This is an interesting thread. There’s a difference between “obsolete” and not having a market. Heck, even With the ubiquity of cell phones, there’s still a market for pagers http://www.pager99.com/
As of 2010, their were 500,000 people in Canada with rotary (non touch tone) phones http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2010/02/02/consumer-touch-tone-service-bell.html
Those items are both “obsolete” (have been replaced by something else), but there’s still a market for them.
Where I live rotary phones don’t work anymore, cash is more expensive for shops than plastic and nobody I know has a chequebook.
(And I wish faxes would finally go away)
A big hospital I worked in replaced all their phones with Cisco comm devices. Some were wireless and some had cables, but none of them was a telephone, they were computers hooked to a computer network. Outside calls to or from cell phones never touch a physical telephone wire.
Does everybody know about this wheat but me?
I’ll put slim odds on that. In spite of owners’ manuals already telling them that their oil only needs to be changed every ~7,000 miles, many owners are somehow convinced that their cars will explode if they don’t change the oil every 3,000 miles.
Yep, that’s my thought. I understand the issue with signatures, but for that matter the idea of a physical signature will tend to diminish in importance over time as well.
Similarly, how about desktop computers? I find it increasingly baffling that someone would buy one today except for hardcore gamers.
^^^ place I get my oil changed puts a sticker in the window telling me to come back in 3,000 miles.
I peel it off and throw it in their parking lot.
Everybody who is a Star Trek fan or has seen The Trouble with Tribbles a few times.
So yeah, everybody on this messageboard except you.
Businesses will always buy desktops for workers that stay at their desks because you can get much more bang for your buck from a desktop. There’s no compelling reason to switch to laptops in every situation and some home users even prefer desktops. I know I do.
I don’t know. My car tells me when it’s time for an oil change and I just listen to it. Insisting the oil be changed every 3000 miles is my father’s generation. Now I think people will rely more on their car’s electronics.
My whoosh detector may be malfunctioning, but you do know I’m quoting Kirk both there and above, right? 
I got whooshed. 
my ten-year-old desktop still functions better than many modern laptops for games, and i’m not a hardcore gamer.
I just replaced my (home) desktop computer. I’m not sure what I was supposed to switch to. I do game, a lot, although I wouldn’t consider myself “hardcore” by any means. I also use it for schoolwork (going back to school) and for writing stories, surfing the web, and probably a ton of other random things.
Was I supposed to switch it for a laptop? I don’t have a smartphone (and probably never will), and I do intend to get a tablet for my birthday later this year…but I still intend to use my desktop lots.
Count me in with preferring a desktop computer simply because it doesn’t rely on a battery.
I am so distrustful of batteries and their lifespan when I’m plugging in/plugging out 20 times a day, and even if I leave it plugged in at a station (like I am typing on now at work), then what’s the point of having a laptop when I could just have a desktop?
I would much prefer to work on a desktop and put files/folders on a desktop that are uber important, and leave laptop work for stop and go things.
They’re cheaper, easier to upgrade, and can be smaller than a laptop. For me, I currently have no real use for a laptop, given access to my smartphone, tablet, PC, and cloud services.
I honestly think that laptops have a shorter life expectancy than desktops. They’re caught in the middle.
That’s easy; some of us like the idea of being able to get “under the hood” so to speak. By that, I mean replace individual parts/components when they either no longer work correctly, or when there’s a better alternative within my budget.
You can’t do that with a laptop.
For example, I may decide I need more hard drive space. With my desktop, I’m not really limited- I suppose there’s probably some absurdly large BIOS restriction on size, and I might not be able to fit anything larger than a full-height(!) drive in my case, but other than that, the sky’s the limit. Same goes for monitors- I can use just about any monitor I so choose, in any size/format.
If my keyboard craps out, I go spend $15 and get a new one. Can’t do that with a laptop
Of course you can hook a lot of things like keyboards and monitors up to a laptop, but what’s the point of a laptop then, if you’re using it just like a desktop?
I don’t think there’s any “think” about it. Laptops have significantly shorter lifespans than desktops. My last desktop crapped out after about 10 years (2000-2010). The laptop I bought three years later (in 2003) died about the same time.
touch wood
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say the Enterprise should be hauling away garbage…