Yes, and I think there are couple of pocket sized desktop computer equivalents, but those seem to be exceptions. Is there not a general divide between mobile devices and the rest, and what they can do? I have to use an iPad for work and am fairly often annoyed at some of its limitations and the fact that they seem to be designed that way intentionally.
I don’t think there’s any apple device like what you’re looking for but if you search for Windows 10 2-in-1 you’ll find a bunch that either have detachable keyboards of a 360 hinge. I personally love mine and the active stylus support is something I didn’t think I’d use too much but I’m now dependent on.
They’re also used in warehouses and by maintenance people. They can read barcodes and Q-codes, and have better screens than the RFID guns. Nowadays there are companies where the division between blue-collar and white-collar has been almost fully replaced by tablet vs laptop.
Also popular with visually-impaired or mobility-impaired people who can’t see anything or poke exactly what they want in a phone’s screen, but who do just fine with the tablet. And while this includes a lot of old people, they’re not the only ones.
Old El Paso “Stand N Stuff” Taco shells are definitely the most useless. First it solves a problem nobody has for more than a few seconds (how are you suppose to get fillings in a hard shell taco without it tipping over? besides maybe just leaning it on anything you might have in your kitchen or even the plate itself?), and second because the shell itself has a flat bottom, the moment you take a bite out of the shell it’s just immediately going to crack completely open and dump all your fillings, negating the entire reason in the first place.
I’ve never had a taco that didn’t crack open the moment I bit into it. Honestly, tacos are a stupid, useless food. They’re like pitas for morons.
Let me guess: you’re one of those people whose cellphone screen looks like the floor in my brothers’ room at 10am on a sunday back when they were little, except with all the little bits and pieces neatly arranged in rows.
Electric hand dryers. They’re only there to save whatever place they’re in money as they don’t require the up-keep and cleaning-up-after of paper towels. They’re only barely more environmentally friendly as well. As anyone who used one can attest, not only do they barely dry hands it also means there’s no actual paper towels nearby in case you need to clean a spill, wipe your face, dry anything besides your hands etc.
Hard shell tacos could also qualify if they had been invented a few decades later. I never get a hard shell taco if I have another choice of food due to the aforementioned breakage problem.
I nominate those cheap little plastic coffee stirrers. They are too flexible and too narrow to stir efficiently. The flat wooden ones are much better.
Hard taco shells are useful because they’re delicious.
Sure, it all crumbles and falls on the plate. Second meal!!!
Bottled water.
The same stuff you get for free in your kitchen–but now you get the privilege of lugging it home in heavy bottles, and it’s only 50,000% more expensive.
When it first appeared on the supermarket shelves (about 30 years ago), I thought it was a joke, like the pet rock was in 1975.
Dammit! :smack:
I have a feeling that the Surface-style tablet-top devices with the removable keyboards are what we’re going to see more and more of. I have one at work(Dell 5290 2-in-1), and it’s cool- 80% of the time, it’s basically a laptop hooked into a docking station of sorts and I use my two monitors, regular keyboard and mouse.
15% of the time, it’s a laptop that’s not hooked into the docking station, with a real keyboard and touch pad.
5% of the time, I take the keyboard off and it’s a straight up Windows 10 tablet.
It’s a really cool piece of technology- kind of the best of both worlds. No idea why Apple is so dead-set against them- it’s neither a crippled PC, nor a half-assed tablet.
I’m sure there must have been some reason but I don’t understand why they needed to add screw-top openings to milk cartons and other cardboard liquid containers when for decades we just inverted part of the top into a spout.
It is much worse than that. The outlying Effingberg area is wracked by drought and so you see an image or video in a news story where some good samaritan from the city is carrying two shrink-wrapped flats of 10oz bottles of PrimaPure to the door of one of the desperate denizens of the desert. Because, you know, there not some better way to address the problem. The bottled water hype has messed up our collective heads.
The egg cuber. I recall Consumer Reports tested one many years ago, and said it worked very well, but wondered why anyone would want an egg in the shape of a cube.
So they don’t spill all over the fridge when I inevitably knock them over.
No way. That spout thing was the worst. It was too easy to mess up, too easy to spill. With the screw cap you can even put the carton on its side on the fridge.
easier storage.
Yes. I’m catching my son up on the important(?) movies from the last 40 years, which have become cultural touchstones so to speak. And, in a surprisingly large number of them, I have to tell him “ah, well, they’re doing that because they don’t have cell phones, they hadn’t been invented yet.” I kind of feel sorry for those characters running around, clueless about what the other characters are up to, because it was the pre-cellphone world.
If I were to nominate a “useless” but must-have item from our modern world, let me nominate Facebook. I think most users liked it at first because it provided a curated view of the internet. But I’ve always disliked that it needed to duplicate information already out there, you know, on the regular internet.
But what I’ve come to call the “private” internet, Facebook, is the sole owner of the platform and can and will use it to get as much valuable information they can about you and all other users, and let paid promoters manipulate you into whatever it is they want you to do. To me this is more a danger than a convenience, so you won’t see me there (but Mrs Limmin still uses it every day).
So when a club I’m interested in only maintains a FB page I’ll hold my nose and briefly look at it via my browser, then back out when I’m asked to log into FB. Wish I didn’t have to do that; the internet is really one of the best knowledge-sharing ideas humanity has ever had, why spoil it by having your entire internet experience be through a private provider with possibly nefarious purposes?