Hardware disasters are so much more fun than software failures. Getting sent to the wrong place by the first version of Apple Maps wasn't amusing but seeing founders and CEOs and designers going out on a limb with wacky product experiments will never not be intriguing.
As tech companies spent billions searching for the next iphoness throughout the 2010s, we've seen plenty of fascinating product failures over this past decade.
Who could forget Juicero (2016), the cold-press juicer that didn't juice? Or Lytro (2012), the 'light field' camera that let you manipulate the focus of photographs after the fact, which was mind-blowing but never found an audience. Then there was the Nexus Q (2012) media streamer, which was so expensive and ill-conceived Google refunded pre-orders and shipped it anyway. And some flops were steps on the way to success. The mistakes made by Nintendo on the Wii U (2012) helped the company deliver a major success with the Switch.
Yet even with the relative demise of the peppy Kickstarter campaign in tech culture, the debacle surrounding the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Fold this year proves that the space to flop and, crucially, the will to flop, remain intact as we head into the 2020s. May there be many more.
The Amazon Fire phones (2014), pure flop
To be fair to Amazon, when Jeff Bezos stood on stage at the Fremont Theatre in Seattle in June 2014, holding his “elegant” Fire phones high above his head, 3D TVs (another flop!) were still three years away from biting the dust. It was a time, at least inside Amazon HQ, when making ‘3D’ abilities one of the core features of an iphoness competitor was plausible. Just not popular.
Its design was naff, the front camera array was mostly pointless and at £400 in the UK, the middling specs didn’t justify the price or Amazon’s walled garden of its own services and shopping. Reportedly in development since 2010, Amazon ended production of the Fire phones just over a year after the launch, in August 2015, with speculation that it suffered a $170 million in connection with the launch. Bezos has shied away from physically presenting Amazon hardware on stage ever since. It was probably the purest of the decade's flops.
The funny thing is that Amazon was far from alone in experimenting in the wrong directions in phoness and tablets: Microsoft, HTC and particularly RIM/BlackBerry were flailing around for a response to the iphoness and ipads. And it had succeeded with the Kindle e-reader series and its Kindle Fire tablets.
If Amazon had come back, a little bruised maybe, with a pared back Fire phones with a tweaked aesthetic, more useful features and a lower price, we probably wouldn’t be talking about the one and only Fire phones in this context at all. If the second gen Fire phones that never materialised had been able to replicate what Amazon has done with its standard and kids Fire HD tablets, that would have resulted in a serious dent out of both iphoness and androids smartphones sales over the decade.
It’s tempting to go into counterfactuals about Alexa and Echo, too, but remember that the first gen Amazon Echo smart speaker was announced only a couple of months after the Fire phones, in November 2014 with invite-only sales until mid-2015. Still, without the complete and utter defeat on the Fire phones project, who knows how many resources Alexa and Echo would have received?
More post-iphoness misfires
BlackBerry: Its (many, many) last gasps included the Playbook tablet (2011), Priv phones (2015) and 10 OS (2013).
HTC First with Facebook Home (2013): Don’t forget HTC’s pilot ‘Facebook phones’. Hint with hindsight: don’t build a phones around one set of apps.
Jolla (2013): A quite delightful ‘indie’ phones, running on Sailfish OS. It didn’t stand a chance.
HP TouchPad (2011): Quite how anyone at HP thought this could take off the ipads is beyond me.
Sony Tablet P (2012): Ahead of its time dual screen, clamshell tab.
Samsung Galaxy K Zoom (2014): Turns out we don’t want a Frankenstein phones-camera after all.
Magic Leap (2015-) and the pivot to enterprise
Google Glass is, and always will be, an iconic fail but the real glasshole of the piece is Magic Leap. When the hype around the Glass Explorer editions melted away – when it was on your face, the experience really was quite underwhelming – it was reasonable to make the following arguments: Google went too soon, it misjudged the camera element and the etiquette, an augmented layer on our lives was still possible.
Then two years later Rony Abovitz’s over-funded Florida startup Magic Leap released a concept video named ‘Just another day in the office’ with all the elements of 3D AR graphics in real space that we wanted. Google, Qualcomm, Warner Bros, Alibaba, all poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Magic Leap’s vision and over the next four years or so, the Magic Leap One hasn’t so much flopped as fizzled away.
The signs were there: Beyoncé tried the headset in early 2017 and wasn’t impressed. The form factor was clunky and wildly inappropriate for everyday consumer use, despite the funding. And the reality didn’t match up to the videos.
Tim Cook knows when to stay away from a technology experience that isn’t ready for the mainstream. Apple has made its purchases in the AR space but reports of Apple AR smartglasses now point to a 2021 release at the earliest. Why? Google Glass 2.0 in 2017 was an Enterprise Edition; Microsoft HoloLens’ biggest successes have been in industrial uses; in VR the HTC Vive’s business now seems reliant on B2B. And on December 10, 2019, after an alleged total of 6,000 sales in six months, Magic Leap launched Spatial Computing for Enterprise.
More face computer fails
Google Glass (2013): Pivoted to enterprise.
Snap Spectacles 1, 2 and 3 (2016-): Snap has sold tens of thousands of these camera glasses to hipsters in a bid to get to the AR future it thinks we (it) deserves.
LG 360 VR (2016): Still one of the most insulting products I have ever tested.
Samsung Gear VR (2014): A genuinely good-value headset that had nowhere to go.
Leap Motion (2010): Brilliantly accurate tracking technology that was failed by too-clumsy humans.
Nixie (2014), future of wearable tech
Nixie? Yes, Nixie. The autonomous, person-following, selfie-taking, wrist worn drone that Intel awarded $500,000 to in its Make It Wearable Challenge (later turned into a TV show). It was at this moment, while sitting in the audience, that I realised Intel would not be making up for lost time in smartphoness with this particular push into wearables.
Nixie represents the heady days of wearable tech when everything was possible and use cases didn’t matter. ‘Emotion tracking’ smart rings, audio augmenting hearables, bulky watch accessories. Nixie beat the modular smartwatch system Blocks (below) and bionic hand makers Open Bionics to the prize, despite having very little to demo at the time. As of early 2016, the droneable was in development but not commercially available.
Nixie did technically have one or two use cases – taking a selfie while climbing a mountain – but it was all pretty tenuous and, as like many, many wearables over the 2010s, it was essentially some interesting technology without a problem to solve.
It’s slightly sad that Apple, which – health innovation aside – has taken what might be seen as the safest route through wearable tech with the Apple Watch and AirPods, has chewed up and spit out all the other ideas, even the notion of round smartwatches. But some ideas deserved to be eaten up and never spoken of again and Nixie was one of them.
More wearables no-one* ever wore
Microsoft Band (2014): A fitness tracker built by aliens who have never encountered human wrists.
Samsung Galaxy Gear (2013): Samsung’s first smartwatch had a camera on it.
Blocks (2014): The modular smartwatch that took five years to fail to materialise.
Sony Wena straps (2019): Odd smart straps that arrived with too many complications.
Acer INOX Cybertool (2016): Acer and Victorinox get points for the sheer ugliness of this watch add-on. We’d be very surprised if a single person, not being paid to, wore this in public.
Google Pixel Buds (2018): Ambitious but failed to real time translate in any meaningful way.
GoPro Karma drone (2017): It’s not a wearable but GoPro’s first drone deserves a mention on account of its near-biblical design and battery issues which lead to Karma’s falling from the sky. Less than ideal.
Facebook Portal (2018) and the danger of doing everything
It’s difficult to think of a product with as quite as spectacularly poor timing as the first Facebook Portal. The first batch of video calling smart displays were actually a well specced, if limited, proposition with features such as autozooming to centre you in the frame. It was very similar to the Amazon Echo Show.
In 2018, though, a scandal-infected Facebook was attempting to put out fire after fire - the Cambridge Analytica breach, Russian troll ads, the UN’s report on its role in Myanmar. With Facebook the absolute worst word in privacy and trust, no-one wanted a Facebook camera and microphones in their homes, especially one which the company admitted would track call data in order to serve ads to users.
This hardware flame-out itself fuelled the privacy conversation even more, a vicious cycle in which Facebook did not manage to shift very many Portals. Estimates put sales as “very low” (according to supply chain sources) and less than 1% of total smart speaker sales. There’s a lesson for Amazon, in particular, here: when you try to do everything, the damage will spread from politics and policies to products.
Cisco could have warned Facebook that hardware is hard - its $600 HD video chat Umi device flopped way back in 2010. But in 2019, Facebook is back with a second generation of Portal products. Now all it has to do is convince Apple, Amazon and Google to give it a spot in their newly formed smart home mega-alliance.
More products that burst into flames (literally)
Beats Pill XL (2015): Even Apple isn’t immune to speakers catching fire.
Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (2016): The Note 7's exploding batteries were one of the first, and most dangerous, signals that companies with the reputation of Samsung can have serious quality assurance issues. See recently for cracked screens rather than aeroplane bans: Samsung Galaxy Fold (2019).
Hoverboards (2015): It was something of a relief when these things started going up in flames.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
