"A lot of things get sold as the next big thing, but what actually delivered?"
"The Internet. I remember when it was first starting out in the late 90s and nerds were saying it would change everything about the way we live and do business, etc and I was like yeah yeah…But it turned out they were right."
"George Foreman’s lean mean fat reducing grilling machine, for a while, until Air Fryers came along"
"LeBron James.
When he was still 16/17 people thought he would go on to be one of the greatest athletes of all time.
Spoiler alert: He did it."
"Amazon. It was clear fairly early on that it was going to be a huge disruption to bookstores, but it wasn’t clear that it was going to disrupt all the stores."
"Harry Potter."
"The iPhone"
"Wireless ear buds. They were mocked when announced but you rarely see anyone with wired ones anymore."
"Smaller cell phones, and then a little bit later, bigger cellphones"
"They have come a long, long way, but I would argue machine translation engines such as Google Translate would fit this description. Of course, it wasn’t initially that way, but after years and years of trial and error, they are quickly approaching human parity in certain language pairs and certain language fields. Which is slightly unsettling as a professional translator."
"Video calling. It took 30 years plus but it has changed how we communicate."
"3D-printing. I thought it was going to just be a short-term fad but it’s stuck around longer than I anticipated. It think drones might be the same way if they start using them for deliveries on a wide scale."
"Camera phones"
"iPads. They were widely laughed at, especially the name. People had been trying to sell tablets for years with no success."
"Sliced bread
People are still buying it, if I recall correctly"
"Electric scooters are becoming what Segway wanted to be
A bicycle for the lazy"
"Solid State Drives. They’re better in nearly every way. Faster, smaller, lighter, lower power, and by now, cheaper up to about 512GB. Spinning hard drives are still cheaper if you want to store terabytes and are ok with being less efficient.
The chip will wear out after being written too much, but that limit is way beyond what you’ll do before you buy another computer."
"Online shopping. I acknowledge that I’m old fashioned and still prefer to go to stores and try things on, but in my town, there’s only one store left I buy clothes at. Our mall is almost entirely vacant spaces. Of the four cornerstone stores they had, only one remains. One was replaced by a grocery store. A Macy’s became a VA Clinic. The other has just been vacant for 6 years now."
"Reading the entire question before you answer it."
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Don't worry about google language translation, we still need professionals. Have you seen how bias the AI has become?
3d printing is a fad. it's still in small areas like commercial or university, but not mainstream. i know a few people who have printers that are stuck back in a closet with old clothes. they're just not practical.
Yup again on machine translations (MTL). If you've ever had to read a foreign language novel via Google Translation, then you're well aware of how it melts your brain with how much gibberish it is.
#12 LOVE the C64 animation!
#14 Well, that's because everything before the iPad really sucked. I had a few of those "before" thingys and all of them were just horrible to use.
#16 Not sure those are around long enough to really say that they're succeeded. Cities like Paris alerady banning them...
#19 Wat?
This. It's not a decision by the people. And it still looks like you are wearing a tampon in your ear.
Exactly! But, I have Bluetooth headphones that are wired. To each other.