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Gadget Graveyard

W

Wool

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/01/18/gadget-graveyard-voters-cd-roms-are-doomed/

CD-ROMs and radios are the gadgets most likely to go extinct, as determined in a "Gadget Graveyard" voting contest.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers organized the contest.

Radios came in second on the Gadget Graveyard list with 58 percent "yes" votes, followed by MP3 players with 55 percent, DVDs with 53 percent, and cable boxes with 51 percent. The voting may reflect how consumers have been gravitating toward online streaming or Internet downloads for TV shows, films and music entertainment.
 
I'm guessing that the typical CES respondent is skewed younger, as opposed to older, and typical of his/her age they see progress moving forward and not remaining stable.

So long as we have "personal transportation devices" (cars) we will have radios but they may not look or operate via RF OTA as they do now.

So long as people want to store home or theatrical movies we will have "personal storage systems" and right now DVD's and CD's are far cheaper and more useful than buying a bunch of flash sticks.

Desktop PC's will exist as long as people need robust, "multi-function computing systems" with enough horsepower to handle video editing and a plethora of other CPU-intensive functions.

MP3 players are still far cheaper than cell phones so will be with us awhile. I have a Sansa Clip which is the size of two ordinary postage stamps, can record and has a <gulp> FM "radio" to boot. The smallest and cheapest cell phone can't do that. And if I lose it I'm out maybe $12. Try that on your cell phone!
 
Wool said:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/01/18/gadget-graveyard-voters-cd-roms-are-doomed/

CD-ROMs and radios are the gadgets most likely to go extinct, as determined in a "Gadget Graveyard" voting contest.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers organized the contest.

Radios came in second on the Gadget Graveyard list with 58 percent "yes" votes, followed by MP3 players with 55 percent, DVDs with 53 percent, and cable boxes with 51 percent. The voting may reflect how consumers have been gravitating toward online streaming or Internet downloads for TV shows, films and music entertainment.
Click to expand...

MP3 players may go away in the near future, since smartphones have that capability. I think CD-ROMs are already gone, but DVD-ROMs (and DVDs) are still prevalent. Radios? Still many years away from extinction.

Online streaming is far from perfect. Unless you have a good, fiber-based internet provider, quality is variable. DSL is still very iffy (I just went to DSL from cable a couple of months ago, and it is barely adequate for video streaming).

Of course, I still have my obsolete VHS player and tape collection. ;D
 
I still have a standalone mp3 player but now just use my phone for that purpose. I don't understand why cable boxes are on the list since the cablecos are pushing digital cable these days (and Comcast just went all digital in Little Rock last year making analog cable-ready TV's not so.
 
KeithE4 said:
DSL is still very iffy (I just went to DSL from cable a couple of months ago, and it is barely adequate for video streaming).
Click to expand...

There are several flavors of DSL and your local provider is a key ingredient. After a year of frustration with my local cable provider (outages mostly) I switched to the phone company VDSL at 7M down speed and it has proven fine for streaming. And in three years of service I have had about 2 hours of downtime. Not to mention it is cheaper than cable. My next door neighbor is an IT work-from-home guy and he runs 20M down and has had no glitches either.
 
landtuna said:
KeithE4 said:
DSL is still very iffy (I just went to DSL from cable a couple of months ago, and it is barely adequate for video streaming).
Click to expand...

There are several flavors of DSL and your local provider is a key ingredient. After a year of frustration with my local cable provider (outages mostly) I switched to the phone company VDSL at 7M down speed and it has proven fine for streaming. And in three years of service I have had about 2 hours of downtime. Not to mention it is cheaper than cable. My next door neighbor is an IT work-from-home guy and he runs 20M down and has had no glitches either.
Click to expand...

The quality of the phone wiring is a major factor. In an apartment, 3-4 Mbps is about as good as it gets, and CenturyLink said as much when I first asked about signing up with them. But so far, at least I've had no downtime - unlike the abomination called Ygnition Networks that we're stuck with as an alternative (the owners won't allow Cox in the complex).
 
I just bought a new Sansa Clip Zip MP3 player recently because it has more features than my phone. I don't doubt though that they will lose sales to smart phones in the future. It's already getting difficult to find good quality MP3 players that are between the more expensive IPods and cheap $20 or $30 models.
 
I listen to Sirius and Pandora through my smartphone. I plug an auxiliary cable from my phone and into the port in my dashboard. This allows me to play streaming audio through my speakers. If you have Bluetooth, this will work as well.

I haven't listened to local radio in a very very long time because it offers me nothing.
 
StereoBrain said:
I listen to Sirius and Pandora through my smartphone. I plug an auxiliary cable from my phone and into the port in my dashboard. This allows me to play streaming audio through my speakers. If you have Bluetooth, this will work as well.

I haven't listened to local radio in a very very long time because it offers me nothing.
Click to expand...

My car is too old to have either of those, but I use an FM transmitter connected between the cigarette lighter accessory socket and the headphone jack on my phone to listen to music or internet radio. Outside of local sports and the Sunday night blues show, I hardly listen to radio at all anymore.
 
I'm forever a radio nerd looking in from the outside, but its usefulness to me has dropped almost to zero as well. The amplified antenna on my car crapped out years ago and I never bothered to get it fixed. It's only a $50 part that I could probably install myself with an extra set of hands to help me, but I just don't see the value in it.

The mp3 player is my main companion and I listen to radio-based talk programming via it at my own convenience.

I have had really bad luck with phones and 'the cloud' and streaming. My first smartphone was on a 3G network that was too inconsistent to actually stream anything. I'd be lucky to get 5 minutes of streaming or one song on Pandora before it quit or timed out. I've got a new phone now on Verizon with LTE and streaming is flawless, but it's now on a data cap so I'm not streaming much if I can help it. And beyond that, this particular phone (which is badass in so many ways) has some huge shielding issues so I get hums and buzzes and burps through the AUX IN when it's connected to the car stereo. No other phones or devices do this, so it has to be the phone. So once again, I have a less than ideal streaming setup. Figures. ::)
 
My newest vehicle has the "base model" AM/FM CD (w/mp3 and wma support) radio but its best feature is that aux jack located near the 12v accessory outlet ;) I do listen to terrestrial radio some but mostly at night on the AM dial and to bandscan FM. Mobile streaming is iffy in this rural location so I do listen to podcasts on the smartphone unless I'm near a larger town.
 
Aux in jacks seem to be more and more available.

I like the idea that it would be possible to take a different AM radio and plug it into the car radio,
bypassing the AM tuner.

Getting another AM radio to work as well as the car radio may be a little trickier.
I just hate the muffled sound of most modern AM car radios, and have long wished for deliverance
from a "mandated" if bandwidth that for me, destroys at least half the value of radio.


I bought a mp3 player 2 months ago, and I can't seem to get the habit of using it, 'cause there's no actual time or place
in my life where the headphone isolation listening method is possible.

I mostly used it at the previous job (just swtiched jobs) plugged into the aux in jack of a boom box
in the lunch/break table area of a machine shop.

I tried using it in the car but it doesn't work nearly as well as the laptop does for playing mp3s.
At least for go-to-work. Vacation and long travel might make it more useful, but to me that
usually means I'd rather see what I can hear on local radio.
So for me the most likely gadget to die will be the mp3 player.
 
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