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As the development of economy,
the tech products changes so fast. It’s said that some tech products you rely
on are likely to go the way of the VCR. In the first half of the 2000s,
retailers were buzzing about the prospects of MP3 players and notebooks, but by
the end of the decade, those products had largely been replaced by Smartphone’s
and tablets.
As tempting as it may be to imagine otherwise, some
of the gadgets you may rely on most right now will likely suffer the same fate
and be killed off or made obsolete by the end of this decade. Sure, you may
still be able to find these products for sale in certain niche stores, but they
will no longer be produced for a mass-market audience.
You can still find and buy VCRs and there are people
still using mainframes from 1992, so it’s not like this stuff disappears
forever,” says Stephen Baker, an industry analyst at the NPD Group. Baker notes
that the main reason retailers continue to market and sell outdated products is
to cater to shoppers who buy them for nostalgia’s sake, but for all intents and
purposes the market has left these products in the dust. So which popular
products today will join the likes of VCRs, cassette players and transistor
radios in the next few years? Main Street asked five tech analysts to offer
their thoughts on the gadgets that will largely be phased out by the end of
this decade.
The days of spending $200 or more on a standalone GPS
device won’t last much longer, analysts say. “Portable navigation devices like
those sold by Tom-tom and Garmin will probably not be sold in 2020, just
because mobile phones will have taken on that function themselves and because
GPS systems will be standard equipment in cars,” says Charles S. Golvin, an
analyst at Forrester, a market research firm. As a result, there won’t be much
of a need to buy a product whose only function is to tell you directions.
If there is a demand for these GPS systems, it will
likely come from a very specific segment of consumers. “Maybe you could argue
there will be a market for guys climbing Mount Everest or long-distance
truckers or the military, but for the vast majority of consumers, standalone
GPS systems will be irrelevant and redundant,” Baker says. The e-reader has
already undergone significant changes in its short history, evolving from a
product with a keyboard to one with a touch screen and more recently being
integrated into a kind of a tablet-hybrid, but according to Golvin, the market
for e-readers will mostly disappear by the end of the decade.
“The tablet will largely supplant the e-reader in
the same way that the iPod increasingly gets displaced by smartphones,” Golvin
says. “Tablets will take on the e-reader function of handling magazine,
newspaper and book reading.” In essence, spending money on an e-reader that can
only handle reading when tablets can do this and more will come to seem as
useless as buying a GPS system that can only look up directions when other
technology does this as well. Just how small the e-reader market becomes may
depend somewhat on advancements in display technology. One of the biggest
incentives for consumers to buy a pure e-reader is to have an e-ink display
(like reading from a book) rather than a backlit display (like reading from a
computer screen), but according to Golvin, manufacturers are already working on
ways to merge the two reading experiences and create a tablet that doubles as an
authentic e-reader. Even then, there may be still being some e-readers on the
market at the beginning of next decade, but not many.