The Microsoft Kinect was a $150 motion-sensing camera that let players control an Xbox 360 with their bodies instead of a controller, and on October 25, 2017 Microsoft confirmed it had stopped manufacturing it for good. Launched on November 4, 2010 as an add-on for the aging Xbox 360, Kinect did something no mainstream game device had done before: it watched the room, tracked a player’s skeleton, heard voice commands, and turned “you are the controller” from a slogan into a product. People bought it in numbers that embarrassed every prior peripheral. It was not killed because it failed. It was killed, in large part, because Microsoft tried to make everyone buy it whether they wanted it or not.
The early success was genuine and historic. Kinect sold roughly eight million units in its first 60 days, earning a Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device, and went on to move around 35 million units over its lifetime — a figure Microsoft cited when it announced the end. For a brief window it looked like the future of how people would interact with computers: waving, leaning, speaking, no controller required.
Then Microsoft made the decision that defined Kinect’s death. When the Xbox One launched in November 2013, every console came bundled with a new, more powerful Kinect, which helped push the price to $499 — a full $100 above Sony’s PlayStation 4 at $399. Gamers, who mostly wanted a games box rather than a living-room camera that had to be plugged in to work, balked. The PS4 outsold the Xbox One decisively out of the gate, and in 2014 Microsoft reversed course, releasing a cheaper Kinect-free Xbox One at $399 and quietly cutting the sensor loose.
Unbundled, Kinect lost its reason to exist: developers stopped building for hardware that was no longer in every box, sales dried up, and in October 2017 production ended. The technology did not die, though. The depth-sensing and skeletal-tracking work Kinect pioneered fed forward into Microsoft’s HoloLens headset and, later, the Azure Kinect developer camera. The gadget that taught a generation to flail at their televisions was gone; the engineering that made it possible quietly went to work elsewhere.
The Apple Newton was the device that named an entire category and then failed to own it. Its first model, the MessagePad, shipped on August 2, 1993 for a base price of $699, and on February 27, 1998 Steve Jobs — barely a year back at the company he had co-founded — switched the whole line off. In between sat a handheld computer genuinely ahead of its moment: a stylus-driven tablet that took notes, kept a calendar, sent faxes and beamed contacts between devices, years before anyone carried a phone that could do the same.
It was Apple’s CEO John Sculley who, in a 1992 keynote, popularized the phrase “personal digital assistant” to describe what the Newton would be — a pocket information device, easier than a PC, meant to sell for under a thousand dollars. The vision was clear-eyed and, in retrospect, almost exactly correct. The execution was not. The Newton was bulky, expensive once you bought the accessories, and saddled with a single demo-friendly feature — handwriting recognition — that did not yet work well enough to carry the marketing built around it. The MessagePad misread enough scrawl to become a national joke before it could become a habit.
The mockery was specific and lethal. In August 1993, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau spent a week of Doonesbury strips having a character’s Newton translate “Catching on?” into “Egg freckles,” and the phrase entered the language as shorthand for the device’s failings. The handwriting engine improved markedly with Newton OS 2.0 in 1996, and later MessagePads were faster and more capable — but reputations harden early, and the Newton never outran its first impression. Sales ran well below Apple’s hopes across the line’s five years.
When Jobs returned in 1997 to a company bleeding cash, the Newton was an obvious cut: a costly, off-strategy hardware effort with its own operating system, competing for attention with the Mac he intended to save Apple with. He killed it in early 1998. The irony is that he was not rejecting the idea — only the timing and the form. A decade later Apple shipped the iPhone and then the iPad, the touch-screen pocket computers the Newton had been sketching in pen. The Newton did not so much fail as arrive about fifteen years too soon.
The Microsoft Band was Microsoft’s attempt to wear technology on the wrist, and after two generations and two years it was discontinued, quietly pulled from the company’s online store on October 3, 2016 with no third model to follow. It launched on October 30, 2014 at $199 — a slim, screen-bearing fitness tracker that crammed ten sensors into a stiff plastic-and-rubber strap and promised to read heart rate, skin temperature, sun exposure, and sleep while doubling as a notifications display. A second version, the Band 2, arrived a year later at $249 with a curved screen, a barometer, and eleven sensors. Then the team was disbanded, the device was delisted, and Microsoft walked away from the wrist.
It was not killed by a single rival or a fatal flaw so much as by the accumulated weight of its own compromises. The Band did a remarkable number of things, and it did most of them adequately and none of them with grace. The strap was rigid and uncomfortable for all-day wear; the battery lasted roughly two days, less with GPS; and — most damningly — the rubber had a habit of cracking and splitting along the seams, a defect common enough that Microsoft revised the materials for the Band 2 without ever quite admitting why. A wearable’s first job is to be worn, and the Band made that a chore.
Microsoft’s exit was characteristically tidy and characteristically final. There would be no Band 3; the software development kit was pulled; and the company folded its Health-branded apps into a backend it hoped third-party wearables would use instead of building its own. That hope, too, expired. On May 31, 2019, Microsoft shut the Microsoft Health Dashboard and removed the Band apps from every app store, deleting the cloud data that made the device smart and leaving the surviving Bands as offline pedometers.
What the Band left behind was not a community in mourning but a cautionary spec sheet: a device that out-sensored every competitor and lost anyway, because it never solved the unglamorous problem of being comfortable on a human arm.
The Meta Portal was a smart video-calling display with a camera that followed you around the room, and after four years of decent reviews and indifferent sales the consumer version was discontinued, with Meta confirming its exit from the consumer market in June 2022 amid cost-cutting at its money-losing Reality Labs division. Facebook launched it on October 8, 2018 as the $199 Portal and the $349 Portal+, built around a “Smart Camera” that automatically panned and zoomed to keep callers in frame as they moved. The hardware was genuinely good. The problem was whose name was on it.
Portal arrived at the worst possible moment for a Facebook-branded camera in the living room. The launch came months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a breach affecting tens of millions of accounts, into a public that had just learned exactly how Facebook treated personal data — and was now being asked to install a Facebook camera that auto-tracks human movement on the kitchen counter. Facebook anticipated the objection and engineered against it: a hardware button to electronically cut the camera and microphone, a physical lens cover, on-device processing, and repeated assurances that it neither watched nor kept call contents. Reviewers largely agreed the device worked and the safeguards were real. The trust the device required, Facebook had already spent.
So Portal sold modestly. It found its truest audience not among friends and family but among businesses, where it became a useful remote-collaboration tool during the COVID-19 pandemic — reportedly rising from around 600,000 units in 2020 to roughly 800,000 in 2021, figures attributed to internal estimates rather than disclosed sales. Even that was a rounding error against Meta’s ambitions and against the billions Reality Labs was burning on the metaverse. In June 2022, as Meta postponed AR glasses and canceled a smartwatch, it ended consumer Portal production and refocused the line on the enterprise.
What Portal proved was uncomfortable for its maker: that the company could build a polished consumer device and still fail to sell it, because the deciding feature was never the camera. It was the brand attached to it.