I’ll give you pods lasting power in an office environment, outside of that they are not nearly convenient, cheap or good enough to make pots obsolete. The expense factor alone is a major stumbling block with Keurig getting more insistent on protecting their revenue by locking out non-Keurig coffee.
If it gets to the point where they can’t subsidize the machine with overpriced coffee, the brewers will go up in price, I’m sure, making pot brewers more desirable.
And it’s laughably false.
For example, who’s making Williams-Kilburn tubes? No, modern CRTs don’t count, and if you claim they do, you’re either ignorant or lying.
Similarly, who’s making ADM-3A terminals? Again, you can point to things which are not ADM-3A terminals, and you’d be wrong.
This is another statement which is only true if you torture definitions to fit, such that you’re redefining and/or ignoring things to make it true.
Bold is mine.
I would argue the battleship ended it’s useful lifespan even before WW II. There were lots of them throughout the war, but they were extremely vulnerable to air attack, and generally traveled with or near carrier groups for support. They were so cool, though.
I’m not going to say you’re wrong, except to say that you probably can make something using more recent parts that is indistinguishable in function from the old tech in nearly all cases. You may not be able to get all the chips used in the Apple 1, but you can probably mimic their function on FPGAs at full speed…except, ironically, certain “features” that were due to bugs in the chip. Harder to mimic those. You can probably get something that will mimic any function in a circuit performed by a vacuum tube.
Meet back here in… ten years. (More likely five, but let me hedge the bet, since we’re talkin’ 'bout yer generations.)
This, pretty much. The idea of being able to select one of thirty-five kinds of coffee and brew up one meh-ish cup of it won’t replace the superiority of fresh-ground, drip-brewed for those who truly like coffee, and not this week’s Starbuck flavor.
The idea will stick around, in office, vending and other uses. But the idea of a home Keurig is going to fade away.
And now you’re just changing the parameters.
The statement was “Is still being made”, not “could prospectively be made by someone with enough money and time on their hands”.
You’re not arguing the same point. Not even a little bit.
Why are people so dead-set on saving this idiotic argument?
No probs.
You’re missing a few g-g-gs in there too!
Couldn’t you make a super Keurig, where each cup has a few freeze dried coffee beans, and the cup is nitrogen filled? You’d stick the cup into a receptacle located on the top of the machine. The coffee machine would cut open the cup, the beans would drop into a grinder, and it would grind the freshly, then run the hot water through the grinder blades (to rinse off any fragments from this flavor of bean so the next cup of coffee won’t have residue from the last) down into the brewing chamber.
The brewing chamber would have heated walls and precise microcontroller temperature control. Once brewing is completed, the coffee would be poured into the cup, with one last spurt of water to rinse the walls of the brewing chamber.
Tubes are still in wide use in amplifiers. In fact I suspect that they won’t go away in musical equipment anytime soon. The sound is just better, especially for guitar amps.
Slee
I wear an ordinary digital watch. I had no difficulty at all finding a new one a few months ago. In fact there was enough of a choice that it took me several minutes to puzzle over which one I wanted.
Because it’s probably more true than you are willing to admit. Out of the vast array of machines and inventions ever built to any significant scale, you can probably get nearly of them today in some form. You’re taking the reverse argument and saying that you can’t get the exact part and model number of some long obsolete part even if you can easily get something similar.
The OP has probably allowed enough flexibility of definition for me to include the Rabbit phone system. This may have been a UK only thing.
Building on the budding mobile phone system then being built up, which was at the time (1993) very expensive, Rabbit let you use a portable handset to access the standard phone network via short-range base stations (100 metres). The handsets were also usable at home with your own base station. They could make outgoing calls only and coverage was limited.
The system lasted all of 20 months. I remember at the time, when they were being heavily promoted that all they really did was give you your own handset for a call box and distribute the queue to use one over a couple of hundred square metres. The litigation following the failure of the system lasted four years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_%28telecommunications%29
This all sounds well enough, but I can’t believe that you’re not going to have a roaster on top. Pre-roasted beans. Sheesh.
Can’t (well shouldn’t) use roasted beans for a good 48 hours. Need to outgas and generally stabilise. So logistics of supply needs to be managed. A controlled atmosphere (N[sub]2[/sub]) container would be good however. Foil packed pre-roasted is never as good (despite what Andrea Illy says).
Back on track I concur that a coffee percolator is a good candidate for an item that had huge market penetration, and has now essentially vanished - with about a generation in vogue.
Digital clocks with split flap displays (flip clocks) are a good contender as a one generation technology. They seem to sell as retro-chic items only. In general the big airport split-flap displays are being replaced with arrays of flat screen monitors, so they will go the same way.
I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that e-readers are something that’s functionally obsolete.
When the initial e-paper e-readers came out, smartphones weren’t that smart, and didn’t have the screen size/resolution or storage capacity to function as an e-reader.
But, in the past few years, the screens have become drastically better, the capacities have become much greater, and the e-reader apps are pretty much identical in functionality to the integrated e-reader software.
In short, I don’t see the market for a standalone e-reader being there any longer- most of the e-readers being sold are actually Android tablets already.
So gone in less than a generation- more like 10 years.
I think the big thing about black and white e-readers w/e-paper (or whatever, I’m thinking the Kindle Paper White) is you can read them outside in bright sun. I’m going to buy one for vacation. Otherwise, yes I read on my phone all the time.
I’m not sure of the particulars, but I’m sure someone will expound:
Micro-fische and readers
(Probably more than one generation)
And I used microfilm readers myself for research early in this century.
I think a niche will remain for the e-Ink models with extremely long battery life. Any phablet or tablet can do a great job of e-reading, but only gets close to printed-text resolution and at the cost of burning through battery time.
For “a thousand books in one” purposes, the dedicated readers will remain. But yeah, as a mass product, here and gone.
Even in direct sunlight?