Nintendo Wii: Sold like gangbusters.

64bit Processors: The computing standard.

Battlestar Galactica: Considered one of the greatest sci-fi series of all time.

Facebook: Continues to be the world’s leading social media platform by literally BILLIONS of users.

High Definition: HD only got even more HD.

iPhone: Set the standard for mobile smartphone form factor and function to this day 16 years later.

  • kbity@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.