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 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 As soon as HD had made it to mainstream (actual tvs, laptops, monitors) it was already outdated.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.
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.
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.
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
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.