12 Obsolete Technologies Americans Still Use

Consumerism: Use something because it works (regardless of its age) and we'll mock you for not replacing it with something newer.

If you use these products and they work for you, awesome. You know who misses out on the benefits of you switching? Corporations.

So laugh at others for saving money while you spend half your paychecks on what's new and cool, just because it's new and cool. /rant

A fairly stupid article, which seems to be pushing the silly idea that as soon as neat new tech A becomes popular, old tech B suddenly becomes completely obsolete and useless. The "cult of the new" you might call it.

In reality almost all new tech, even that which is a good general replacement for something older, involves tradeoffs. Sometimes the bad points outweigh the good ones for use-cases slightly out of the mainstream. In other cases, the advantages of the new tech simply aren't great enough to warrant replacing something you already own.

[I own a (small) old CRT TV. A new LCD TV might be neat and appeal to my gadget instinct, but ... why bother? I don't really use it so much, and the old one works well enough. I just don't care about it very much, and would rather spend the money on something I do care about.]

I can't tell if this article is supposed to be mocking these technologies or justifying their use.

I don't see why landlines are dying, mobile phones are way too expensive for general use. Hell, I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have a landline.

Actually, I can see why people want Dot Matrix Printers, http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers sums it nicely.

Also, CRTs don't have only disadvantages, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray_tube#Advantages_and... explains.

The problem with faxes is that people continue to (wrongly) assume that you can't spoof them. Especially now that you can fax arbitrary PDF.

I'd take a CRT television or computer monitor over any widescreen flat display. The one I have next to my some-what old LCD looks much better when playing video. It can render 640x480 games correctly without some horrible scaling artefacts.

I also wish there were still more pay phones in my local area.

Fax machines are the big one. They were obsolete ten years ago and still cheerfully screwing up documents and wasting paper today.

I'd argue that the printer and books pretty much qualify.

In other words poor people, people living in rural areas and people in niche markets are using old technology. Hardly a surprise.