15 'obsolete' retro products that have made huge comebacks

Dated products that people still use

Read on to see 15 products you thought had disappeared but haven't. 

Nintendo Game Boy

Nintendo's Game Boy consoles were first launched in 1989 and the final iteration of the console was the Game Boy Micro in 2005. Nintendo sold over 100 million units during this time, but eventually replaced the console with the Nintendo DS. But 15 years later, a certain community of players still enjoy their Game Boys.

Nintendo Game Boy

In fact, many regularly post on the social media forum Reddit about their gaming habits and the modifications they have made to their consoles. One company has gone one step further to turn nostalgia into reality. Gaming manufacturer Hyperkin specializes in retro games, selling a device that allows you to play Game Boy games on your phone by just popping them into the top slot (pictured).

Nokia 3310

The Nokia 3310 was a classic cellphone launched in 2000 and over the next five years it sold 126 million handsets. Fast forward to 2022 and over four billion people own smartphones globally – yet some are happy to keep with a 'brick' phone, with many still selling on eBay. Why? Perhaps a desire for a simpler life without constant internet access, or the longer battery life of the 3310, are the reasons behind its popularity.

Nokia 3310

In 2017, Nokia decided to make the most of the nostalgia, launching an updated version of the phone. While not exactly the same as the original – it boasts a color screen and an updated version of the classic game Snake – it also does not offer internet access or apps such as WhatsApp, therefore capturing some of the simplicity of its predecessor. It also boasts a standby battery life of a whole month! The phones are popular and to buy one you have to join a waiting list to find out when new handsets are available.

Polaroid camera

Polaroid cameras, which allow you to immediately print your picture, first went on sale in 1948. Created by inventor Edwin Land, the instant cameras achieved great success, notably in the 1960s. However, a steady decline in sales led to the company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2001. Polaroid cameras came to an end in 2005, with the last rolls of film being produced until the end of 2009.

Polaroid camera

Yet some devoted fans weren’t ready to say goodbye. A group known as The Impossible Project decided that they needed to act before Polaroid film ran out forever. In May 2017, they acquired the brand and intellectual property of the Polaroid Corporation and took over its last remaining factory in the Netherlands. Under the name of Polaroid Originals, the company has brought Polaroid back to life, creating two new analog cameras and selling vintage cameras and film, proving that there is still a place for the Polaroid in the digital age.

Pager

Before cellphones, there weren’t many people who could be contacted wherever they were. Invented in 1921, pagers began to be used by firefighters, police officers and medical professionals during the 1950s, before entering the commercial market in 1964 with Motorola’s Pageboy I. Owning one was a status symbol, signifying that you were important and in-demand. Doctors and businessmen relied on pagers, until cellphones and later smartphones came in to replace them.

Pager

However, people are still using pagers. Why? Well, they can be slightly more reliable. Where cellphones can fall victim to patchy service, pagers work on a separate network which has better reception in rural areas. In the US, it’s estimated that 90% of hospitals continue to use pagers.

Dial-up internet

With seemingly ubiquitous broadband, and the arrival of fibre optic, dial-up internet feels like a thing of the distant past. In the UK, while it is still used by some in rural communities, official figures are no longer kept. The last year that data was recorded was in 2010, when 800,000 people used the service. Meanwhile, Australia only had 90,000 people using dial-up in 2016, with the figure dropping each year.

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Dial-up internet

The numbers in the US are much higher though. Around 1.9% of American internet users were still using dial-up internet in 2019, according to Statista data, with the highest proportion of dial-up users in Georgia. That's because in some rural areas dial-up is the only option, and all you need to connect is a traditional phone line in the house. 

Fax machine

You would have thought that fax machines had been kicked into touch by online technologies such as email. However, with contracts often needing a real signature rather than electronic authorization, as well as habit, many businesses still have a fax machine.

Fax machine

For example, until very recently faxes were thriving in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). The NHS was actually the world's largest fax machine buyer, with at least 10,000 machines in service across the NHS. But in late 2018 the nation's health secretary banned the NHS from buying fax machines and ordered them to be phased out by April 2020. However, a report by health marketing and PR specialist Silver Buck in fall 2019 found that, with six months to go until the ban kicked in, only 42% of machines had been retired, with two hospital trusts revealing they actually had more machines than they had in 2018 when the announcement was made.

Floppy disks

Floppy disks are no longer in production, but they are still the preferred method of storing and transferring data for many. In fact, up until October 2019, the US Department of Defense was still using them as it relied on a 1970s computing system – the IBM Series/1 Computer – before it finally updated its systems.

Floppy disks

For Tom Persky (pictured), owner of floppy disk seller floppydisk.com, his business is reliant on companies that still use the outdated technology. He knows it's a dying industry, but the end is not quite in sight. When interviewed by the New York Times in 2019, he said the technology is more widely used than people might expect, especially for large industrial machines such as those used by the medical, military and aviation industries.

Rotary telephone

Nowadays many people are abandoning landline phones altogether, let alone old-fashioned rotary phones, which started to become obsolete when push-button models were introduced in the 1960s. Invented in the 1890s, the traditional rotary mechanism works by the user rotating it to each number, before it springs back and returns to its original position.

Rotary telephone

So why do people still use these relics? For some it’s a case of nostalgia, while for others, especially elderly people, it’s what they’re used to and they simply prefer it. Although there is no official data on how many people still use them, Ken Parker of TDS Telecom told New England local newspaper Concord Monitor it’s likely less than 1% of the US population. 

VHS tapes

When you could subscribe to a digital streaming service for a few dollars each month and gain access to a whole library of movies with crystal-clear picture quality, why would you resort to clunky, old-fashioned VHS? For a small but thriving subculture of VHS enthusiasts, there are a number of benefits to this outdated technology. For starters, there’s the nostalgia factor, ramped up by VHS collectors displaying their tapes on social media platforms such as Instagram.

VHS tapes

There’s also a renewed interest in the “low-fi” aspect of VHS – fans report that they enjoy the mechanical click of the tape as you put it into the drive, the outdated movie trailers, and the slightly fuzzy aesthetic. Whatever their reasons, there’s undoubtedly a renewed interest.

DVD rental services

In a similar vein, it looks like DVD rental services are still alive and well. Netflix, which started life as a mail-order DVD rental service before becoming the streaming behemoth it is today, still makes $200 million a year from DVD and Blu-ray rentals. Some customers cite the wider choice of titles, with 100,000 movies to choose from as opposed to 6,000 movies and TV shows online, as a reason for sticking with the old-fashioned method.

DVD rental services

Despite the fact the wider business went bankrupt in 2010, there is still one surviving Blockbuster Video store in Bend, Oregon, and it's shown no sign of shutting down anytime soon. Speaking to BBC News, general manager Sandi Harding said: "The amount of attention has been absolutely crazy. We've had lots of people coming from around the world, like London and Taiwan, and across the country."

Walkman

It’s just over 40 years old, yet the Sony Walkman – the ultimate piece of tech to be seen with in the 1980s – is making a comeback. Although the classic cassette tape Walkman was retired by Sony in 2010, an increased demand for analog technology has fueled a renewed demand for these iconic devices.

Walkman

French company Mulann has capitalised on the trend, partnering with La Toile Sur Ecoute to release a portable cassette player which is currently on sale for €69 ($81). The new cassette player comes complete with improved sound quality, and a new prototype is being developed which will be rechargeable and include Bluetooth.

Cassette tapes

Unsurprisingly, along with Walkmans and cassette tape players, cassette tapes themselves are enjoying a comeback. These small plastic devices were invented and released by Philips in 1962, as a more compact and efficient alternative to reel-to-reel audio storage. They were adopted en masse by the mid-1960s and peaked in popularity in the 1980s, before being replaced by CDs the following decade and quickly becoming obsolete.

Cassette tapes

Yet bizarrely, they're booming in popularity again, as younger music artists release their albums on cassette, allowing younger audiences to experience this analog technology of their parents' generation.

Telephone booths and payphones

Red telephone boxes are up there with the most recognizable features of Britain's streets, along with black taxi cabs and red double-decker buses. At their peak in 1992, there were 92,000 telephone boxes across the UK, but usage has been on the decrease, declining 90% over the past decade as mobile phones have become more widespread. For that reason, phone company BT decided in 2017 to scrap half of the country's remaining 40,000 telephone boxes. Yet they're not set to completely vanish from the streets just yet, as they still handle around 33,000 calls a day and are still used by elderly people, young children, and in emergencies when people don't have access to a mobile phone. 

Telephone booths and payphones

In the US, there are still around 100,000 payphones, although how many people use them is anyone's guess

Typewriters

While most of us rely on laptops and PCs for typing today, for some nothing beats the look and feel of a good old-fashioned typewriter. The first commercial typewriters entered the market in 1874 and became popular from the 1880s onward, especially for workplaces. However, typewriters began to fall out of favor by the 1980s as computers began to come into peoples' homes, and prominent typewriter company Brother rolled its last models off the production lines in 2012.

Typewriters

Despite this, typewriters have seen a resurgence lately. Fans have formed online networks to chat about and deal in typewriters, and there are currently more than 8,000 results for the term on eBay. Paul Schweitzer, owner of Gramercy Typewriter Company in New York City, said sales of manual typewriters have been on the rise in the past few years, telling Fox News: "The younger people are rediscovering typewriters because there are too many distractions [with today's technology]. You can concentrate more."

Delivered milk

Long gone are the days when the milkman would deliver milk to the doorstep. Or are they? In line with recent concerns about plastic consumption and the fact that glass can be recycled, some people are opting for traditional milk deliveries once again. In the UK, milk rounds still account for 3% of total milk sales, and the COVID-19 pandemic has seen demand for milkmen and women rise. Modern milk delivery company Milk and More reported "unprecedented orders" and had to recruit 100 more people to keep up with the demand created by the nationwide lockdown.

Delivered milk

It's a similar story in the US, where milk deliveries are also booming due to the pandemic. According to NBC Philadelphia, milk delivery services are received a surge in interest during the pandemic as customers kept away from supermarkets, with one milkman reporting, “We’re probably averaging somewhere around 90 to 100 calls a day.”

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