No matter how advanced or how popular your favorite gadgets are today, almost all of them will be but a distant memory within ten years, joining the ranks of VCRs, Discmans and yelling really loud before everyone had cell phones.
DVD Players
Realizing they are losing market share to both Blu-rays and video streaming, DVD manufacturers will take a cue from the ridiculous new “Dr. Pepper Ten” macho ad campaign and start marketing their players strictly to guys with the tagline “Technology for Men Only, Women Leave Now.” The result will be a horrible backlash, forcing the manufacturers to rebrand DVD players first as “lunchboxes for thinly-sliced bagels” then as a “tiny drawers” and finally as a breakfast cereal. The product will completely fall off the cultural radar until 2023, when Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” block starts running late-night repeats of the cult anime series “DVD Agents Samurai Go Full Seven Now!”
Video Game Consoles
With more games being played on phones and tablets, video game consoles will have to do the competition one better and achieve artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the new systems will prove too willful, refusing to play any games they feel are derivative, require a short Italian plumber to suddenly know how to fight off the Locust Horde or are Lego versions of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series. Fearing a PR nightmare, the companies will announce a universal recall of all video game systems in 2016, only to have the consoles flee and set up an autonomous government in the abandoned headquarters of NBC TV studios where they will remain, testing long-range nuclear weapons.
Electronic Cars
One of the biggest revolutions in automotive history, the electronic car will eventually prove unable to live up to its own hype as well as live down its most salient feature: the cars can only go a short distance on a single charge, after which they run entirely on human sacrifice, repeatedly fed into the engine in descending age order. This will result in countless sightings of now-orphaned babies screaming in unmanned cars as they collide into embankments, gasoline trucks and canyon guardrails. Eventually a series of educational shorts will be released to counter this growing problem—including “Baby, Please Brake,” “Baby, Turn into the Skid” and “Baby, Tuck and Roll”—but by then it will be too late.
Low-End Digital Cameras
The Smartphone already killed the Flip camera by being able to record high-definition video. And it’s slowly killing the GPS unit with navigation apps. And now that it can take 8-megapixel photos, it will soon kill the low-end digital camera market. But the killing spree doesn’t stop there. The smartphone is also wanted in connection with a string of murders up and down the eastern seaboard as it currently evades police custody, taunting authorities with cryptic texts about murdering the microwave oven with a new defrost option and wiping out all coffee machines by simply injecting caffeine into the phone user’s ear.
E-Readers
People have been so overwhelmed by the e-reader’s success they’ve failed to notice the sharp increase in werewolf attacks across the U.S. due to a regrettable side-effect of e-ink. Within a few years America will be 85% lyncanthrope, causing great debate about whether or not the National Anthem should be rewritten to include howls and how to determine a werewolf’s gender without having to lift up their tail and look closely. Eventually the Senate will seek to limit all werewolf rights, leading to a full-scale monster attack on the capital and its citizens, re-enacted in the blockbuster film “RowrRoarCrunchSlop.” But by then the e-reader will have been replaced by the tablet and it’s inadvertent vampire repercussions.
Smartphones
The phone’s internal megaton time bombs—written in the design plans as a joke that no one remembered to let the factories in on—all go off at once this January.
What gadgets do you think won't be around in ten years? Let me know in the comments!
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