10 Technologies Everyone Thought Would Be Dead By Now

There was a time when every major technological breakthrough felt like a permanent addition to our lives. The typewriter took the better part of a century before it started to look replaceable. Incredibly, the telegraph didn’t fully disappear until 2006 after 150 years of faithful service. These days, obsolescence moves a lot faster. The 3D TV was marketed as the next best thing in the 2010s, and its rapid rise and fall is the perfect example. Nowadays, even a single software update on your smartphone can be enough to make last year’s flagship feel outdated. 

But there are plenty of examples of technologies that were presumed dead and buried years, or even decades, ago that are still running quietly in the background, and some are even making a dramatic comeback. Most of these technologies have survived because they continue to work in situations where newer alternatives fail. Others have stuck around because they’re more affordable, while some have been resurrected after picking up new users who weren’t even born the first time they had their run. Somewhere between today and the headlines that announced their passing, each of the following has found legitimate reasons to stick around. Here’s a closer look at 10 technologies that have simply refused to die.

The old landline network has gotten much pricier to run as it’s aged. So once smartphones became cheap enough for most people to own, you would have been forgiven if you thought that was the end of the landline network. But plenty of people still haven’t ditched their old house phones. A survey by the CDC National Center for Health Statistics found that close to one in five adults still had a landline at home by the end of 2024. Across the pond in the U.K., it’s even more. In fact, landline ownership there only just dipped below 50% for the first time that same year. Most people over the age of 65 in the UK continue to hold onto their reliable landline telephone. And reliability is actually a very real reason why it remains in use.

A survey by telecommunications company NumberBarn found that people cited not having to constantly charge the phone as a top reason for keeping it. Respondents also reported that it was handy to have one as insurance against a lost or stolen smartphone, while others felt confident it was more dependable in a crisis — and for the latter, they aren’t wrong. Landlines get their power directly from telephone company networks. This means they stay on during a blackout. A digital line draws power from the grid and needs an active internet connection, and once the battery dies on a smartphone when the power is out, it’s effectively useless. A landline will also keep working when cell towers go down, and it has proven to be so reliable that hospitals and medical practices continue to rely on it. Although this is also because their fax machines run through the same line.

The clunky fax machine may seem like a relic from the pre-digital dawn and an obvious casualty of email and modern file-sharing, but it’s still around. In fact, certain industries never moved away from it. Insurance agencies, real estate agents, and banks still treat it as a standard part of business, and the technology also endures across the healthcare and legal industries. Worldwide usage is still at 17%. In the U.S., a significant 70% of healthcare companies still rely on this 160-year-old technology to some degree. 

The reasons the fax machine has endured may surprise you. They essentially boil down to regulation, security, and good old-fashioned practicality. Healthcare providers, for example, can legally exchange patient information by fax under federal medical privacy laws — a status email doesn’t share. From a legal standpoint, faxed paperwork also holds up much better as legal documentation, another area in which email falls short. Given that faxes travel across telephone lines rather than the internet, they’re also harder for hackers to intercept than email, while newer fax platforms add further protection through modern encryption technology.

There are around 43 million fax machines still sending documents around the world, and a set of shared technical standards adopted in 1968 still governs how they communicate. This means machines built generations apart can still exchange documents without issue. There’s no sign of a slowdown in sales, either. The sector was valued at $3.3 billion in 2024, with substantial growth expected later in the decade.

Mobile phones may have taken over as the dominant way people communicate, and pager use might have dropped significantly since its peak in the 1990s, but they are still around. It’s another reliable technology used in hospitals. In fact, there are a number of modern-day industries that still use pagers. They remain standard equipment mostly for one simple, yet familiar, reason: reliability. A survey commissioned by TigerConnect, ironically, a company that sells smartphone-based alternatives to pagers, found that 90% of the surveyed hospitals still had some level of pager usage. On top of their reliability, low cost and the ability to reach clinicians remotely were also cited as top reasons for their continued use.

“They’re like the cockroaches of the healthcare system,” Dr. Brittany Bankhead, a trauma surgeon in Lubbock, Texas, told the Wall Street Journal. “They won’t go away.” She prefers to use a pager because it picks up signals her phone can’t, and she can leave the device in her car the moment she’s off duty, which keeps her job from following her home. Another advantage is that a single page can trigger a siren with a follow-up voice message that can reach an entire care team at the same moment. There’s no truly effective equivalent built into a smartphone. Pagers also hold up well physically, running on batteries that outlast a smartphone’s by a wide margin, which adds even more points to their reliability.

The place you’ll most commonly see a dot matrix printer is at the airport. Airlines still use them to print boarding passes. It punches letters onto the card with small metal pins like a fast, tiny typewriter, and mechanically, there’s nothing else on the market that can do what it does. That’s one reason it’s still around, despite the development of modern-day laser and inkjet printers. But dot matrix printers are also rugged machines. Heat, dust, and temperature swings that would knock out an inkjet barely register on a dot matrix printer. Running them at high volume also costs less, and without a complicated set of moving parts or ink cartridges constantly drying out, there’s much less maintenance involved.

It isn’t just airports where you’ll find them. Government offices and, once again, hospitals still use them. But they use them in a different way. Carbon copy printing is the process of using several stacked sheets so they’re all marked with one strike. Each layer becomes an identical copy, but usually on different-colored sheets. This creates an instant paper trail for record-keeping. One copy goes into the file; the others go to those who need them. Hospitals and clinics rely on this for billing and patient files, which suits the strict record-keeping rules in healthcare.

Every generation seems to find a new way to consign AM radio to the history books. But it has survived television, FM radio, and now it’s contending with podcasts and streaming. Even electric cars are being forced to abandon AM radio, despite the fact that the U.S. government is fighting to keep it. At home, plenty of Americans still tune into the radio every week, and while the share of listeners choosing AM has shrunk and skews toward an older generation, industry figures suggest it still holds an audience approaching 50 million. A lot of that loyalty comes down to the content that’s on the dial. Conservative talk shows are still popular on the frequency, while independent stations have held on longer on AM than almost anywhere else. Quality non-English broadcasts are often easier to find on AM than they are on FM, too.

That said, one of AM’s biggest advantages is its reach. The signal can travel through buildings and over mountains to places where phones and the internet can be unreliable. This is why AM radio has a bigger following in rural areas than in urban centers. It’s also why the frequency remains central to emergency alerts, which is reason enough for government officials to back that bill requiring AM radio in new vehicles. Even Ford has retuned its AM radio decision after a massive backlash, and the fight to keep it in EVs rather than allowing automakers to drop it over interference concerns continues.

The way streaming took off, you might have expected DVDs and Blu-rays to have been wiped out years ago. The turning point arrived in 2011, when Netflix had the vision to switch its business model from mailing discs to streaming. From that point, owning a physical copy of a movie was no longer necessary. Yet, the format hasn’t disappeared. 

The market might currently be running at around 14% of its prior sales, but there seems to be something of a turnaround taking place. Despite SlashGear previously describing the future of Blu-ray as bleak, the BBC states that British entertainment retail giant HMV has reported an increase in disc sales, with “4K and Blu-ray doing particularly well.” Additionally, Wired reports that Technicolor Home Entertainment Services distributed around 750 million discs worldwide in 2021. That’s still quite a bit of demand. Rental kiosks and dedicated new-release sales sections haven’t entirely disappeared from stores, either, which would be an odd thing to maintain if there weren’t demand.

People who still buy or rent discs tend to be in their late 20s and 30s, with some of them treating the current market as an opportunity. They consider now to be a good buying window because they can pick up discs cheaply before the format follows the vinyl record path toward scarcity and rising prices. However, good old-fashioned ownership also keeps the format alive. A physical disc cannot be pulled without notice from a streaming library, and this is especially important if you’re a fan of older or niche titles. Plus, there are extras like bonus footage and director’s commentary that give certain discs lasting value that streaming doesn’t provide.

You might think it would be old hippies or ’70s funksters nostalgically buying up all the vinyl records today. Not so. Data shows that millennials and Gen Z account for a significant share of vinyl buyers, and the global market was valued at an astonishing $1.6 billion in 2025. That’s quite the market for a format that was supposed to be long dead following the launch of CDs and, in more recent years, digital streaming. Even DJs started moving toward digital formats in 2001, with Pioneer’s introduction of the CDJ player. However, despite carrying a single CD case to gigs being markedly more convenient than hauling boxes of vinyl, turntable DJing never fully disappeared. Many who started out on the wheels of steel when vinyl was the preferred format stubbornly persisted with that heavy box hauling. 

There are plenty of other reasons why more people are listening to vinyl records again. For one, there’s the financial aspect for artists. Money spent on a record funnels more easily to them than the fractional payouts that come from streaming. This matters a lot to many music fans. But the big question is, does vinyl actually sound better than CDs? Well, there’s the sonic quality adored by audiophiles. Vinyl’s “warmth” is an obvious texture that listeners immediately associate with the format, and it’s genuinely hard to replicate digitally. But some of what people love about records has little to do with the sound. It’s the ritual of it all. The admiration of the artwork, the reading of the liner notes, the placing of the needle on the record, and, of course, the comforting crackles that come just before the music kicks in. These are steps you simply don’t get with music streaming.

When Apple introduced the iPhone 7, the glaring omission of the headphone jack was highly controversial, and it looked like curtains for wired headphones. Sales steadily decreased for about five years. But with a premium pair of wireless headphones running into hundreds of dollars, cost was one factor that helped drive the comeback of wired headphones. Leading market research company Circana reports a sharp jump in wired headphone purchases in 2025, with that momentum carrying unabated into the new year. Revenue grew an astonishing 20% in the first couple of months of 2026 alone. But it’s not just affordability that has fueled that growth.

Celebrity culture has made wired headphones fashionable again. Ariana Grande and actress Zoë Kravitz have both been spotted wearing cabled earbuds, as have Lily-Rose Depp and other A-listers. A devoted following has sprung up online, centering around the aesthetics of wearing wired headphones or earbuds. Even Apple’s very own chief executive told the BBC, “People still buy them.” But do wired headphones really sound better than Bluetooth? 

Audio quality was the simple reason they were always the preference of audiophiles. The editor at large for audio publication SoundGuys told the BBC in the same article that wired models tend to deliver better sound for the price than their Bluetooth equivalents, and you can also sidestep the pairing glitches that affect wireless listening. But for some users, the shift is just a quiet rebellion against the rapid advancement of technology, while not having one more battery to top up is another obvious advantage wired headphones hold.

USB 1.0 launched way back in 1996 and gradually evolved through faster versions over the next two decades until it was replaced by the slimmer, smaller, and faster USB-C. Or so we thought. Manufacturers haven’t fully completed that shift, and USB-A, as the older standard is now referred to, is still very much in use. Many wireless devices still pair with a dongle built for the old connector, while some manufacturers continue to build products with that same port. 

Budget laptops usually retain a mix of both A and C types. But many premium brands (looking at you, Apple) have trimmed their port selection down in a way some might consider brutal. Critics have pointed out that ditching the USB-A port was simply a cost-cutting move and didn’t benefit consumers in any way, but that didn’t stop companies from doing it.

The reason that some other brands keep the older standard is that most everyday accessories run fine on it. There’s no need for the extra bandwidth that newer connections offer, so there’s little reason to swap them out. For many common peripherals, the lower bandwidth works just fine, and USB-A’s widespread adoption remains one of its biggest strengths. And because just about every cable supports it, mismatched gear rarely causes an issue. So, if you do have that fancy MacBook Pro but still have some older accessories, you’ll probably want a highly rated USB-A to USB-C adapter to keep things running smoothly.

There are many reasons why old film cameras are making a comeback. But the most surprising aspect of it all is that most people pushing the revival weren’t even around when film was the norm. The majority of buyers are young, and store owners will tell you that secondhand film cameras do not sit on their shelves very long. While many of them are being snapped up as fashion statements, other buyers are treating film photography as a pushback against smartphone photography.

You can take hundreds or even thousands of shots on a phone camera. But will you remember them all? Unlikely. In fact, shooting this way can dull your memory, which is just one way smartphones have changed how we travel. With a film camera, knowing that every shot costs money naturally stops you from firing off dozens of near-identical shots. You stop and think about composition, the light, and the angle. It’s about intentionality, not instant gratification.

There’s the visual signature, too. The color tones, the light halos, and the distinct grain are characteristics you only get in film photography. They combine into something that seems more authentic than the over-sharpened, over-saturated, over-the-top aesthetics we see on social media today. If you’re interested, there are plenty of classic SLR cameras still worth buying. If you just want to give it a go to see how you like it, there are also some excellent cheap film cameras that are great for beginners.

These 10 technologies were chosen because each was widely expected to disappear at some point, yet all remain in active use for specific reasons. Few people are likely to seek out a dot matrix printer or a pager for personal use, but the reasons behind their continued survival are clear and well documented. Others, like vinyl records and film cameras, are sticking around for reasons that have nothing to do with practicality and everything to do with people just missing how things used to feel.