.
I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.
When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn't see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.
Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.
Tbh I personally still don't see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.
The one niche that they're probably the biggest is the "I just need a public facing web browser in this spot"
Its really hard to beat a locked down iPad for that usecase, both from a financial perspective (~$250 hardware cost for a lowest-tier iPad was the price I was seeing when ordering and provisioning them for this usecase) and from a management perspective (join it to the MDM and by nature of being an iPad, even if they get out of the browser window its really hard to cause trouble, basically 0 malware risk and iOS has far less obtrusive updates than Windows) plus from a support perspective you can simply walk users through rebooting them and swap the hardware if it needs more than a reboot
Yeah, I think tablets are cool, but if they were full-fledged Windows/Linux computers with mobile app compatibility, they'd be absolutely incredible.
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It's more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.
Yeah, I thought about that. I should look into this, thanks! :)
I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.
Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it's nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.
Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.
I thought cameras on phones were a gimmick. To be fair, they were pretty low quality back then but I still use it to remind myself not to be too overconfident because boy was I wrong.
Oh they definitely felt like a gimmick at First
Around 2000, graphene was a very hot material. I was pretty excited by it and thought carbon-based high-Farad capacitors would essentially replace lead acid and lithium ion batteries in most consumer electronics within a decade, maybe two.
Speaking of carbon, did scientists give up on lengthening carbon nanotubes at some point? They were supposed to be a miracle material as well.
It's still hanging
https://youtu.be/9H1nwqjzVVc
Probably still a thing. You can't really put more surface in a box. Will just take a bit longer, foundational research and all.
"Bitcoin will never take". I mined a few at the very beginning when it was easy, out of curiosity, and didn't bother backing up because it was useless anyway. Ahem.
I mined a bit too. Got almost 2 bitcoin in 2 weeks. Figured it was a pyramid scheme, went back to running folding@home. Forgot my wallet passphrase.
I bought and moved like 1 in late 2013 when it spiked just to play with it and see how it worked, out of curiosity about the tech. (And soon after, mined Dogecoin on Reddit when it started, and we all began tipping like crazy because it was fun and funny.) I made a few bucks off the BTC and kinda regretted not holding it longer. Then cut to a decade later... Sheesh. I may be more sour on the tech now, but damn I'm not so crazy as to not regret selling it.
Us early Doge sponsored a NASCAR driver! I have 30-40k locked in an unused wallet. It's amazingly stupid that's a thing. It was never meant to have value!
I let ~20 of them disappear after hearing about the first domino pizza being bought with them for 600 some odd
Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens
I remember thinking similarly. Specifically "well duh you'll just be hitting buttons with your face on calls with those dang touchscreen phones" except it turned out I spend way less time on phonecalls than circa 2006 me could have ever imagined, and also the proximity sensor blanking the screen and blocking input works really good (and even did back in the early 2010s when I got my first smartphone)
I hate microsoft but really liked windows phone and cortana. Something about tiles made a lot of sense and the keyboard was clean af.
I am very sure they were the first to have url bar above the keyboard in their browser WHICH WAS VERY HELPFUL BECAUSE YOUR FINGERS ARE ALREADY AT THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE PHONE LIKE OMFG.
like there was so many little things they did that just worked and worked well. rip windows phone, i will tell my grandkids about you.
I really wanted the Linux/Qt/Jolla phone to happen. They still haven't refunded the other half of my deposit...
Firefox for Android still defaults to this. I don't understand.
In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.
I never thought game subscription would take of. The entire concept is stupid to me. Pay per month to *acces selected games but not own them? Take into accoumt 90% of people will play at most 25% of the catalogue. Let's do some math if PS Plus Essentials, where you get 2-4 random titles per month is taken, which costs 9€ per month which if you play down to 25% of the catalogue goes up to 36€ per month (that is you basicly pay 36€ to play that single game which was chosen at random and you still don't own). For that ammount of money I can buy a REAL game I OWN or 5 good games on Steam Sale or GOG.
Still I guess if it sounds good people will smoke it.
To be clear these statistics are purly "Trust me bro" but I doubt someone will play Core Keeper, Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed and NFS: Unbound all in one month enough that it makes sense, and if you can more power to you, but I know those are not most people. Most people play Minecraft or Elder Scrolls or COD or GT etc.
Still feel free to express yours opinion.
I'm generally against the rise of subscriptions in every service on the Internet, but I did actually benefit from game pass for a couple years. Access to the library meant I could try a lot of games I otherwise probably would not have played. I was only out the time I spent downloading and playing them if I didn't like them- no need to deal with returns or resale, which is especially difficult/restrictive for digital purchases.
I can't find what the original price for game pass was, but I'll do the break-even math for the current price: It looks like the highest tier game pass subscription today is ~$30/mo. Multiply by 12 months, that's $360/yr. With games typically costing $60-70, $360/yr divided by $60 is 6 games/yr.
One would need to play > 6 new games each year to save money with xbox game pass. I think that number is pretty achievable for the average gamer, but I'd be curious to see some statistics about average game consumption.
I think what drives it is probably the general prices of games on consoles. The prices just don't really drop from the launch price of $60+ (plus indies are far less prevalent) so the math starts mathing up pretty quickly, especially if you're one to sell your console when you stop using it
For sure. I feel like holding the launch price forever has been more of a recent development (some time in the last several years, ignoring nintendo) and it seems to be happening on pc too. At least on pc, we usually get a couple decent sales every year and lots of indie content.
Having been on a few Segway tours I was surprised when they stopped making them. Easy to learn, fun to ride. Eventually they will age out and be gone. I wouldn't buy one for myself to have at home, but for whizzing around sightseeing when on holiday they're great.
For reference, the first generation of IPhone actually preceded the IPod Touch, but the Touch reached my friend group first. Thus my reaction when I first heard of the IPhone was more or less,
Boy do I feel like an idiot now.
Yes! If it's any consolation, I made almost exactly the same statement about the iPad too:
Well, the touchscreen part and maybe a bit more, had the same reaction on many directors at Nokia at the time. I don't know if they feel like an idiot, but at least you're not alone.
"This bitcoin thing is too niche and low value to be worth figuring out"
I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.
I had a two (or maybe a bit less) bitcoins on my wallet back in the day. I sold them for ~20€.
I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they'd fail like bulldozer
Before it launched I thought Bulldozer would be good. I even had an FX-8350, and in hindsight I'm not sure it was even an upgrade from the Phenom II X4 955 black edition that I had before
I thought people would miss the keyboard on smartphones. Turns out we are a small minority
There are some products out there that do cater to people who want a physical keyboard on their smartphone today. It's not the norm, but if you're frustrated over it, it might work for you.
Amazon has a lot of portable Bluetooth keyboards that can basically collapse down into a pocket. Those are generally designed to be used at a table, though, not in a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard sense. I'm pretty sure that I've seen a few of the latter that can clip to a phone, though.
I wish we'd still use them. Typing this on a Unihertz Titan 2.
Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that's stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.
I just thought it wouldn't go anywhere. Financially I made the right choice by never investing. No matter how much money you could have made in retrospect, the correct choice is to make the decision based on sound financial strategies. All the value remains speculation
So, if you are born with an unfortunate citizenship and location, you do need these things exactly. Bitcoin is one tech-bro thing I worship. It fulfills a purpose. The world would be worse without it.
That's because you live in a first world country and think, apparently, that everyone does or that those who don't have only themselves to blame.
Pessimistically I thought for sure autonomous war drones would have become way more prolific by now.
I also felt pretty sure that some kind of massive CRISPR/Cas9 catastrophe was bound to occur by now.
It just took until recently for a war to break out with the right conditions for drone warfare to actually make sense. I posted this photo in another comment:
Ukraine has also made significant headway damaging major military assets via drone, sinking a significant portion of Russia's navy as well as basically making tanks obsolete in ground offensives. Flame throwing drones, drones that launch other drones to attack drones, etc. The cyberpunk future is here!
Drones are the industry in the last 6 months. It's just beginning.
I was treating the exercise as "certainties we held a decade or more ago".
I thought blu-ray would supplant DVD-RW for storing and transferring data, including for buying software. Much like DVD replaced CD, which replaced diskettes. Turns out both were replaced by cloud and streaming, with a short interlude for USB sticks.
Al still have their niches, but buying software and storing data is pretty much all online now.
I thought the advent of 4k TVs would push people over to BluRay because with the codecs available a decade ago you needed a good 40mbit+ for a single 4k stream. Turns out I picked the wrong component of streaming to be the thing that would push people back to physical media.
Also all of that broadband investment that was talked about a decade+ ago actually turned into broadband improvements, so now even my in-laws who live on 8 acres in the sticks outside of a tiny town of 400 or so residents have gigabit FTTH service
It doesn’t matter how good is internet connection nowadays, the source in the server is still encoded losing some quality.
Tried to watch Batman Begins in HBO Max, despite being offered as 4K UHD, the loss of information was noticeable on my OLED tv, specially the blacks (as you know, there is almost no black colour in Batman /s).
A friend of mine lend me his Nolan’s Batman trilogy on BR 4K UHD and it was like night and day.
Since the lbs I’m buying physical for movies that I like the most and want to watch them in the highest quality possible.
It's crazy to think this now (since I'm so heavily into free software) but I actively chose a Windows Phone for my first smartphone, and thought it would take over the market from iOS and Android.
To be fair, it did have some cool features: it let you aggregate all the different ways of contacting people into one interface (the dream of many a tech person since the beginning of time!), it had a connection with facebook so you could see status updates/photos from your friends (in the contacts app of all places!), and I thought the live tiles and design language were really cool.
Despite even my hatred of Microsoft, I still have fond memories of that phone.
Well, on the flip side, my first smartphone was a Palm Prē, and I even installed the custom kernel to overclock it.
Still have it in a box somewhere too. That was such a great phone.
Now webOS is used by LG to spy on their smart TV customers.
Tiles and the metro interface in general were a really good idea. Kind of a shame everything's consolidated around iPhone's icon system instead. I remember being impressed with my mom's, but it was such a flash in the pan and had so little 3rd party app support I never ended up getting one.
You could do something similar with widgets I suppose.
I still believe my windows phone had the best UI of any smartphone I’ve used
My parents made us a Betamax household well into the mid 90s; always relegated to the small shitty section of the video rental store.
In the 2000s I wanted to avoid another format pushed by Sony, so I went with HD-DVD over Bluray... sigh. I even got the Xbox 360 external HD-DVD drive.
My uncle got an Xbox 360 specifically because Smallville was coming out on hddvd instead of Bluray. He could never find that hd dvd drive until the format war was over, and I ended up with the 360.
This was my biggest miss too. The porn industry had predicted the winner in all of the previous format wars, so when it settled on HD-DVD I thought that was the end of it.
I thought the iPad being just a giant iPhone was stupid and it wouldn’t catch on. Years on I use an iPad to read comic books in bed, though I guess tablets as a whole are kind of niche and not great as a productivity tool due to mobile OSs holding them back.
I never thought Twitter was gonna go anywhere. 140 character post limit? That's fuckin' stupid.
At least I was half right: 140 characters was stupid. So they increased it to 280.
But I also didn't predict it would lead to the US going full nazi.
I thought Apple would go broke selling the same phone over and over as a new model.
I thought VR would be more widespread by now.
And it's probably because of the two next things I thought as well.
I thought it would be cheaper and easier to do by now. More like a Google Glass kind of thing. But we're still playing 4 figures for dedicated massive headsets to strap to our heads. No wonder it didn't take off.
And I mean dedicated like the HTC Vive. Not the Quest.
This was my thought as well. I really thought it would be better by now. Fingers crossed for the steam frame!
I am really grateful that Microsoft removed Windows Mixed Reality from Windows 11 and turned a lot of good headsets into trash for a while. Got an HP Reverb G2 for 120 bucks and now that works better than ever thanks to the Oasis driver that came out a few months ago.
It's 2160p per eye and I played Half-Life: Alyx on it, which is an absolute masterpiece. And I got Virtual Home Theater and watched all of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies in full 3D SBS. Better quality than my local cinema.
The Steam frame is supposed to have the same resolution and might be 600+. I'm not paying that much for VR.
I thought touchscreens would never work out. But here we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too.
Many kids now grow up only interacting with touchscreens and assume they're the default. I genuinely wonder if the average 18 year old knows how to use a standard PC now, given they'd be interacting with almost exclusively with chromebooks, ipads and smartphones throughout school
My son was in kindergarten in 2005 - when touchscreens were still pretty rare - they gave him one to work with at school and were so jazzed about what he was doing they encouraged us to get one at home. I set him up with a keyboard instead, and he kicked butt with the keyboard just as well, if not better than, he did on the touch screen. Of course, iPod / iPads followed soon after - anybody can use a touch screen, it doesn't hurt to know how to use the keys too.
and I thought they would be outlawed for safety concerns, but even though the data is in they are dangerous, no one will end them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2025/02/11/tesla-again-has-the-highest-accident-rate-of-any-auto-brand/
Of course, firing most of the NHTSA prevented that.
You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.
if I had been in the stock market in the 90s I would've gotten very rich then lost it all on iomega
I don't know if I can count this as mine, but I certainly didn't disagree with predictions of others around 1990 or so that the smart home would be the future. The idea was that you'd have a central home computer and it would interface with all sorts of other systems and basically control the house.
While there are various systems for home automation, things like Home Assistant or OpenHAB, and some people use them, and I've used some technology that were expected to be part of this myself, like X10 for device control over power circuits, the vision of a heavily-automated, centrally-controlled home never made it to become the normal. I think that the most-widely-deployed piece of home automation that has shown up since then is maybe the smart thermostat, which isn't generally hooked into some central home computer.
I mean, the AppleTV (latest gen) is essentially a computer. Locked down, sure, but a computer. It’s just we don’t think of it that way because of all the technology we have (like this phone computer I’m typing this on or the computer watch I’m wearing).
"This internet stuff is useless" (me, around 1994). Yeah, I'm a visionary.
I also fell for the Nintendo 3DS hype! I was 12 years old at the time, and I really believed the glassless 3D would be a killer feature and the next big thing in gaming, and I spent six months leading up to the launch date washing cars and doing odd jobs to scrape enough money together to buy it on day one.
I did still love the device and kept it for a long time, but the 3D was a gimmick and got switched off fast. I was sad to have spent all that time and effort saving money, only for the price to plummet soon after launch, but it taught me a good lesson :)
I thought that the 3d was pretty cool on the 3DS! Now I can’t find my New3DS XL, now that they’re apparently quite jailbreakable…
Minidiscs would endure and crypto would fail.....I still believe both will bw true in the end....
I like minidiscs, even if I'm too young to remember any popularity of them, I remember discs for Sony PSP which are similar in idea, an optical medium with protection like of diskettes.
And optical discs are not such a common good to think a protection case is too expensive or something. They get scratches.
But there's another moment - optical discs also degrade with time faster than one would think when they were common. Mostly. Some are good.
About cryptocurrencies ... I don't believe that actually. That is, I believe many of them are scams. Or, one can say, very weird fundraising schemes for their creators. But there are uses, as one can easily feel when being in a sanctioned country.
Yea. The degredation of optical is a major reason its not viable for longterm data storage. But its something like 25 years. Considering people hold onto vinyl and and CDs for that long or longer. Along with the casing... MiniDiscs seemed like the next big step for audiophile. They had lossless recording and are to this day one of the best ways to record live audio.
Well, if vinyl could come back, I suppose MiniDiscs can too.
There wasnt a big enough user base to hit that nostalgia rebound
I still have my MD player and a fee blank disc's that im saving for special occasions.
When the first dotcom bubble burst, I predicted that big companies would buy up all the major websites for fire sale prices and put them behind subscription paywalls. “Pay $30/month and get access to all 400 sites in the Yahoo network.”
I underestimated how easy it is to spin up alternative sites. Most of the media brands I thought of as valuable then are shit now, or gone.
And, like everyone, I didn’t anticipate social media. Even Google was still nascent at the time.
I really thought UMPCs would have taken off
Context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC
I thought the idea of a tiny computer that you carry around with you would have taken off more too. Whether a CPU module like with the flopped EOMA68 project (tl;dr for those who don't want to read the whole mailing list archive, repeated manufacturing challenges caused the project to run out of money before products could ship and the guy running it seemed to have a mental health crisis not long after that) or in the format of the Intel Compute Stick or an all-in-one computer built into a monitor or keyboard.
As a side-note, I briefly worked at an MSP last year that used whatever scavenged computers for employee computers instead of actually spending money on its employees. I was initially given a single 20 year old VGA monitor to work from, and was tasked with pulling drives from computers to prepare them for recycling. I spotted an all-in-one PC with a decent 1080p display (it ran an i3-6100m and only had a single SODIMM slot for memory, so not a very cost-effective option for a Linux PC) and noticed that it had an HDMI input port, so it got a second life as my main computer monitor for the 5 months or so that I worked there. Honestly 6/10 monitor, there's some really good 1080p displays available for about $100 these days, and being not primarily designed as a monitor, I had to hit the button use the passthrough mode every time I booted my work computer (and after every power loss the embedded computer would try to boot and kick off the passthrough mode), but it was a very acceptable display for the circa ~2016 it hailed from
At least we still have very powerful netbooks. GPD makes some.
Not me but my dad. He was friends with a guy who was loosely related to someone relatively high up at Google when they first went public. His friend offered him 500 shares at 50¢ a pop. His life right now would have been wildly different.
Did you take share dilution into account? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_dilution
Why would I? Ruins the story ;)
If my math is right this would be worth about 9.8 million today if the shares were issued in 2004 ish.
I remember I wasn't impressed with smartphones when they first appeared. Phones were already everywhere and gimmicky variations were appearing all the time. The Internet and social media were much less popular and to use them you generally wanted to be sat down at a desk. At the time it really felt like anyone with a fancy phone was just going to use them for calls and text and nothing else.
I thought you’d have to go into a physical store, connect your MP3 player to a special computer, and download music there. I didn’t anticipate iTunes.
Neither did Sony, lol.
Desertec failed due to geopolitical considerations (basically the Europeans didn't want to have their next energy sourced from a region outside their control and therefore stopped funding the project)
There was some similar project that the UK was going to do, run an HVDC submarine line down from the UK to Africa.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Power_Project
Everything ? I though MS Office woukd fail becase no one will want to close source their data files, i was using an Amiga at the time at home and the file format was standard and you chose the app to use
It started there and just progressed, Apple was a big one, people won't buy into their closed wall'd shenanigans. Wrong again.
Messaging, what a debacle that has turned into. I assumed the system would be standardised and the fight would be over the front end for interoperability, wrong again.
That texting would be so popular. Coming from pagers to actual cell phones and being able to hear people talk anywhere was amazing. Going back to text messages seemed counterintuitive.