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.
Are you joking? I thought the Wii was a wild success, I remember it being very popular.
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undefined> 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 feel like both of these are wrong.
streaming is just the next step to downloading movies. Downloading movies was never really a “thing” and this is really just some tech writer not understanding the term streaming. Netflix had just launched in 2007 as a streaming video service and this is the hyped thing they are referring to. They are not referring to downloading movies on iTunes or whatever. If they are, then my argument is no one ever hyped that up, especially not in 2008.
This is also for PC, not TV. https://web.archive.org/web/20081216002805/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ shows that 1024x768 was the majority followed by 1280 x 1024 Sadly I can’t pull stats from earlier because Valve decided to use Adobe Flash for these stats until 2017. But just in 10 years https://web.archive.org/web/20180331131102/http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey 1080 HD became 75% of the PC gaming base. HD certainly should have been as hyped as it was. It’s become the absolute standard. If you don’t have at least 1080 HD monitors you are far behind.
Also I wanted to address this:
It absolutely did have a lasting impact. It changed Nintendo forever. It’s seen as one of the best examples of a Blue Ocean strategy working. It’s why we had the Wii U and thus eventually the Switch. Which in turn influenced the Steam Deck. Wii also directly influenced it’s competitors to create the failed Kinect and failed Playstation Move. It was the best-selling TV console from 2006 to 2013 until Playstation 4 launched which quickly was replaced in 2017 by the Switch becoming the best-selling console.
Lastly, this article was fairly wrong and clearly written as a fluff piece without substance. If you look at the original magazine https://issuhub.com/view/index/1138 they don’t even go into detail or expand on their thoughts. It’s a fluff page.