If you’re reading this text right now, chances are you’re old enough to have witnessed the creation of a technology that was supposed to be a “killer app” but eventually failed to do so. Betamax promised higher picture quality than VHS, but it lost the videotape format wars, anyway. Microsoft made an arguably better iPod with the Zune, but still failed to beat the mighty Apple. The Windows Phone was ambitious, but few people cared.
Toyota launched a mass-produced fuel cell vehicle with the Mirai, but it’s been functionally obsolete for a while. But hey, you can get them for pretty cheap! 4jim comments:
Will the trunk space fit my Betamax, laserdisc, and Zune?
Speaking of old technology, I wrote about a modern camper adopting some old-school fiberglass techniques. As it turns out, I forgot that flatscreen CRTs were a thing. From Ash78:
Galileo: “Hey Thor, the world doesn’t revolve around you!”Too nerdy?
How about correcting the term “flat screen TV” and saying “Flat panel TV.” I had a flat screen TV in the late 90s. It was a very heavy CRT, but the screen was flat.
And that’s it for today’s episode of “Errmm, Actually…”!
I love this. And I smile every time I see a Scamp or Casita in someone’s driveway. Or Lance, for that matter. I just don’t like quasi-monopolies or low-quality crap
I mentioned a really old and hilariously heavy flatscreen TV that my parents bought when I was a kid. TheDrunkenWrench noted:
If it was THAT heavy, you’re probably thinking of the old Rear Projection models. Which were also flat screen. But their large picture was not as good of quality as a CRT of the same era.
I guess while we’re on the subject of old tech, I recently picked up a Japanese-market PlayStation 2!
This morning, Matt asked if there is any automaker that can dethrone Toyota as the world’s largest. RidesBicyclesButLovesCars gives a creative answer:
Mattel is already bigger than Toyota as the largest car manufacturer in the world. They own the Matchbox and Hot Wheels brands and sell over 700 million cars a year. We will ignore the fact that humans can’t drive these cars.
There you go. Have a great evening!
I still use my Zune to this day and love it. It was a better experience than the iPod and the Zune software was much better than iTunes as well. But as Microsoft did with Windows Phone they got into the game too late…
Ah hydrogen, the rotary engine of its time. Lots of promise but so many hurdles. Mazda experimented with it back in the early 2000s producing the RX-8 Hydrogen RE. As a combustion fuel it solved the emissions problem of the rotary (except for NOx emissions which are still an issue due to the combustion temperatures) it offered much less fuel range. While hydrogen is more energy dense than gasoline on a mass basis (@ 2.7 times greater), gasoline is much higher on a volume basis (@ 4 times higher). What this means is you need to store 4 times as many gallons of hydrogen than gasoline to get the same amount of energy. The solving of this problem is very similar to the energy inefficiency problem of the rotary. Its like trying to swat a fly with your hand, just as you are about to hit it, it takes off and lands just a few feet away so you try again.
If anyone dethrones Toyota, it will be either a Chinese automaker, or the Renault-Volkswagen-Stellantis Group (following their next two sets of mergers, after which, I assume, they’ll name themselves something like Groundplane)
How dare you insult the Zune with this page.
I had a Zune 30 and a Zune HD, and I still contend they were excellent devices, just arrived too late after iPods had already taken over. The Zune ecosystem brought the concept of full music access for one monthly fee WAY before Spotify or Apple Music.
The Zune HD in particular had a powerful Tegra processor and inky black OLED display. It had some fantastic 3D games like AudioSurf, Project Gotham Racing, and a Tony Hawk-type Vans skating game all included.
Ultimately the ubiquitous Apple support for things like car connections and the rise of smartphones drove me over to iPhones, but Zune will also have a soft spot in my heart.
I knew a guy who had a zune phone and the amount of crap that just didn’t work right ended up making him ditch it for an iPhone before it became embarrassing. He was a Zune stan for quite a while while he had it too. Reminds me of the Tesla stans actually, especially the early adopter ones that make excuses for their product being half baked because it’s so cutting edge.
There was never a Zune phone as such, just the “Windows phone”, which rolled in the music aspects of the Zune software. I think everyone agrees all the Windows phone attempts were terrible.
The actual Zune devices were solely media players, and they were ahead of their time in a lot of ways, like being able to tap two Zunes together to share a song with a friend, full 3D games with crispy graphics, or a single monthly subscription to access the entire library.
It was just too late to market with Apple already dominating the space.
No I don’t agree. I actually liked my Lumia 822 and the windows phone os after the 8.1 update. But it was too little too late.
See my comment just below, the MS “Kin” phone had a Zune player, but was a lot less featured than an actual Windows Phone. It was slow, buggy, but even when it didn’t work, I could at least use it as a Zune player.
There was never a time in my life I felt like more of a “have not” than when a good chunk of my coworkers started getting iPhones.
From about 1997 until about 2008, there was a period of time where almost everyone paid nothing for a cell phone, plus about $40/mo for service. Overnight all of that changed and here we are today. Smartphones quickly became a must-have and the market has adapted really quickly — now you can barely go through a day without one (and I don’t mean convenience, but actual need).
I owned 3 Zunes and loved them all. The Built in DAC, that Hexic game, the ability to share songs with other Zunes. Still get mad that someone broke into my MK5 Rabbit in 2017(!!!) and decided it was worth stealing.
So many artists I cant remember and demos I cant find anymore sitting in a dump somewhere after they realized it wasn’t worth anything secondhand.
Also, that PS2 looks sick and I’m pumped that translucent tech is popular again. Makes me want to mod my Steam Deck with an Atomic Purple shell.
i have one of them as they were on sale via amazon
I can (slightly) one-up the Zune comment by sharing that my wife and I both had Microsoft Kin “smartphones” around 2010, which included Zune software.
It was a weird gray area between a flip phone and a smartphone, and was basically free with contract…the hack was that you didn’t need a data plan! So it had Wifi, but you could otherwise just use it elswhere as a regular phone and it had a full physical keyboard.
I think there were only 1 or 2 phones like that ever introduced (Pantech Jest was another!) because we had just had our first kid, my wife was a SAHM for the first time, and the idea of paying over $100/mo, PLUS over $1,000 for two iPhones, seemed like the most insane thing I’d ever been told. A couple years later, it was the norm.
My Zune HD was an incredible little player. Kicked the iPod Touch’s butt in ALL areas (size, speed, capacity, OS, and price). Too bad the previous Zune model was a little half baked and made the whole product line become a punchline.
We had a couple of Zune HD’s. I think we still have at least one of them kicking around somewhere. It was a good device, and didn’t require running desktop itunes which was absolute garbage on Windows.
I had a few Windows phones also.
I bought a 32” Sony flat screen CRT that was literally 258 pounds! Would have been around 1999.
The sheer weight is the reason I bought a 27″ Trinitron instead of the 32″. I could lift and move the 27″ by myself, mostly.
I don’t think I know the actual weight of any of those TVs that I help move around, but
1) Apparently they were really heavy and not just bulky – that’s for confirming that.
2) I don’t know why they made the bottom (where you had to put your hands to carry it) out of a cheese grater.
I considered one about the same time, but ended up with a normal curved screen instead, because my apartment had a lot of windows. My thinking was that if there was a glare spot on a curved screen, I could just move to a different seat, but on a flat screen this might not be as effective.
My dad bought one of those too. We had to borrow my friend’s full-size Dodge van to bring it home and it took 4 people to carry it into the house.
We have one of those! Hubs got it cheap off of Craigslist in 2014 for retro gaming, but we had to haul that boulder of a TV out of a DC area townhouse. Of course it was also in an upstairs bedroom. Somehow we made it out of there and into my car with no damage or wanting to murder one another.
The seller also gave us the stand it sat on, which had a clip for the strap that was attached to the TV so it could not easily be pushed over onto the floor.
Speaking of large and heavy CRT TVs, here’s a really entertaining and fascinating YouTube video from a channel called Shank Mods that one of my kids sent me about how some people from various parts of the world worked together to rescue what might be the only known surviving and working example of the largest CRT TV ever produced (45″!!!!) from being thrown out and ship it from Japan to the USA: https://youtu.be/JfZxOuc9Qwk?si=WQhGUlR33iXgbxUA
Highly recommended and kudos to all the people involved in saving such an impressive piece of technology from Japan’s bubble economy era.
I just watched that too, it was fascinating!
That was a great video… Watched that when it dropped a few months back.
I saw your post at 0:30 my local time, and I knew I was going to spend the next half hour or so watching an YT video about a big ass CRT, instead of sleeping. I REGRET NOTHING!
Quick note, this past week the sign in page freezes, so you can’t pan down to get the sign in tab. My workaround was to switch the screen to float, then I could get the tab.
Back in like 2002 I got roped into helping a friend’s sister move. She was on the second floor of an apartment building and her new apartment was on the fourth floor of a fancy new high-rise. I didn’t think much of it until I saw her fiance’s fancy TV – a 34″ Sony Trinitron flat screen CRT. It was at least 200lbs, had no real place to grip it, and was just big enough it wouldn’t fit in the elevator at either building. Carrying that stupid thing up all those stairs was the worst, but the picture quality was fantastic (for the time).
Ha. Yeah, funny that you got roped into moving that 34″ CRT TV, especially without the use of an elevator. Oof!! You might or might not appreciate it all the more to watch this YouTube video which I’ve already posted elsewhere in comments about the efforts involved in moving a 45″ (yes, 45″!!) CRT TV from the second floor of a restaurant (without the use of elevators, either) in Japan to the USA: https://youtu.be/JfZxOuc9Qwk?si=WQhGUlR33iXgbxUA
34″? I would have offered to buy them a new flat-panel one for $100 and tossed the CRT out the window. 😉
Well, this was 2002, so $100 didn’t buy much in the way of flat-panel TVs…
Oh, ha. I missed that part. 🙂
I quie like the idea that Mattel is the biggest car manufacturer, it’s right up there with LEGO producing more tires than any other company in the world. Useless fun trivia that always makes people laugh.
If you want the most-produced car that (some) humans can “drive”, I believe the production record goes to the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe.
I always wished they made a hatchback version.