“It Works 100% Of The Time”: 35 “Obsolete” Things These People Haven’t Given Up On

I’m a school librarian - print books are nowhere near as obsolete as people seem to think. Kids still devour them!

Regular buttons in a car instead of touch screen everything.

I want my physical media. When all these companies start pulling licenses, selling them to new people, making it harder to access content, I want to be able to pull my Blu-ray, DVD, CD, or whatever other media it’s in off the shelf and watch it.

USB drives for data storage.

I have trust issues with cloud servers, and dislike the idea of personal data being stored on file servers that I do not own and control.

"The Cloud" is nearly impossible to avoid entirely; I just minimize my use of it in favor of local backups with planned resilience and redundancy.

Paper maps are considered by many to be obsolete, but they are essential for hiking or just being in an area away from civilization where cell service can be unreliable to nonexistent. 

Edit: I've had about 100 replies informing me that maps can be saved so they work offline. I am aware of this. However it doesn't do much good when hiking on remote trails that aren't marked in any online maps. It doesn't help when you've unexpectedly driven into a large dead zone and didn't know to save maps in advance. And it doesn't help when leaving the phone behind for an overnight kayaking trip because of the risk of dropping the phone in the river. .

A notebook and pencil. I find writing down lists, making plans or doing financial analysis on paper so 'clarifying'. The pencil must have an eraser on the end.

Regular, non smart watches.

Cast iron cookware. My $15 pan will outlast any nonstick pan you can buy. I can burn it, scrape it, and rust it out, and still recover it into new condition.

Keys for opening my car door/starting the car.

I'm not down with the whole push-to-start/keyless entry thing.

Manual gearbox. Because it allows me to feel more involved in the driving process.

I prefer to spend cash. It helps my brain process the spending. I'm still bad with money but I got tired of swiping and praying.

A lot of venues are cashless now - hate it.

Handwritten agendas/planners. Writing s**t out by hand in general.

Books vs ebooks.

Manual can openers. I hate the electric ones.

Hand held compass. Never runs out of battery and has saved my bacon many times.

Any non-smart device other than a smartphone. To hell with those devices collecting my data, serving me ads, and being a pain to maintain.

Notepad and txt files!

They have no formatting and work in all situations. Across every device and every piece of software. And by every, I mean that you can easily hit a txt file with a hex editor and fully understand and manipulate it. The file size is small.

Since notepad has no formatting options, you can paste in any modern day c**p and it will strip out the annoying bits. It kills things like hypertext, color, italics bolding, size, and other font changes. It even does a pretty good job of ignoring non human readable characters.

In other words, it works 100% of the time and returns only the content that you actually want with exactly nothing else.

It is not obsolete really. But my 1999 VW Golf.

I despise new cars and refuse to get one even if I had the money for it.

All these mandatory driving assistance features you cannot permanently turn off like lane keeping assistance combined with the f*****g subscription s**t they are putting out and the fact that you cannot repair your car unless you have the software for it.

I want a car to be able to do 3 things. Have AC, have good sound system, be able to get me from point A to B without breaking down. I neither need nor want all these extra system and they'd be fine if I could disable them and never worry about them again. I cannot so I refuse to get any new car until I can.

Magnifying lenses. Why use a digital camera when you can use a magnifying lens that doubles as a solar death ray?

Wired headphones.