5 Products to Avoid Buying in 2025: Waste of Money
- You may still remember the joy when you got your first Walkman.
- However, other technical products that we used until very recently are also starting to move into the category of great-grandfathers.
- Even modern external disks and flash drives, which you connect to your computer via a USB port, are starting to become less useful.
The Tech Graveyard: Products We Used to Love, Now Collecting Dust
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You may still remember the joy when you got your first Walkman. You could sit on a train or walk through a field while listening to your favorite tape from start to finish. Today, when you tell the younger generation about it, they look at you with an uncomprehending and slightly sympathetic smile. For them, it is now wholly normal to listen to music anytime and anywhere, just with the help of their phone, where they have downloaded hundreds of songs from different artists.
However, other technical products that we used until very recently are also starting to move into the category of great-grandfathers. You problably still own them, but the dust is slowly settling on them. And if you currently bring them from the store, you may end up regretting spending money on them.
External Drives: The Cloud Takes Over
We don’t mean floppy disks that are a distant memory. Even modern external disks and flash drives, which you connect to your computer via a USB port, are starting to become less useful. In the era of the cloud, their importance gradually decreases, and their purchase frequently enough doesn’t pay off. Cloud services are affordable and often provide some space completely free of charge. One of the most generous is Google Drive, offering 15 GB of free storage. Google Drive. In addition, your files are automatically backed up in the cloud, eliminating the risk of data loss. External drives have a limited lifespan, and recovering data from them once they fail can be difficult and expensive.
Consider this: how many external drives are lying around your house,and do you even remember what’s stored on them? A 2023 survey by Backblaze revealed a 1.88% annual failure rate for hard drives, highlighting the inherent risk of relying on physical storage. The convenience and reliability of cloud storage are increasingly outweighing the perceived benefits of external drives.
External drives and flash drives have been effectively replaced by the cloud. ,…
| Feature | External Drive | cloud Storage (e.g., Google Drive) |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Initial purchase price + potential data recovery costs | Subscription fee (optional for basic storage) |
| Data Backup | Manual or scheduled backups required | Automatic and continuous backup |
| Accessibility | Limited to physical access to the drive | Accessible from any device with an internet connection |
| Reliability | Susceptible to physical damage and failure | Redundant servers and data protection measures |
Home Printers: A Declining Necessity
If you have small children at home and regularly print coloring books for them, a printer might still be worthwhile.Families appreciated its function especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when children needed to print school texts and assignments as part of remote learning. But for the average adult, the home printer is losing its relevance. Most forms can now be filled out online, and anyone with an electronic signature can easily handle official dialog with authorities via the Internet. The old inkjet printer just dries up on your desk, and a laser printer isn’t cost-effective for infrequent use.
According to a report by Statista global printer shipments have been steadily declining as 2015. If you really need to print something on paper once every six months,it’s better to stop by a copy center or the library.
Compact Cameras: Smartphones Reign Supreme
It’s the same with compact cameras as with Walkmans. They were simply overtaken by modern phones that now offer comparable or even better picture quality. Smartphones also integrate with other functions. You can promptly share photos on social networks, save them in the cloud, or edit them in a graphics program. Transferring images from a compact camera to a computer, by contrast, is often tedious and cumbersome.
Today, compact cameras are only suitable for professional and artistic photographers who, however, purchase the most expensive and specialized devices for their work. Cheaper and mid-range models are losing importance.The Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) reports a significant decrease in compact digital camera shipments over the past decade.
Almost no one uses compact cameras today., …
GPS navigation devices once replaced the paper map on the knee and proved a great service to millions of drivers. Today, we can quietly thank them for that, but in practice, we now prefer applications like Google Maps, Waze, or Sygic, which we can easily set up on our smartphone.Mobile apps automatically update maps, provide real-time traffic data, and can work offline. In addition, most new vehicles are ready for phone connection via Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, rendering external GPS devices needless. Their sales are decreasing in the market, and they will soon become a rarity.
The rise of smartphone navigation has fundamentally changed the automotive landscape, making dedicated GPS devices increasingly niche.