Well, that really depends on your context. Streaming-media infrastructure isn’t nearly widespread or robust enough for it to begin rendering local storage obsolete for me. I use streams for certain things, of course, but not for anything I count as permanent or important.
Pianos are becoming a sort of musical asbestos. Across the country, moving companies are trashing pianos by the truckload as people abandon them when they move. There will always be a home for grand pianos, but decades old run of the mill spinets and uprights are difficult to get rid of. They’re not exactly obsolete, but they have become cost-ineffective to maintain and repair.
Dial phones? AT&T does not support pulse dialing in their Uverse system. Even if your telephone company still supports pulse or rotary dial, nothing else does.
As for photos, I have a 150 megapixel photo that just begged to be printed. Leaving it to be trapped on a small display would be cruel. That said, film-based photography is pretty close to dead. Kodachrome is gone, Polaroid is gone, and the bottom has dropped out of the 35mm SLR market.
It completely depends on the technology. It wouldn’t surprise me for example if some you have an elderly relative still using a 40 year old toaster which they got as a wedding gift. I know I have had the electric frying pan I use for about thirty years–and it was used when I got it.
For the technology that you are referring to ( not eternal stuff like hammers ), the speed of obsolescence is increasing. It took thousands of years for horse carts to be replaced by the petrol driven truck, but new technology will soon replace petrol etc etc.
At this rate of increase, expect the new communication device you buy in 10 years time to be obsolete by the time you unwrap it at home, LOL.
Heh, It looks like I’m going to have to pay someone to take my 40" CRT TV. (Which works perfectly fine).
Also my whole entertainment center is obsolete because it wasn’t designed for a flat panel wide screen. The slide out drawers were made to hold VHS tapes so now the whole setup looks well, obsolete.
gotpasswords another who for some reason believes that there is no market for upright pianos even though evisdence of a tobust market was given before his/her post says “There will always be a home for grand pianos”
But not in too many homes. have you ever been in a house with a grand piano? I’ve seen plenty of uprights, but the only grands I’ve seen were at schools or auditoriums.
Oy. My parents have one of those, as well as several sets of encyclopedias. I’ve heard that sets of encyclopedias are nearly impossible to give away, too.
My parents hold onto a lot of old stuff that will probably be hard to get rid of. Lots of VHS tapes, that kind of stuff. I’m not looking forward to the day when my sister and I have to get rid of their stuff. I certainly don’t want an upright piano or a set of encyclopedias from the 70’s, and I really doubt my sister does, either.
I don’t see much evidence of a robust market for pianos. Just one mention of a high-end dealer with robust prices.
The reality is that Craigslist is jammed with cheap pianos, most of which are well under $500, and no shortage of free pianos. As for what I said earlier about truckloads of junked pianos, the story is here: For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump - The New York Times
Regarding pianos: a friend of mine runs a small moving company. He says that many people do abandon pianos, when they move. There is little market for them, and he winds up hauling many to dumps.
AM radio will never be obsolete. Never. There is too much commercial FM band competition to justify the expense of putting a talk radio station on it in anywhere but urban areas, and AM’s distorting effect due to low bandwidth has a negligible effect on voice only. Additionally, it has range advantages.
I promise you, AM radio will always exist. You may not listen to it, but millions of people do every day.
+1 on AM being far from obsolete. I would go as far to say that AM will outlive any current technology that has the ability to be replaced.
Me
People in developing countries can’t really use (nor do they desire) obsolete technological crap any more than we do. The standard these days is be able to surf the web and play music and vids online. Tech that’s even a few years old struggles to keep up. This is why a lot of computing equipment can’t be even given away, unless you are going to use it for basic word processing PCs that are just a few years old are really doggy when they try to handle streaming content which is a huge part of the net experience these days.
I bet that’s not true for film. There are still higher resolutions to go to. The television industry has started really pushing 4K televisions, and in another 8-10 years, they’ll start to be cheap enough to be mass market. It’s very unlikely that by then network speeds will have increased enough to reasonably stream 4K content, so I’m pretty sure there will be at least one more cheaply printable digital film medium.
It probably won’t be as dominant as the DVD was, but it’ll be bigger than minidiscs and laserdiscs were.
Eight to 10 years? Look at how much faster network speeds have got in the last 8-10 years. I don’t think streaming speeds will be a problem in “wired” areas. Yes I know that a lot of people still don’t have decent connectivity, but I don’t know whether that will be a big enough market to make a whole new physical format viable.
Someone I know was trying to sell their upright piano and the main reason nobody wanted it was that it costs a lot of money to get the piano re-tuned after moving, by an actual skilled person, that is, which is apparently essential. And this was in London, where I’m sure you could find a professional piano tuner with some searching. Smaller places might not have any.
We threw in our big screen non flat screen tv as a package deal with a 3 year old fridge for sale for $200.oo last year. The fridge was 200 but if y ou only wanted that it was 250. We were just so happy not to have to pay someone to take the tv away.
Not by a long shot. Even “hi-def” streaming is pretty poor compared with Blu-ray, and the Blu-ray medium is inadequate for display on a new 4k set. You aren’t going to get a 3840×2160 (or 7680×4320 ) display and then be content with Netflix on it.
Even with standard HD, if you want something to look really nice on your set you are liable to spring for a physical copy. I don’t mind streaming services for TV shows, but even something like House of Cards I found myself thinking, “Damn, I wish I had a better copy of this.”
Sure, you* can* digitally distribute better quality than is typical for Netflix or Xbox HD - but it still doesn’t compare well with Bluray - I’ll take the 50gb version now, thanks. Tomorrow? Fuji has a 1TB disc that is faster and cheaper to produce than Bluray. When 4k or 8k sets are attainable by mere mortals like us, our movies will come on something like that. On demand streaming is okay for stuff you don’t care about, but I’m not going to watch something like The Hobbit that way - I want it to look awesome.
A big problem I see is streaming videos are, well, virtual. I save YouTube videos to my NAS. No guarantee the owner doesn’t pull it off Youtube tomorrow, or a given movie studio gets into a spat with Netflix. I still have laserdiscs that I own and can play and no one can take them away (well, except laser rot and the fact SD composite sources are barely watchable to me).
Even though internet data limits are high, as people do more streaming and the quality gets better pretty soon the that’s going to be an issue for more and more people. Watching the Return of the King in full blu-ray quality would take up 100 GB?, a big chunk even of Comcasts 300 GB limit.
Internet coverage is still very much dependent on location. Some places could already stream 4K content and some are still on dialup. My internet connection is slower and more expensive than the one I had 5 years ago.
I could pay much more to get fast internet and stream HD content, but Netflix will send me Blurays for $10/month (and the quality of video from them is significantly better than the more-highly-compressed streamed content). Much more efficient, though somewhat less convenient.
Stamped media is still by far the cheapest way to store and transport media. A disc costs a few cents to make and a cargo container of them driven across country is way higher bandwidth than any network we’re likely to make. Sure, future networks will go faster, but future data storage will be higher density, leaving physical media useful for a very long time.
If you really want to see obsolete technology at work, visit a Massachusetts courthouse. You will see carbon paper forms being typed out by old IBM Selectric typewrites, and old fashioned filing cabinets in use. The court proceedings are taped-with old reel-reel tape recorders. I even saw an old Webcor wire recorder!
Procedures are done as they were in the 1890’s…and no attempts to modernize will be tolerated.