Comments on: 10 obsolete consumer products for 2010

By: George

George — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:29:14 +0000

I think that it is stupid to eliminate your landline. Cell phones sound terrible, they can get lost, broken, flushed, or discharged battery. You can make your landline bare-bones be eliminating long distance and home voice mail, for example, to reduce cost. The landlines, with hard-wired phones instead of cordless phones, still work in an electrical power outage, during which the cell phone may or may not have run out of battery. Having several extensions in your home, like beside your bed and in your kitchen, mean not having to remember where you left your cell phone, or not being able to hear it if it is in another room, or downstairs, or upstairs, or if it fell out of your pocket and is sitting on the driver’s seat in your car.

By: sd

sd — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:30:24 +0000

I also don’t believe that external hard disks are on the way out. “Cloud” backup may seem attractive, but puts you at the mercy of 1) a slow network connection to restore your data (even *slower* backing it up in the first place); and 2) whoever is hosting the service. When your hosting service is hacked and your financial records end up as semi-public information, or when the hosting service goes belly up and physical access to the host servers is lost — even for a little while — your own external hard disk backup (stored away from *your* home) will be what you can count on. Sure, an external can be stolen or lost in a disaster. But remote backup is not without *its* risks.

By: Melissa

Melissa — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:15:06 +0000

E-Textbooks are not even close to a decent enough quality if its a book you will actually be using. I’ve used them for several classes and am generally extremely annoyed by their limitations. They’re not at all intuitive.

By: Amy3e

Amy3e — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:11:33 +0000

College textbooks are a big expense and there are lots of ways out there to save money on that bill. Here’s a good article that explores all the options out there to students.. renting, borrowing, sharing and online resources and more. you can read it here: http://www.celebrationideasonline.com/saving-money-on-college-textbooks.html

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:01:53 +0000

I love collecting cd’s. Having the artwork and a physical thing to hold is important to me. Plus mp3 quality just isn’t the same. And books? Getting an old book from a used book store is an immense pleasure for me. I always go for the really old tattered classics. You know they’re well traveled.

By: Vivace

Vivace — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 03:40:37 +0000

I wish #8 was an option for me, but my school often uses a specific, branded edition that’s only for our school. Not only do I have to buy them new 9 times out of 10, but the only place I can sell them back is the school bookstore – if they haven’t already decided to make a new edition. Arg.

And I love my ebook reader – I have definitely curled up with it in bed, and it’s not at all awkward. If you want pages, I’m not going to knock you, but at least don’t make irrational and unsupported arguments against ebooks. They have their place for those of us who’d like to minimize what we carry every day as well as what we keep on our shelves.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:54:25 +0000

I disagree with #3. External hard drives are not going out of fashion. People still need a solid, tangible backup solution that isn’t based on the access to the internet. I agree, online backup tools are a good idea, but they should be a part of an overall backup scheme.

By: LeeAnn Balbirona

LeeAnn Balbirona — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:40:57 +0000

#2 We are actually going back to having a landline for home telephone service after doing without for five years. We primarily use our cell phones but as our oldest child has now become of age to stay home alone or babysit her siblings, we prefer to have a landline to the house rather than buy her a cell phone.

#7 We still buy music CD’s, although not many. Perhaps three or four in 2009. But we all share them–the kids download the songs on their iPod or mp3 player and then the CD’s are usually stored in the car for use on the van’s CD player. But perhaps we are unusual that way in that we listen to the same music our kids do–mostly Celtic or classical.

#6 Enjoying our new subscription to the New York Times national edition this year. For years we had the local big city paper (Seattle Times) but the quality was just…eh. Now at least I’m getting better bang for my buck. I do like sitting down to read things on paper. Once I am on the computer it’s down to work. And now for some reason we get the Seattle Times for free on Sundays anyhow–must be the advertisers paying for it.

#1 DVD’s we still buy quite a few each year, probably two or three a month on average. We play them in the van on longer road trips as well as in the house. We do have instant play Netflix but rarely use the service as the computers in the house aren’t accessible to everyone watching at once and the internet connection isn’t always reliable. This past year we bought a lot of Shakespeare movies for cheap (from Amazon) and some religious movies that generally aren’t available on Netflix.

Some of those other things that have gone obsolete we never even owned to begin with!

By: Christine

Christine — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:16:44 +0000

I find this article to be mildly depressing. I don’t like everything becoming so “digitized”. When I want to read I want to hold a book in my hand. I like to buy CDs. I agree with Cameron – we need to remember that we can go too far with this whole simple living thing.

By: Cameron

Cameron — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:06:29 +0000

Books will probably not die until another world revolution in which almost all of mankind is wiped out. But, until then, we’ll have them and they’ll remain awesome.

It’s my opinion that a real minimalist doesn’t want to digitize his/her life anyway. For most of us, we choose to get rid of things in order to live a more fulfilling and less distraction filled life, not so we can shun the simple pleasures that make us happy (like books, for instance).

Always remember that you can actually go to far. A simple life doesn’t mean we need to make everything we own virtual and live in a shack in the woods, unless that’s what makes you happy! Even Chris McCandless said that happiness was not real unless shared, and I think he’d know better than most of us since he had to learn it the hard way!