A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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Nintendo Wii: Sold like gangbusters.
64bit Processors: The computing standard.
Battlestar Galactica: Considered one of the greatest sci-fi series of all time.
Facebook: Continues to be the world’s leading social media platform by literally BILLIONS of users.
High Definition: HD only got even more HD.
iPhone: Set the standard for mobile smartphone form factor and function to this day 16 years later.
To be fair, a lot of these are accurate, or at least were at the time.
Multi-GPU just never caught on. There's a reason you don't see even the most hardcore gaming machines running SLI today.
The Wii's novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didn't have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.
Spore is largely forgotten, despite the enormous hype it had before release. It's kind of the Avatar of video games.
It took years for 64-bit to become relevant to the average user (and hell, there are still devices being sold with only 4GB of memory even today!). Plenty of Core 2 Duo machines still shipped with 32-bit versions of Windows and people didn't notice or care because basically no apps average people cared about were 64-bit native back then and you were lucky to have more than 4GB in your entire machine, let alone need more than that for one program.
Battlestar Galactica (2003) fell off sharply after season 2 and its ending was some of the most insulting back-to-nature religious tripe that has ever had the gall to label itself as science-fiction.
Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)
I definitely know people who didn't get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, they're still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.
The Eee PC and the other netbooks were only good when they were running a lightweight operating system like Linux or Windows XP. Once Windows 7 Starter became the operating system of choice for netbooks, the user experience fell of a cliff and people tired of them. Which is a shame, because I love little devices like UMPCs.
The original iPhone was really limited for 2007. No third-party applications, no 3G support, no voice memos, you could only get it on a single carrier... the iPhone family did make a huge impact in the long run, but it wasn't until the 3GS that it was a true competitor to something like a Symbian device.
The only entry on this list that's really off the mark is Facebook, which even at the time was quickly reshaping the world. And I say that as someone who hates Zuck's guts and has proudly never had a Facebook account.
Got an eee PC for university in 2010. Learned that my courses just weren't made for using a laptop in class.
However with Lubuntu or whatever it's called, I'm using the thing regularly to this day, when all I need is literally a light shell 😄