Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone (2014)

The tech is very much alive and well.

In Europe, I remember the same frequency, 27 MHz being used for early RC cars. Not sure if EU truck drivers used this too, but it is available and caused runaway RC cars as it was unreliable to use that band. 40Mhz didn't have that issue, but perhaps it was not allowed for regular/unlicensed use...

Here is some more detail for that particular scanner:

https://www.rigpix.com/rs-realistic/realistic_pro57.htm

Semi-related because Radio Shack, a store manager taught me how to leverage my "Tandy Service Plan" to get free upgrades on my scanner for life. I was not ready for him to do this. He grabbed my handheld 20 channel scanner by the antenna and smashed it on the desk. Then he handed me a 200 channel scanner because Radio Shack no longer had an equivalent model. Once the 200 channel scanner was obsolete I got a free 1000 channel scanner. Each iteration scanned both channels and stepped frequencies faster. Most scanners lock out particular frequency ranges but this can be bypassed usually by cutting one diode or moving a jumper. Radio Shack preferred the diode method. Nowadays people call this "frequency expansion" or expanded on scanners, ham radio, etc... Some HAM radios can be used as scanners once frequency expanded.

Some now prefer software defined radios to double as scanners. I like both. SDR's are great at home but too much clutter for in the vehicle for me. SDR's combined with leaked keys can monitor P25 encrypted law enforcement tactical channels.

Department stores and Radio Shacks used to be full of little golf computers and VHS rewinders and electronic Scrabble dictionaries and sports trivia games around Father’s Day and Christmas. It would be unusual in most families, I think, to give someone an app for Christmas.

They’ve also changed our relationship with industrial design. There are probably fewer people designing gadgets, and consumers are less used to acquiring a new device and learning how to use it. I didn’t grow up in a particularly gadgety household, but by the time I was 12 I had learned to work a pretty wide variety of electronics with different interfaces and physical media. Nowadays even your TV is basically a smartphone with a remote.

* hardware tools / multi-tools

* bluetooth speakers

* portable projectors - outdoor big-screen movie night on the cheap

* the "sports/action" camera market - waterproof, magnetic/mountable, go-pro/insta360 etc

* pro/am mirrorless cameras are mostly too expensive to qualify but there's some really cool accesories now (handheld stabilizing gimbals, say)

* everything in the thread/zigbee/etc home automation space (sensors and buttons and automations...)

* car gadgets for enthusiast cars (things that plug into obd ports for diagnostics or real-time display of measurements), or "add android auto to your old car's built-in screen" multi-media retrofits (though in gaining things like this we've lost the ease of just things being single- or double-DIN in the first place), or dashcams

* vr headsets (feels very much like the sort of thing Radioshack of old would've been all over like the tiny handheld TVs)

* fitbits and such wearables

* portable monitors

* mechanical keyboards (as well as macro pads and such)

a lot of them qualify as "phone accesories" but I'm not sure that takes away from them

My Sony digital camera is still a lot of fun (so are my medium- format film cameras for that matter). Of course the phone is the camera I always have on me.

I have plenty of other dedicated devices but I'm kind of lazy to think about them, list them. (A digital 12-channel recorder/mixer just jumped to my mind though.)

Newspaper

Classifieds

Phone book

Rolodex

Photo album

ATM?

Health tracker?

Translator

Dictionary

Thesaurus

Notebook

Scanner

Compass

Flashlight

Sears catalog?

Amateur Radio and GMRS though are still very much things that will give good performance for those use cases. GMRS requires a “license” but no skill is required, just payment to the FCC.

Ham radio or GMRS are still great options for remote areas or at crowded venues where nobody can get cell service because everything is overloaded.

Even before the iPhone I had a phone with front and rear cameras and Bluetooth, it has long since been replaced and is probably sitting at the back of a drawer somewhere. If I had the ability to make it work as a Bluetooth webcam it might have had a productive second life. It was physically capable of doing this, just not software capable

What is disappointing is that LTE Direct and 5G Peer to Peer didn't go anywhere. They do LTE or 5G directly without towers. The range is 1km, not walkie talkie distance, but enough for a lot of things. There are some first responders phones with but it doesn't seem to be available for public.

In 2025 it would be $7,245.62.

Most users of that era did none of those things. They used apps or shareware they purchased, not much different from today. If anything, it was vastly harder at that time to get the tools to tinker. Compilers and assemblers were quite expensive products; users would be limited to Microsoft GW-BASIC and debug.com that came with MS-DOS or a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal if they were willing to pay extra to get it.

So if you evaluate it by hardware, it's true that the phone isn't giving the same I/O capability. But the application software is there, there are far more apps for a phone and you can access the old ones in some degree too.

If you need an actually hackable PC equivalent, we have all kinds of boards and configurations, from microcontrollers to rasPi style computers through FPGA boards. Any of them are a tiny fraction of the cost of the old desktops.

Fun times.

As I recall, the goal was for the detector detectors to shut off once detecting that they were being detected, to avoid a ticket in places where detectors were illegal.

And in Ontario, Canada? One single company sold to the cops and people, in a war of escalation that left their pockets quite padded. Wikipedia says BEL-Tronics, Inc. of Ontario, Canada

Then again, it needs to be a laser detector today.

https://radio.garden

But if you actually comprehended the article, the author said that you use your phone to perform all those functions. The iPhone can replace all of those functions you listed. It is water resistant and has a speaker. It does not have an AM/FM station but most broadcast radio stations also have a live stream that you can get in your phone. The iPhone came with earbuds when this article was written. It had a calculator app on day one, and it’s just fine. You don’t have literal CB but you can use a variety of apps to communicate with voice in real time. You can’t play the literal CDs but you can’t play the literal .wav files on the CDs.

I continue to find this assessment of phones and tablets impossible to relate to. The very-portable device with multiple cameras, microphones, various other sensors, maybe stylus support built-in, is in most cases in which I’m creating anything in my personal life vastly more useful than a laptop or desktop computer. This seems to also be what many people who create real things for work have decided. (I do computer-things with computers for pay, so it’s different for me there)

Some of those still exist in niches - music hardware, ham radio, specalised navigation hardware for boats and planes, and high-performance high-end professional cameras and such.

But consumer-grade products are now mostly software, and the software runs on a handful of platforms controlled by a handful of corporations who charge access tribute (taxes.)

The entire system is very locked-down and brittle, and gives those corporations the option to create individual and collective kill-switches for people and/or activities they don't like.

That would have sounded unlikely a couple of years ago, but it sounds a lot less unlikely now.

> Yes, a clear win for replacement.

Not that clear unless augmented with wireless earbuds: I would much rather spend an hour talking on a traditionally-shaped phone handset (not quite the one in the picture) than on a mobile phone (even a pre-iPhone candybar one, though holding a glass slab to your cheek for prolonged periods of time is particularly unpleasant). Of course, hour-long personal telephone calls are not really a thing anymore for most people, but I don’t know in which direction the causation points there.

However, I don't own an iPhone, I have a Xiaomi with an audio socket.

How do you figure that it's 3 times more? The article says those things add up to $5100 updated for inflation (written in 2014, so more today). A smart phone then was a lot less than $5100.

  You’d have spent $3054.82 in 1991 to buy all the stuff in this ad that you can now do with your phone. That amount is roughly equivalent to about $5100 in 2012 dollars.

For a budget device, we pay, what, 2%? Not 2% less, just 2%.