A number of industries are well known for their fads: fashion, food, health. But technology has experienced just equally many short-lived crazes over the years. From mobile games then pop they caused a danger to the public, to "futuristic" television sets that slowly died off. Here are the tech world's biggest fads from the last decade.

Netbooks

In the late 2000s, if you wanted a very low-cost portable laptop and didn't care well-nigh speed, computing power, storage, screen size, playing games, etc. then you bought a Netbook. I was part of this fad, and have terrible memories of squinting at my Intel Atom N270-powered machine every bit it took several minutes to load Windows XP.

Netbook specs improved slightly as the decade drew to a shut and for a while they were even hailed as the savior of the laptop market. Sales of the tiny machines were expected to skyrocket in 2022, but Apple had other ideas. While the release of the iPad and the MacBook Air were not the just factors that spelled the get-go of the end for Netbooks, they played a key function.

It's worth noting, though, that some people were questioning whether the low toll was worth the poor performance even before Apple's devices and better ultrabook alternatives arrived. Ironically, information technology was the Netbooks' cheapness that was role of their undoing - manufacturers realized the race to the lesser was not working for them either.

More powerful and increasingly cheaper tablets eventually came along. The size and price of traditional laptops decreased, and consumers turned to ultrabooks, Chromebooks, and hybrid devices for depression-cost, portable calculating. In 2022, tablet shipments overtook netbooks for the first time, and in 2022 Netbook sales fell by 25 per centum.

But the final smash in the Netbook bury came in 2022, when Acer, Asus, and MSI appear they would cease manufacturing the ten-inch portables. They may have been a fad, merely the Netbook's five-year lifespan is certainly a memorable one.

3D TVs

Remember when a television wasn't considered high-stop unless it featured 3D technology and came with several pairs of glasses? It seemed Television manufacturers noticed cinema goers were paying extra coin for that third dimension and decided they wanted a piece of the activeness. And for a while, it looked as if "the futurity of tv" was here to stay.

While 3D had been popular in movie theaters since the 1950s, modernistic 3D television didn't have off until the early 2022s. In the first year of this decade, around 2 meg units were sold worldwide. By 2022 that figure had reached over 45 million.

As the 3D Boob tube miracle grew, new and improved forms of the technology arrived, forth with an increase in the number of channels offering a dedicated 3D service. But in tardily 2022, things started to go wrong equally the number of people buying the televisions slowly began to reject.

The situation got worse when low subscriber numbers pushed those expensive 3D TV channels off the air. Fewer companies were making the sets as consumers started shunning the technology in favor of new features such every bit 4K and HDR. The writing was on the wall in Feb terminal yr when it was revealed that Samsung and LG had all only abandoned 3D sets. Its death now looks certain, afterward Sony and Panasonic confirmed that they, likewise, won't be supporting the applied science in their 2022 Telly models.

So why did people lose their dearest of 3D TVs? For starters many never did beloved them, and it was only manufacturers' way to market and push Television receiver sales for every bit long as it lasted.

A few other theories have been put forward: The lack of content is plain a big trouble with any new technology trying to go off the ground (have mind, VR); information technology didn't always work very well; it could cause eye problems/headaches, and many people only didn't similar sitting in their living rooms wearing big glasses all evening. For a lot of viewers, 3D was strictly a two-hour(ish) feel all-time kept for the cinema. While at that place are notwithstanding a few 3D TV sets bachelor, the fad is already being regarded in the same way every bit LaserDiscs.

Depict Something

Candy Vanquish, Farmville, Words With Friends, Mafia Wars – we've seen lots of mobile games that, more often than not thanks to Facebook integration, became worldwide hits before their popularity started to wane. Only none of them had the kind of meteoric rise and burdensome autumn experienced past Draw Something.

On Feb 12, 2022 – just before social video game behemoth Zynga decided to larn the firm – OMGPop released an awarding that was, essentially, digital Pictionary. The game was great fun, and the power to sign in with a Facebook account as a way of challenging friends gave Describe Something a crack-like addictive nature.

Even for people similar me who take the artistic power of a blindfolded cat, OMGPop's game was ane of the nearly enjoyable mobile titles I've ever played. Many a time were my efforts posted on Facebook for others to laugh at - my attempt to replicate one of the Spice Girls resembled something from the mind of Se7en killer John Doe.

It took just seven weeks after release for Draw Something to reach 35 1000000 downloads. While the app was free and advertising-supported, users had the option to pay for an ad-gratuitous experience. All this defenseless the middle of Zynga, who had already experienced massive success of its own with FarmVille. The company paid effectually $200 million for OMGPop on March 21, 2022, which, ironically, was the verbal aforementioned twenty-four hours that Depict Something's popularity peaked.

As much fun as the game was, it offered little variation on the basic theme. People started to get bored and movement onto new things, and daily average user figures dropped by 5 million in a single month.

In October 2022, Zynga finally admitted it overpaid for OMGPop, taking a write-off of between $85 million and $95 million on the purchase. Just one yr subsequently acquiring the company during the height of Draw Something'southward popularity, Zynga close downwards the game's creator for good.

QR Codes

A slightly controversial entry, admittedly, as QR Codes are however in use today. But a lot of that is downwardly to Snapchat and its Snapcodes, which helped make the Quick Response Codes popular(ish) again.

A few years agone, QR codes were everywhere. On nutrient packaging, within magazines, on billboards, fifty-fifty appearing in TV commercials, they were a dream marketing device for ad agencies beyond the world, especially equally the number of people using them could be tracked, indicating just how willing potential customers were to engage with a production.

While the QR Lawmaking arrangement had been around since 1994 – information technology was designed for high-speed component scanning when tracking vehicles during manufacturing - the ascension of smartphones saw the snazzy squares become mainstream.

Despite the ane-fourth dimension near-ubiquity of QR Codes, a lot of people even so didn't know what they did or how to use them. And even those that were aware of these strange squares didn't enjoy stopping in the middle of a street to point their devices at billboards. Some codes even appeared on signs along busy highways – peradventure the most dangerous method of receiving a disbelieve always conceived.

Ultimately, the overwhelming majority of QR codes were used to solely to advertise products, and the few people who were regularly using them started to drift away. Advertisers turned to platforms like Facebook as a better way of selling their crap, and simple, shortened web links were used to directly consumers to sites.

QR codes withal have their uses today. They're oftentimes utilized by large events when allocating tickets; Twitter introduced them concluding Nov as a manner to straight people to profiles; products similar Google's Wi-Fi system uses them to expert consequence, and the codes remains synonymous with Snapchat. Perhaps QR codes were more a marketing fad than a tech fad.

Pokémon Get

At its height, you couldn't look at a news publication, be it on Goggle box or the net, without being overwhelmed past the latest Pokémon Go stories. Only that's non surprising, because how at one point an estimated 45 meg people were logging in to play the game each day.

The mobile title was and so popular, lawsuits were launched against developer Niantic over the swarms of marauding players damaging beaches in The netherlands and neighborhoods in the United states. It was used to lure victims and rob people, got banned in Iran and Mainland china, and even resulted in some parents naming their babies afterward the characters. With over 500 meg downloads, the game was enjoyed past players worldwide. Only much similar Draw Something, that popularity quickly waned.

It took just one month for 10 million people to abandon Pokémon Go, and user numbers have been decreasing ever since. Like so many other mobile games, players started to get bored and moved on. Fifty-fifty the hope that it "cured" concrete inactivity couldn't keep people sticking around.

Pokémon Go still has a sizable (huge) userbase and is earning enough of money for Niantic. And the game merely arrived in South korea last week, which volition likely hateful an upturn in user numbers. But information technology will never over again hit the dizzying heights of its celebrity days. If a fad is an intense and widely shared enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived, then Pokémon Go fits the bill.

E-book Readers

Like Netbooks, advances in technology have been behind the E-book reader's slow demise. The devices were still able to boast global shipments of 7.1 million units in 2022, but that's a far cry from the 23.two million readers shipped during their acme of popularity in 2022, and the lowest number since 2009.

E-volume readers of today aren't hugely dissimilar from the first modern incarnations that arrived ten years ago, which is partly why and so many people rarely upgrade their devices. Simply there are 2 large reasons why dedicated E-book reader sales have fallen by well-nigh one-third in the last five years: tablets and smartphones.

Yep, people are nevertheless buying electronic books, only the 92 percent of United states consumers who own a smartphone and the near 50 percent that ain a tablet use these devices as their preferred method of digital novel consumption. It'south worth noting that east-books are still very popular; acquirement from sales has continued to grow every twelvemonth for the terminal decade, a trend that'south expected to keep.

Dedicated Due east-book readers nonetheless have enough of fans, but with variety of inexpensive, powerful smartphones and tablets available today, you lot have to wonder how much longer will it be earlier they're looked back on every bit being fad.