Technology

I thought the iPad being just a giant iPhone was stupid and it wouldn’t catch on. Years on I use an iPad to read comic books in bed, though I guess tablets as a whole are kind of niche and not great as a productivity tool due to mobile OSs holding them back.

I thought touchscreens would never work out. But here we are in a generation where have touchscreens in cars too.

...yeah, i initally considered the `web an also-ran gopher knockoff, too...

I hate microsoft but really liked windows phone and cortana. Something about tiles made a lot of sense and the keyboard was clean af.

I am very sure they were the first to have url bar above the keyboard in their browser WHICH WAS VERY HELPFUL BECAUSE YOUR FINGERS ARE ALREADY AT THE BOTTOM HALF OF THE PHONE LIKE OMFG.

like there was so many little things they did that just worked and worked well. rip windows phone, i will tell my grandkids about you.

"Bitcoin will never take". I mined a few at the very beginning when it was easy, out of curiosity, and didn't bother backing up because it was useless anyway. Ahem.

I thought that AMDs move with Ryzen being heavily multi core architecture was dumb, and that they'd fail like bulldozer

The Wii. Previous gen console specs. Silly gimmick controller. Best selling peripheral was a step.

Most popular shit in the history of everything.

I never thought tablet computers would become popular among the mainstream public.

When the iPad first came out, it was functionally worse than even the cheap netbooks, and I didn't see much purpose in the larger screen with phones getting bigger and bigger every year. Wireless display was also already available, so I envisioned people would just cast content to a TV if they really wanted a bigger screen. Even reading articles etc seemed to be already covered by eReaders, which were already available for half a decade by the time the iPad released.

Little did I know how brain rotted people would become.

Tbh I personally still don't see the utility in most tablets, except in specific niches like in digital note taking/drawing, or industrial cases where it becomes a glorified HUD.

Desertec failed due to geopolitical considerations (basically the Europeans didn't want to have their next energy sourced from a region outside their control and therefore stopped funding the project)

I wrote a term paper once about how twitter would enable citizen journalism and lead to a more informed public and a healthier, more direct democracy. I got an A.

I was a pretty huge fan of Zune and I still miss it.

Not me but my dad. He was friends with a guy who was loosely related to someone relatively high up at Google when they first went public. His friend offered him 500 shares at 50¢ a pop. His life right now would have been wildly different.

When Steam first appeared (and was required to play Half-Life 2 IIRC), I thought that was a ridiculous idea to have a middle man to play a game. Well, what do I know, everyone loves Steam now (yet hates on other launchers).

You were pretty correct about Apple, it got saved by Microsoft who kept it alive to skirt monopoly laws.

Physical buttons on phones would win out over gimmicky touch screens

In the mid-nineties I passionately believed that the internet would democratize information and usher in a wonderful new era of well-informed critical thinking and general enlightenment. Basically the opposite has happened.

I thought blu-ray would supplant DVD-RW for storing and transferring data, including for buying software. Much like DVD replaced CD, which replaced diskettes. Turns out both were replaced by cloud and streaming, with a short interlude for USB sticks.

Al still have their niches, but buying software and storing data is pretty much all online now.

In the late 90s I saw a piece demonstrating an optical 3d storage system that had a capacity about an order of magnitude greater than the at the time brand new HD DVD and Bluray discs. I assumed this clearly superior format that already had a working demo would obviously kill other optical media. Turns out nobody could figure out how to manufacture one at a price anybody was willing to spend.