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.
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.