What is something that was 'luxury' in the 90s/2000s but is considered 'c****' or basic today?

I recently bought Nokia from 2022 with flap. I never had flap phone before. Never had Nokia. My highschool dream came true. It cost me 50 euro. ///edit. Typo

Heck even a pager was fancy

The antenna was just for show in some phones. Did absolutely nothing.

I miss my sidekick

Matrix best ad

I saved mine. I opened it not too long ago and recall the first time I did it in total amazement.

I remember feeling like Captain Kirk with my flip phone.

Just a big TV in general. In the late 90s I had a 27” Sony Trinitron that I felt was the peak of television technology. I think I paid close to $1000 for it. Right now I’m sitting in my living room next to a 65” flat panel 4k TV that cost me about $300.

I remember it was a big day in my house when we upgraded to a flat screen tv. Now we have a bunch sitting around gathering dust and I have no idea where to came from.

When I got married in the early 2000s my wife and I bought a flat screen TV on a Sears credit card for $1200. It was a 47 inch Toshiba. When I replaced that TV 13 years later, I got a 56 inch LG for $480. Hahahah.

Also the sheer number of TVs. It used to be just the richer families that had one in multiple rooms in the house. Now, as you said, it's basically nothing to throw up a 55" on any random wall.

Yeah, my 17 year old son has a 50"ish one mounted to the wall in his bedroom. We didn't buy it, and I know he does't make a ton, but he just up and ordered it, and paid for it himself. As long as he's still putting money in his IRA, I guess.

2008 - paid ~$750 of a 32” Samsung LED. I laugh at myself on the inside whenever I walk into Costco and see 200” TVs for $50.

Not as luxury as a video player/recorder in the early 80s. A lot of people had to rent them,as they were so expensive.

Yeah, in the 90's they were all back-projection-screen and a luxury purchase for the big family room in a nice house. In the early 2000s, with widescreen plasmas, they were still a luxury purchase. I recall a co-worker spending his sign-on bonus to get one. But during the mid 2000s, this also led to all the consumer electronics stores getting on this "high" where they no longer had to sell c**** TVs anymore. Seriously, there was this brief period where nearly every TV (even small ones) was priced at like $1000+ unless it was some old model hidden in the back where you wouldn't see it. Now they're all standard, c****, and common place. (Unless you want something specifically high-end.)

Portable dvd player

It still makes me laugh to think the first Fast and Furious movie started with them knocking I er a semi of DVD players.

That under cabinet model for kitchens was peak Upper Middle Class 💰

No highs, no lows. It must be Bose.

Mmm. I recall asking my highschool girlfriend in the 90s if I should get a holster on my belt for my cell phone. She laughed so hard. But it's true. It did show you were special. Just not the kind of special the wearer was probably going for.

And if you were really special you had 2, a personal and a work phone. And then there were the super bigwigs who had a cellphone and a Blackberry.

Top tier description

And don't even get me started on *mobile* internet.

When I left for college in 1990, my dad had a CompuServe account for stock trading. I was agog after reading the manual: I could send messages to people electronically, wherever they were, as long as they had a CompuServe account? Or play online games with them?? WOW! Unfortunately for me, it also charged by the minute. AND you had to dial in to the server using a modem on the telephone line, and the closest server to us was long distance, which added *another* per-minute charge. On my allowance, I calculated I cold afforded maybe 5 minutes a month. D’oh. Fortunately my university had the Internet (though this was before the World Wide Web). And in 1993 i was working on a project that mixed text, graphics, hyperlinks, and could launch applications from pages on the Internet… and was not Mosaic (later renamed Netscape) so it disappeared back into the ether again once that project ended, lol.

100 %

I'd say the internet went from being a luxury to a necessity. Its not so much that it's "c****" now, more that we rely on it.

Haha yeah the first gps systems basically took up your whole trunk.

We literally went full circle. We were adding gps. Then they built gps navigation systems into the cars. Now we plug our phone into the car to do the navigating.

There was a place called "cups" in my local mall during the 1990s / early 2000s that went out of business. It was the only place you could get great coffee drinks in that entire area. There was also an Electronics Boutique and another computer / tabletop games shop, but I cannot recall the name. It might have been Babbage's, before they merged to create GameStop.

When I was a kid there was nowhere in town where you could buy espresso, but there were multiple shops where you could buy filter coffee and fresh-baked donuts at any time of night.

the fact that the biggest rice consuming culture in the world which invented rice itself at the dawn of agriculture has widely adopted the rice cooker as standard tells me all I need to know

I too was on this kick until I had some rice from a Zojirushi rice cooker. It never misses.

I never even heard of a rice cooker until Uncle Roger taught me about it. i was going to buy one, but then my mom's friend just gave me hers lol. made perfect rice. I started eating sticky rice everyday, reaffirming that I was Asian in my past life, but then I started getting heart burn from it, so I had to stop. and gave my large sack of rice to my friend his wife who is Asian. and he was like sweet, we eat this stuff everyday. My guts are too weak. or maybe I just ate too much of it. i dunno. But I can only do one serving a day or else I'll vomit stomach acid lol. I hope there's an afterlife so I can just eat a bunch of sticky rice out of a giant bowl with slabs of meat on the side like Goku.

Personal limos is where it’s at now. Extended wheelbase luxury models, Maybachs, etc.

Had one, can confirm it was a serious flex at the mall.

Viennetta in Europe (Italy at least) is one of the earliest and most egregious examples of shrinkflation. I got one a few years ago after a decade and I was aghast at how small it had become.

Covid pushed a lot of that technology here.

T9 texting.

I still remember being up late at night on a laptop in the late 90's/early 2000's. it had 4GB of Harddrive space max and I thought it was so much. I'd download a bunch of PC game demos. This was before steam existed. I have no idea how I even found them. but back in those days you'd just explore and find all kinds of websites randomly.

Sadly this is just evidence that people will go hard in favour of convenience over quality. Proper hi-fi is still an absolute joy to own & experience, but Apple first taught everyone that 128Kbps was fine, and that headphones didn't need to be good as long as they had a white cable that told everyone you had an iThing. Listening to great music on poor systems is a sufferance that the vast majority of people don't even realise they're imposing upon themselves.

yeah, even in the mid to late 2000's, getting camera was still kind of a big deal. I remember those USB flip cameras. they were kinda cool for a few months lol

I’m still using the Sony LED TV I purchased in 2011. It was $2600.00.

Ugh. My aunties loved that stuff. There were mall shops that only sold Thomas Kinkade.

Yeah I don’t think people truly understand this. I grew up in a 1700 sq ft house with five people. This included the finished basement. That was a comfortable home for us but I remember my parents coworkers being in shock at the size and “how much did you pay?!” Fast forward to these days and I was fortunate enough to purchase a 2200 sq ft home recently. I have a wife and two kids and my neighbor down the road with one kid asked us if it was going to be big enough for us. Like….what the f***? Apparently I skimped on the size of the house and that just baffles me. There’s more room than I know what to do with!