Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
If your vision of the Big Apple still includes bright yellow taxi cabs, flashing lights, and a phone booth on every corner, it’s time to recalibrate. The city just moved its last freestanding payphone from the street to a museum. It’s just another reminder that today’s newest, fastest, and best technology will soon look like a relic. With each new update, release, and revision, the last version immediately feels primitive. Some products last just a few years, and others endure for centuries, but one thing is certain — obsolescence is inevitable.
01. Internet Explorer
1995-2022
Not long after Internet Explorer’s 1995 debut, it was hard to imagine going online without it — the browser was almost synonymous with surfing the web. Introduced by Microsoft as part of Windows 95, Explorer was dominant for much of the next decade, but then started losing steam to more sophisticated rivals. Microsoft itself released a more sophisticated browser, Edge, in 2015, but refused to kill Explorer until 2022. Now Microsoft when people try to use Explorer, they are pointed to the Edge browser, making this a final goodbye.
02. Phone Booths
1878-2011
Before phones were pocket-sized supercomputers, people had to stop if they wanted to make calls on the go. The places they stopped to make those calls were phone booths. Once a familiar sight, phone booths — like the landlines and phone books contained within — were dealt a mortal blow by the arrival of cell phones. Even New York City — once riddled with phone booths and freestanding pay phones — said goodbye to its last street payphone.