One Laptop per Child was all the rage at the time too! I had a little Compaq, would have been about ten inches like the others in this thread! Sadly it got pinched in a house burglary a few years back, but I missed the little thing. Tablets/iPads just aren't quite the same - even if they are faster with flash storage!
When I was a freshman in college they gave us all a similar HP model and told everyone to use it, the only catch was it was the base model and not powerful enough to accomplish anything. I hated that little machine
I had a HP Mini311, Atom CPU and 11.6" screen, 3GB of RAM, wifi/bluetooth, and it had a dedicated NVIDIA GPU, it was impressive at the time in 2008, and a HDMI port, was able to read 1080p using GPU only. I loved the form factor. Since then I favour laptop with 13 or 14", I don't want/need a 17.3" laptop with DVD and all!
Dedicated graphics? Super fancy! It wasn't until I started buying GPUs for my PC quite recently that I realised how expensive those chips were (and are). Or how hot they get, I'm amazed a tiny little 11.6" thing could keep itself from overheating!
Even if I'm much happier with a big ole ATX PC these days (to keep temps low and fans quiet) and stay at home a lot more, I agree that there is something special about small lil pieces of tech.
They're lovely little devices. I wish you could get something like the GPD P2 Max from a mainstream company like Dell, if only so you had someone to contact for support if something goes wrong. Subnotebooks and other ultraportable PCs are a favourite of mine.
To be fair, a lot of these are accurate, or at least were at the time.
Multi-GPU just never caught on. There's a reason you don't see even the most hardcore gaming machines running SLI today.
The Wii's novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didn't have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.
Spore is largely forgotten, despite the enormous hype it had before release. It's kind of the Avatar of video games.
It took years for 64-bit to become relevant to the average user (and hell, there are still devices being sold with only 4GB of memory even today!). Plenty of Core 2 Duo machines still shipped with 32-bit versions of Windows and people didn't notice or care because basically no apps average people cared about were 64-bit native back then and you were lucky to have more than 4GB in your entire machine, let alone need more than that for one program.
Battlestar Galactica (2003) fell off sharply after season 2 and its ending was some of the most insulting back-to-nature religious tripe that has ever had the gall to label itself as science-fiction.
Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)
I definitely know people who didn't get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, they're still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.
The Eee PC and the other netbooks were only good when they were running a lightweight operating system like Linux or Windows XP. Once Windows 7 Starter became the operating system of choice for netbooks, the user experience fell of a cliff and people tired of them. Which is a shame, because I love little devices like UMPCs.
The original iPhone was really limited for 2007. No third-party applications, no 3G support, no voice memos, you could only get it on a single carrier... the iPhone family did make a huge impact in the long run, but it wasn't until the 3GS that it was a true competitor to something like a Symbian device.
The only entry on this list that's really off the mark is Facebook, which even at the time was quickly reshaping the world. And I say that as someone who hates Zuck's guts and has proudly never had a Facebook account.
It was, but back then people thought motion control would be the future. But Kinect got canned and even the Switch only has a dumbed down version of it
It sold really, really strongly early on, but sales peaked in 2009 and started falling considerably from there year-on-year as the novelty of motion controls wore out and nobody could make a good case for it as a lasting element of future console games.
Motion controls were being hyped up around 2007-10 as the next big shift in how games were played; the 5th gen (Saturn/PSX/N64) took the industry 3D, the 6th gen (Dreamcast/PS2/Xbox/GameCube) introduced online multiplayer, and people thought motion controls were going to be the 7th gen's big paradigm shift in future game design.
But they weren't. The Xbox Series X controller doesn't even have motion controls at all, while the PS5 controller only has a gyroscope, something PlayStation controllers have had going back to SixAxis in the PS3 controller. Nobody designs games around "waggle" anymore, and outside of VR, Nintendo are basically the only people still making games that are centred on motion controls.
Possibly, now that we have much tighter integration between different chips using die-to-die interconnects like Apple's "UltraFusion" and AMD's "Infinity Fabric" to avoid the latency and microstutter issues that came with old-fashioned multi-GPU cards like the GTX 690 and Radeon HD 7990 XT.
As long as software can make proper use of the multiple processing units, I think multi-GPU cards have a chance to make a comeback... at least if anyone can actually afford the bloody things. Frankly, GPU pricing is a bit fucked at the moment even before we consider the idea of cards with multiple dies.
undefined> Downloading movies over the internet ultimately fell between the cracks outside of piracy. Most people stream films and TV now, and people who want the extra quality tend to buy a Blu-Ray disc rather than download from iTunes (can you even still do that with modern shows?)
I definitely know people who didn’t get an HDTV until 4K screens hit the market, and people still buy standard-def DVDs. Hell, they’re still outselling Blu-Rays close to 20 years later. Calling HD a dud is questionable, but it was definitely not seen as a must-have by the general public, partly because that shit was expensive back in 2008.
I feel like both of these are wrong.
streaming is just the next step to downloading movies. Downloading movies was never really a "thing" and this is really just some tech writer not understanding the term streaming. Netflix had just launched in 2007 as a streaming video service and this is the hyped thing they are referring to. They are not referring to downloading movies on iTunes or whatever. If they are, then my argument is no one ever hyped that up, especially not in 2008.
The Wii’s novelty wore off fairly quickly (about the time Kinect happened), and it didn’t have much of a lasting impact on the gaming industry once mobile gaming slurped up the casual market.
It absolutely did have a lasting impact. It changed Nintendo forever. It's seen as one of the best examples of a Blue Ocean strategy working. It's why we had the Wii U and thus eventually the Switch. Which in turn influenced the Steam Deck. Wii also directly influenced it's competitors to create the failed Kinect and failed Playstation Move. It was the best-selling TV console from 2006 to 2013 until Playstation 4 launched which quickly was replaced in 2017 by the Switch becoming the best-selling console.
Lastly, this article was fairly wrong and clearly written as a fluff piece without substance. If you look at the original magazine https://issuhub.com/view/index/1138 they don't even go into detail or expand on their thoughts. It's a fluff page.
They are not referring to downloading movies on iTunes or whatever. If they are, then my argument is no one ever hyped that up, especially not in 2008.
I know Microsoft was making a big deal about its Zune video store for the Xbox 360 at the time (2006-8) that let you download movies over the internet in standard or high definition, to either rent or keep. And of course Apple also offered digital video downloads through iTunes. So it's definitely not something that no-one in the tech industry was hyping up.
But just in 10 years 1080 HD became 75% of the PC gaming base.
"Just 10 years"? 10 years is quite a long time in the computing space. In those 10 years, a lot of price reductions and product line consolidation happened. Hell, back in 2008, 16:10 was still the standard PC display resolution, hence the 3.57% of users with 1920x1200 panels and the popularity of 1680x1050. 16:9 PC monitors didn't start becoming a big thing until the years after that when production of 1080p flat-panels increased and prices on them came down. By 2017, 1080p monitors were cheap and abundant and you'd have to really look to find other resolutions. Plenty of people had monitors die or become obsolescent in that time.
[The Wii] also directly influenced it's competitors to create the failed Kinect and failed Playstation Move.
I will grant you that the Wii marked a huge shift for Nintendo, letting it move away being a participant in the "console wars" - the rat race of ever-increasing power and competing for hardcore player mindshare. And it sold incredibly well.
Yet in terms of its impact on video games themselves and on how its competitors designed consoles, the Wii was something of a flash in the pan. The Motion controls never really caught on as a long-term trend, only really surviving in the form of VR games and Nintendo's own motion-based titles for the Switch. PlayStation Move and the Kinect never led to anything, but neither did the Wii U's gamepad.
And the Switch itself arguably reflects something the company has had one eye on going back to at least the GameCube days, so I wouldn't necessarily say that the Wii was a necessary step in its development, at least outside of the integration of gyroscopes into its Joy-Con controllers. The impression I get is that the Wii U was partly Nintendo wanting to play around with tablets back when they were still novel (circa 2008 when the Wii U concept was being worked on) and partly that they wanted to build the Switch but the tech didn't exist yet.
Lastly, this article was fairly wrong and clearly written as a fluff piece without substance. If you look at the original magazine they don't even go into detail or expand on their thoughts. It's a fluff page.
Yeah, this style of fluff piece ranking was (and probably still is) very common for magazines published by Future. I recognise the presentation style from various other publications like the Official Xbox Magazine from back in that period. Some of the entries (like Battlestar Galactica) feel a lot like filler to meet a nice, round number 10.
It's kinda sad how SLI and Crossfire faded away. I used to think multiple GPUs were amazing and wanted my own SLI setup! But technology went a different way. It's probably better for my wallet though!
To be fair, Spore was overhyped - it was fun enough, but not the total gamechanger that it was forecast to be. Will Wright had two amazing strikes with Sim City and then the Sims, and then a whole pile of very middle-of-the-road simulation games, so it wasn't that hard to foresee.
And EEE PCs occupied the uncomfortable niche where they didn't do a lot that your phone couldn't, while being extremely limited compared to a £300 'proper' cheapo laptop. That's not really a business model.
So yeah, that's two things that anyone could have seen coming, versus eight where they're so massively completely wrong they couldn't have failed harder if they tried. Would have been better to call this list 'things which are not massively overhyped', they'd have done better.
Yeah, when they talked about procedural generation I was imagining like, photorealistic details or custom textures on the fly, something way more advanced than what was available at the time. I didn't really understand it but it sounded fancy! But all it really meant was like a random map and random species being chosen. It didn't quite live up to the marketing, sadly.
The Wii was extremely popular. For years, it outsold every other console combined by several orders of magnitude.
Netbooks absolutely were overhyped, and the market for them died really quickly. They were barely usable, and by 2010 when tablets really started hitting the market, there wasn't a space for them anymore.
HDTVs weren't overhyped, they were just expensive, and in 2008 there wasn't that much content to take advantage of it. I had a 32" 720p TV that I paid nearly $700 for in 2007. Now, you can gt a 40-something inch 4K tv for a little over $200, and there's plenty of content to make it worthwhile (though the real-world benefit of 4k on such a small set is debatable).
The first iPhone was so incredibly polarizing at the time. The hype machine leading up to that announcement was unlike any other product launch I can recall. So it was never going to live up to that kind of hype. And while it was limited in features for it's time, it was clear more was on the horizon. And given how it not only revolutionized the phone market, but also the web as a whole, we know how it all ended up.
In 2008 there was still new stuff being shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio in some places never mind HD, I remember when Top Gear did the polar challenge the year before it was a real showcase for HDTV.
The Wii was overhyped though. Most players never bought any other game than Wii sports. I had an unlocked Wii and played all the good titles, and there are not more than ~10 of them. Most Wii games (looking at you, NFS) felt like half-baked mobile ports.
And the Wii U sales showed that. Yeah, the Wii sold to tons of casuals, but hardly any of them upgraded, even though the Wii U was a much more capable system.
The most frequent question I hear to this day when talking with former Wii owners is "What's the benefit of the Wii U and why would I need to upgrade?" That's a question I have never heard in relation to any other game console. Or have you ever heard the sentence "What's so special about a PS3 if I already have a PS2? Why would I need to upgrade?"
And this setup the Wii U to be such a huge commercial flop that Nintendo effectively cancelled their stationary game console line.
I would say it was seriously overhyped, similarly to the Netbooks. It was a fad, it was cool, boatloads of non-techy-people bought them, and none of them bought the successor so it all died quickly.
The Wii had a ton of great games outside of the Nintendo specific ones. The Conduit 1 and 2, Golden Eye, tons of fighting games, it gave us No More Heroes. The Force Unleashed somewhat had the best edition on the Wii (this is mostly subjective but it's a strong consensus that the Wii's version held up). Its main appeal to other consoles I think was how diverse the games could try to be - silly games like Boom Blox and De Blob, and niche ones like Endless Ocean for all the marine biologist kids.
Granted, I grew up with some of these games and I'm not trying to say that the Wii's extensive library is all stellar. But there are many gems amongst it. The Wii's popularity drew a lot of attention to games that would just be scrolled past as shovelware on other online stores (Xbox Live mostly). Few of these were outside of the Xbox Arcade or whatever it was, but on the Wii they would be digital and sometimes have physical editions. Also because of how wide its demographic, it had a few surprisingly decent Barbie-esque and Horse care games. I mean, it had so many games made for it that only just stopped getting games in 2020.
The Wii U was an attempt to bridge the gap between the success of their portable line, the DS, and the Wii. Growing up all any kind ever wanted was getting their consoles connected. But then when the Wii U finally came out and was marketed, its main selling point was that you could play your game on the tablet while someone else was using the family TV. I mean really, it was exactly what every 10-14 year old into Nintendo was talking about up until Nintendo actually made it.
Part of it was marketing, I remember a lot of people being surprised that the gamepad wasn't what was being sold, but a whole console with it.
It's crazy that it failed honestly but at the same time it's totally understandable. You can't try to be both a home console and a "portable one" when what's portable is connected to the Wii 2. It was the genetic imprint that wanted to be everything the Switch became.
The Wii U was an amazing platform specifically because of the second screen. It lended itself nicely for asymmetric multiplayer (Rayman Legends is so good on the Wii U) and the ability to play without using the TV is also pretty nice.
Yeah marketing was certainly an issue, but the other issue is that the Wii was mostly owned by casuals and casuals don't need to upgrade ever.
Hence why the Wii received it's last game (Just Dance 2020) a whole year later than the Wii U received it's last game (Just Dance 2019).
To be fair the only thing that iphone had going for it was the form factor and the screen. Releasing without 3g or picture messaging totally put me off of it when it came out. Obviously it got better though lol
Yeah, Apple spent a lot of investment getting the thing going, but it is certainly still a modern powerhouse. Even if worldwide iOS has a smaller marketshare than Android, Apple is huge in Japan, the US and UK.
While I don’t think the iphone is over-hyped I’ve started fantasizing about going back to a dumb phone. The LG enV 2 is still the best phone I ever owned.
Were they wrong somewhere? I mean, come on, a smartphone without 3G or third-party apps? The Eee PC, who has ever heard of it after it was released? HD, we still have 720p and 1080i living 15 years later while you can buy an 8K TV for $500 in the store next door. Nobody uses Facebook any more. And the Wii that everybody bought was a lifeless piece of furniture three months later.
Lots of people forget how big of a joke the 1st iPhone was. It was expensive and it didn’t optimize web browsing like blackberry was doing. It couldn’t get enterprise email. Additionally it was tied only to ATTs network which was slow, and people buying iPhones basically crushed their network for two years or so.
I was going to say that I agree iPhones are smartphones are of no benefit, they don't do anything, I'm being sarcastic, but looking closer at the list, how did they get it all so very wrong?
Don't need 64 bit for more than 4GB? Every new computer should have 32GB and 64GB is not unreasonable.
Don't need full HD? How does 8K resolution sound with 16K being developed?
I question their basic knowledge and experience with technological advancements for higher demand, more complicated work loads, and adcancements for security protections like 64 bit memory address randomization that can't exist on 32 bit hardware.
If they are using Windows, having 4GB for each core helps to element the need to add RAM in a few years as programs get bloated and will utilize more hardware resources.
It's to fully garauntee zero risk of pagefiling in te future. That's why for people who have a Ryzen 9 I say they must have 64GB otherwise the CPU will frequently be waiting on RAM to free up space during workloads.
Haha, I mean I'm using up 8 gigs of ram with 10 chrome tabs open, 16gb is definitely starting to look a little lightweight than I'd like at the moment. I built my PC in 2020 with 16gb and around the end of 2021 I ended upgrading with two more sticks, just to keep things running smoothly!
With you adding my RAM, that's exactly why I say 32GB of 4GB per core, to make sure everything runs while making sure not all hardware is being used so everything runs at max performance.
For example if an 8 core 32GB system is using 6 cores and 14GB, then all programs are running as they should be with ease. But if a 16GB system is using 14GB, there's not enough memory and might already be starting to pagefile.
They're probably referring to streaming. I don't know when this article came out, but considering they're talking about literally the first iPhone I guess we can assume it's 2007 or 2008, and Netflix started streaming back in 2007.
Apart from that, perhaps they're referring to when Amazon started offering movies to buy or rent online, but I don't know when they started doing that.
It's funny how piracy was a step forward compared to the industry. People around 2008 hyping downloading movies from the internet, when pirate sites have been doing that since early 2000s, of, perhaps, even earlier.
The first movie available to buy on iTunes was High School Musical in March 2006. Apple then launched the iTunes Movie Store in September and by the next year (sometime around when this was probably written) was bragging about having sold a couple million movies.
Anyway, I think they're likely talking about downloading proper rather than streaming.
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