Items here now won't be there then

[Jaded]

Nearly already gone - digital cameras.

[Polar Bear]

Corded headphones
...

Oddly enough I was looking for a cable for my son to give him a hard link between his "wireless" headphones and his amp for when the battery in the headphones runs low but he still wants to listen.

My solution is to have more than one pair of headphones ...  🤔   🤣

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

People still have coal fires?

[Polar Bear]

The solid fuel burner for peat, coal and wood is still being installed in homes in the UK because it's seen as trendy.   Just not environmentally friendly trendy!

[T42]

Nearly already gone - digital cameras.

Mass-market P&S cameras, certainly, but serious digitals with good optics will be around for a good while yet.

[L CC]

People still have coal fires?

Woodburners, fire pits, chimneas and pizza ovens.

[ian]

Corded headphones

USB cables. Everything will use some horrendous wireless signal (like bluetooth, but prob worse and much less power-efficient).

Coal fires.

Personal computers (laptops or desktop). The IT world is shifting to thin client (see MS latest Windows versions).
That prediction might go completely wrong, and nearly everything shifts to distributed computing. However I doubt it. The power advantages of using centralised server centres are too great.

People have been predicting thin clients since the bigging with not much predictive success. I think people will still use full-format PCs, a skinny ultrabook is still far more utile than any amount of jabbing at a tablet.

Cable in general will go, they're a pain in the ass. Tesla was right in the end.

Anything than can be done on a smart phone will kill the standalone. Digital cameras (other than high end), sat-navs, etc.

[Kim]

Shirley the move towards doing everything on a smartphone/tablet is basically thin clients on the sly.

[Jaded]

Hedgehogs.

[Diver300]

Nearly already gone - digital cameras.

Aren't they just incorporated into phones? They still exist, just not as a separate item.

[grams]

The web is the closest we've come to thin clients on the sly (i.e. software downloaded on demand, nothing stored on the computer).

When Steve Jobs invented the smartphone He decided it shouldn't have third party apps and everything else would be on the web.

Public pressure made that untenable, so clearly the world wants fat clients.

(well, at least the world without even 3G did)

[grams]

Aren't they just incorporated into phones? They still exist, just not as a separate item.

A device that can take pictures and videos but can't post them to TikTok - not even to Instagram - is definitely a curiosity that will befuddle future generations.

[Kim]

Aren't they just incorporated into phones? They still exist, just not as a separate item.

A device that can take pictures and videos but can't post them to TikTok - not even to Instagram - is definitely a curiosity that will befuddle future generations.

GoPro.  But yes, it's only a matter of time before they get their own 6G SIM and InstaTok account.

[Mr Larrington]

There are still those of us who prefer a set of devices that do one thing well – take pictures, display e-books, navigate to the Ends of the Earth, ect and, moreover, ect – than lots of things slightly less well (or, in the case of my phone, very very badly).

[MikeFromLFE]

There are still those of us who prefer a set of devices that do one thing well – take pictures, display e-books, navigate to the Ends of the Earth, ect and, moreover, ect – than lots of things slightly less well (or, in the case of my phone, very very badly).

Indeed
I enjoy using a (film) camera, I enjoy reading on an ereader. I enjoy communicating using short wave radio (and the demise of morse has been predicted for decades)
But the enjoyment factor is not the same case as 'utility' - for most casual use cases the modern smart phone works perfectly well as a communicator, reader, and snapper.

[T42]

There are still those of us who prefer a set of devices that do one thing well – take pictures, display e-books, navigate to the Ends of the Earth, ect and, moreover, ect – than lots of things slightly less well (or, in the case of my phone, very very badly).

While the phone can do so many things badly that the bloody battery runs out in 4 hours.

While we're griping about phones, my first smartphone had a removable battery so that I could carry a spare. The last two have had "integrated" batteries.  The latest one has so-called turbo charging so that you can't plug it in overnight but have to keep an eye on it for half an hour in case their charging algorithm is bollocks and the battery gets fried.

Every fair from fair sometime declines
By chance, or marketing's fickle arseholery untrimmed.

[MikeFromLFE]

Phone numbers?
Already I can tell my phone to 'call Ivor Bigun' if Ivor is in my contacts. Expand this out and the thing will ask you if you want Ivor in Belfast or Beijing. All we need is a personal identifier - like an IP address - and big brother follows us everywhere.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Aren't they just incorporated into phones? They still exist, just not as a separate item.

A device that can take pictures and videos but can't post them to TikTok - not even to Instagram - is definitely a curiosity that will befuddle future generations.

GoPro.  But yes, it's only a matter of time before they get their own 6G SIM and InstaTok account.

Strava, RWGPS, Komoot etc branching out to become social media with added nav features.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

Books.

Everything will be published in "e" form.  Some old nostalgic crusties and a few museums and libraries will maintain tonnes and tonnes of bound paper volumes purely for nostalgic and research purposes no doubt: but mostly, they will be gone.

Is Fahrenheit 451 now an e-book?

[Polar Bear]

Aren't they just incorporated into phones? They still exist, just not as a separate item.

A device that can take pictures and videos but can't post them to TikTok - not even to Instagram - is definitely a curiosity that will befuddle future generations.

GoPro.  But yes, it's only a matter of time before they get their own 6G SIM and InstaTok account.

DJI already make a very compact pocket action camera which is a compact handheld gimbal with an equally compact camera head unit.  It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see the potential for an eSIM enabled smartwatch body which unclips from it's wrist cradle and clips into a similarly sized small gimbal for filming and instant sharing.  I give it 5 years.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Shirley the move towards doing everything on a smartphone/tablet is basically thin clients on the sly.

Yes - and other areas of computing are moving over to thin client.

TBH, I thought that the concept was dead over a decade ago. Desktops had so much processing power. But now the demand is on different types of computing; big number crunching for machine learning apps, specialised number crunching for graphics for example.

This is all much more efficiently handled by specialised shared resources. In a data centre model those specialised resources can be spun up on demand (particularly with the event of VM for everything and FPGA in the data centre). Heck, some of it is even handled in the network cards, never even makes it to the destination computer.

Gaming is gradually moving to thin client model. The uber-powerful graphics cards required to calculate and render games will die out. They are proportionally too damn expensive (compared to the motherboards and CPU)!

 

[rogerzilla]

Books.

Everything will be published in "e" form.  Some old nostalgic crusties and a few museums and libraries will maintain tonnes and tonnes of bound paper volumes purely for nostalgic and research purposes no doubt: but mostly, they will be gone.

Is Fahrenheit 451 now an e-book?

I read it on a Kindle.  Sub-John Wyndham, tbh.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Books.

Everything will be published in "e" form.  Some old nostalgic crusties and a few museums and libraries will maintain tonnes and tonnes of bound paper volumes purely for nostalgic and research purposes no doubt: but mostly, they will be gone.

Is Fahrenheit 451 now an e-book?

I read it on a Kindle.  Sub-John Wyndham, tbh.

I'd put it on Tinder.

[ian]

Shirley the move towards doing everything on a smartphone/tablet is basically thin clients on the sly.

Yes - and other areas of computing are moving over to thin client.

TBH, I thought that the concept was dead over a decade ago. Desktops had so much processing power. But now the demand is on different types of computing; big number crunching for machine learning apps, specialised number crunching for graphics for example.

This is all much more efficiently handled by specialised shared resources. In a data centre model those specialised resources can be spun up on demand (particularly with the event of VM for everything and FPGA in the data centre). Heck, some of it is even handled in the network cards, never even makes it to the destination computer.

Gaming is gradually moving to thin client model. The uber-powerful graphics cards required to calculate and render games will die out. They are proportionally too damn expensive (compared to the motherboards and CPU)!

I think while broadly true for storage and larger processing capacity, the average cheap laptop already offers more power than most people need, they don't need to offload to the cloud. Certainly for work, we just spin something with the required spec up on Amazon. I think it's probably a case of semantics.

I think what also will disappear is people who complain they don't have a capable smartphone, of course...

[Cudzoziemiec]

I think what also will disappear is people who complain they don't have a capable smartphone, of course...

I don't think so. My phone's seven or eight years old and there are various things it won't do cos it's running an old version of Android. In some cases this might be a blessing in disguise (it won't run the NHS Covid app) but sometimes it's definitely not. So I buy a new one – and in seven or eight years it will be outdated again. I don't think everyone is going to be getting a new phone every other year, for all sorts of reasons.