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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.
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.
Multi GPU video cards (not multiple video cards) might be making a comeback.
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.
Is it worth it to do this with something like a 3070?
I doubt it, people want stutter free gameplay and having multiple cards just introduces too much latency.
Are you joking? I thought the Wii was a wild success, I remember it being very popular.
I had an eee PC and while at the time it seemed nifty, it was truly never all that functional.
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.
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.
For the rest I agree though.
God, GoldenEye online was so amazing though for a long time. Only reason I got a Wii.
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.
I think the Netbook concept lives on in Chromebooks: Cheap, low power laptops that make sense in scenarios where higher cost laptops don't fit. Schools, kids, etc.
Some fraction of it was probably eaten by Raspberry Pi's as well. A 12V barrel plug was like the USB-C of 2008. For pennies, you got a intergrate anywhere Linux machine that could augment a lot of hackery.
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 only ones that look wrong to me are iPhone, Wii, and downloading movies from the internet. The rest are dead on. HD literally did exactly what they said, as soon as it got popular it was already on to 2k then 4k then 8k.
They said 64bit computing explicitly calling out the need for more 64bit apps. Dead on as well. When apple went 64bit only there was a huge uproar, even from me, because even in 2018 that was a huge problem.
Facebook they literally agree it’s fun and distracting but that it’s not revolutionary so there’s no reason for the hype. It’s the same thing as with TikTok.
I’m really surprised with how accurate it is honestly.
I disagree. HD lasted a super long time. That there would be a new standard after HD was never a question. As far as standards go it lasted a very long time and did about as good as any standard could.
64 bit was an absolute necessity. That it was a lot of work to switch to does not mean it was overhyped.
I don't like Facebook but that doesn't mean its success can be ignored. It became the biggest social network and was regularly mentioned in the same breath as Google and Microsoft, so I can't see how it's overhyped as much as I don't like them.
The point is you should read the article rather than going off of headlines. Each thing in the list states as much.
The HD paragraph literally states exactly what happened. As soon as HD had made it to mainstream (actual tvs, laptops, monitors) it was already outdated. They were saying to not overhype it because it will keep happening. And they were completely right.
64 bit they were complaining about being overhyped because it was. Until you were able to get almost any app in 64 bit it was useless for all but the most tech savvy.
No one is ignoring the success of facebook. they're saying that facebook as a social network was overhyped. It wasn't the first, there was nothing remarkable about it. Just because Cavendish bananas are the most popular and most successful bananas of all time doesn't mean other, very good, very tasty bananas didn't exist before them. Cavendish bananas are just successful.
64 bit they were complaining about being overhyped because it was. Until you were able to get almost any app in 64 bit it was useless for all but the most tech savvy.
I still remember when it was a big deal when programs like Google Chrome started releasing 64 bit versions... and Chrome didn't get its first official stable 64 bit version until 2014, a whole 6 years after this article was made.
yeah seriously. I mean until mac killed off 32 bit people still weren't serious about it. There are to this day tons of video games that are still made 32 bit.
HD is still the standard for most? I don't know of a single person who uses a 4k TV/monitor. 4K is still in early adopters phase.
Nah, the iphone is also overhypped and overpriced
I think you could argue downloading movies from the internet is the only true mistake, but again internet speeds weren’t great then, Redbox was doing well, and even YouTube was still young. The iPhone complaints are about first gen, and wii was great , but imo was a bit over hyped.
For a “calm your asses down 2008 will not be known as the Golden year of computing” the takes are all reasonable.
The first iPhone was an amazing product in its time, but at the same time it had so many caveats. The two biggest ones were the fact that it didn't support 3G (the iPhone wouldn't support 3G until the aptly named iPhone 3G released) and the fact that the phone was an AT&T exclusive (Apple didn't drop the carrier exclusive situation until 2011). There's also a few other issues I can't think of at the time, but the first iPhone was no perfect device.
They got Spore right.
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.
Honestly feels like satire reading this today
HD only got even more HD.
That's exactly what they were saying, no? "even more HD" = UHD.
Downloading movies from the internet (is wildly overhyped)
lol what does that even mean
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.
Since I love playing devil's advocate, here's a couple of points in their defense:
Multi-GPU videocards: Pretty much dead, it's just not efficient.
64-bit computing: At the time was indeed slightly overhyped because while your OS was 64-bit, most software was still 32-bit, games in particular. So games couldn't really use more than 4 GB of memory. And that was standard for multiple years after this article (this was 2008, 64-bit Windows had been out for ages, and yet 3 years later the original Skyrim release was still 32-bit. Games having 64-bit binaries included was a huge thing at the time) Now most software is 64-bit and yes, NOW it's standard.
High definition: Depends, did they mean HD or Full-HD? Because the former certainly didn't last long for most people. Full HD replaced it real quick and stayed around for a while. Of course, if they meant Full-HD then hell no, they were hella wrong, it's been mainstream for a while and only now is being replaced by 1440p and 4K UHD.
iPhone: The FIRST one as a singular product really didn't live up to the hype. It was missing features that old dumbphones had. Of course the overall concept very much did revolutionize the phone market.
EEE PC!!! I miss the age of netbooks - I had a similar one, the MSI Wind - my favorite computer ever :')
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!
(amazing, everything you said was wrong)[https://youtu.be/2sRS1dwCotw]
They were right about Facebook.
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.
Did you even read it? They don't say anything of it is unnecessary or bad. Just, that it's not there yet.
And iPhones only really became what we think of today with better mobile network and the advent of 3rd party apps.
64bit explicitly mentions the lack of 64bit SOFTWARE. Meaning no software could make use of your 64bit cpu.
FHD was said to only be the first step and that it would promptly be replaced by UHD. Which it did.
None of this means anything on the list is bad, just not as great as sold, aka overhyped.
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.
There's definitely something to be said for classic simplicity!
Consumerism, seems like always kept overhyped.