Google Glass was a $1,500 computer worn on the face — a titanium frame carrying a camera, a microphone, a touchpad, and a thumbnail-sized prism that floated a heads-up display above the wearer’s right eye — and after roughly two years as a consumer product it was discontinued, its Explorer Edition pulled from sale on January 19, 2015. It was not killed by a competitor, a price drop nobody could match, or a fatal bug. It was killed by the people standing next to whoever was wearing it.
Glass arrived in 2012 wrapped in the most theatrical launch in Google’s history: skydivers wearing prototypes streamed live video into the Google I/O keynote while co-founder Sergey Brin watched from the stage. In 2013 Google sold the Explorer Edition to a hand-picked cohort of about 8,000 developers and enthusiasts — the “Glass Explorers” — for $1,500 each, framing them as pioneers of a hands-free, always-on future. The hardware mostly worked. The social contract did not. A camera that could record at eye level, without a shutter sound or a reliable indicator that anyone was being filmed, turned every wearer into a suspected surveillance device, and the public responded with a coinage that did more damage than any review: Glasshole.
The backlash was swift and physical. Bars, restaurants, cinemas, and casinos banned the device; a Seattle dive bar’s “no Glass” sign became a news story; the Motion Picture Association of America warned theaters to watch for it; a Las Vegas strip club made patrons check their Glass at the door. The failure was sociological, not technical — a product that asked the world to accept being filmed by strangers, and the world declined. On January 15, 2015, Google announced it would stop producing the consumer prototype and moved the project out of its experimental Google X lab.
Glass did not vanish entirely. Google pivoted it to industry as Glass Enterprise Edition (2017) and Enterprise Edition 2 (2019), where a face-worn screen made sense for warehouse pickers and factory technicians and nobody felt spied on. That tail ran until March 15, 2023, when Google stopped selling it for good. The consumer dream — the device people were supposed to wear to dinner — had been dead for eight years by then. What it left behind was a verb’s worth of caution and a permanent question every wearable since has had to answer: who else is being recorded, and do they get a say?
The Amazon Fire Phone was Amazon’s first and only smartphone, announced in June 2014 and discontinued roughly a year later in 2015 after a commercial failure so complete it produced one of the more memorable numbers in gadget history: a reported write-down of around $170 million on unsold inventory. Launched at $199 on a two-year AT&T contract — iPhone money — it offered two headline tricks. “Dynamic Perspective” used four front-facing cameras to track the user’s head and tilt the interface, producing a 3D-like depth effect. “Firefly” let the phone identify objects, audio, barcodes, and text in the real world — and, not coincidentally, offer to buy them on Amazon. The whole device was, in essence, a beautifully instrumented shopping cart.
Amazon entered the smartphone market years late, against entrenched giants, with a phone priced at the top of the market and an app ecosystem near the bottom. The Fire Phone ran Fire OS, Amazon’s fork of Android, which meant no Google Play, no Google apps, and a stunted app store missing much of what buyers expected a 2014 flagship to do. To pay iPhone prices for a phone that could not run the apps an iPhone ran was a proposition the market declined almost instantly. The gimmicks did not help: Dynamic Perspective was a novelty that reviewers found gave them headaches more reliably than utility, and Firefly was a clever scanner whose primary purpose was funneling purchases to Amazon.
The collapse was swift and visible in the price tags. Within about six weeks of launch, the on-contract price was slashed from $199 to $0.99, and the unlocked price tumbled from the mid-$600s toward $449, then lower still over the following year. In October 2014 Amazon disclosed a charge of roughly $170 million, largely tied to the Fire Phone and related supplier commitments, plus a large pile of surplus inventory it could not sell. By 2015 the phone was discontinued, never to be succeeded.
What the Fire Phone proved was that distribution dominance in one arena does not transfer to another. Amazon could sell almost anything, but it could not will a smartphone ecosystem into existence or persuade buyers to pay flagship prices for a device built mainly to sell them more things. The phone died; the lessons it taught Amazon — about hardware, about pricing, about playing to its actual strengths — fed directly into the cheap, content-first Fire tablets and the Echo line that succeeded enormously by doing the opposite.
The Microsoft Zune was the company’s answer to the iPod, a brown-tinged portable media player launched on November 14, 2006 at $249.95 — and on October 3, 2011 Microsoft confirmed it would build no more Zune hardware, ending a five-year campaign that never once threatened the device it was built to beat. The Zune was not a bad product. The later Zune HD, released in September 2009, was a genuinely handsome OLED touchscreen player, and the supporting software introduced ideas Apple would not match for years. It simply arrived half a decade after the iPod had already won, into a market Apple had spent those years cementing with iTunes, and it never escaped second place — or, more accurately, fourth.
Microsoft built real innovation into the thing. The Zune shipped with built-in Wi-Fi and a wireless sharing feature officially unnamed but universally called “squirt,” which let one Zune beam a full track to another nearby Zune; the recipient could play it three times over three days before it expired. There was Zune Pass, an all-you-can-eat music subscription launched November 2008 that, in a flash of foresight, let subscribers keep ten tracks a month for good — a streaming-plus-ownership hybrid that prefigured the Spotify era by years. The hardware had a tactile squircle control pad and a design language, Metro, that would go on to define Windows Phone and Windows 8.
None of it mattered. By the time the Zune launched, “iPod” was already a generic noun and iTunes was the gravitational center of digital music; Microsoft was asking people to abandon a library and an ecosystem to adopt a player whose chief novelty was beaming songs to the roughly nobody else who owned one. Its U.S. market share never climbed out of the low single digits — around 9 percent of units in its launch week, sliding to roughly 2 percent by 2009 — and it never made the list of the five best-selling players in America. Microsoft sold an estimated two million units total by 2008, against iPods sold by the hundreds of millions.
The hardware was discontinued in October 2011; the brand was folded into Microsoft’s broader media efforts as the Zune Marketplace gave way to Xbox Music in October 2012, and the music service itself was finally retired in November 2015, its users shuffled into Groove Music. The Zune’s legacy is not failure so much as mistiming: a stack of good ideas, shipped years too late, into a war that was already over.
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 Nokia N-Gage was a $299 attempt to fuse a mobile phone and a handheld game console into one device, and within two years of its October 2003 launch Nokia itself declared it a failure. The pitch was logical enough on paper: Nokia owned the phone, Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance owned portable gaming, and the N-Gage would take both by carrying games and a SIM card in a single pocketable unit. What shipped instead was a device so awkward to use as a phone, so cumbersome to load with games, and so far from the Game Boy on price and library that it became a punchline before it became a product.
The N-Gage’s problems were physical and immediate. To take a call you held the thin edge of the device against your cheek, a posture instantly mocked as “sidetalking” and likened to talking into a taco — which is how it earned its lasting nickname, the taco phone. To change games you had to remove the back cover and pull out the battery to reach the memory-card slot, turning a five-second swap on a Game Boy into a small disassembly project. It cost $299 against a Game Boy Advance that sold for a fraction of that and had a vastly deeper catalog.
The sales reflected all of it. In its first weeks in the United States the N-Gage was reportedly outsold by the Game Boy Advance roughly 100 to 1, with independent tracking suggesting around 5,000 units sold in the opening fortnight against Nokia’s far larger claims. A 2004 revision, the N-Gage QD, fixed the worst ergonomic offenses but could not fix the proposition. In November 2005 Nokia’s own multimedia chief admitted the device had sold about a third of its target — roughly two to three million units against a goal of six million.
Nokia discontinued the hardware in Western markets in early 2006 and let the brand fade. It tried once more in 2008, relaunching N-Gage as a games-download platform for its Symbian smartphones rather than a dedicated device; that effort closed in 2009 without ever finding an audience. The N-Gage is now remembered as a product that was, in a sense, right about the future — phones really would become the world’s dominant game machines — and almost comically wrong about how to get there.
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 Segway PT was a two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transporter that was supposed to change how cities were built and instead became a tourist novelty and a punchline. Inventor Dean Kamen unveiled it on December 3, 2001 on ABC’s Good Morning America, after a year of feverish speculation about a secret project codenamed “Ginger” and “IT.” On July 15, 2020, after nearly nineteen years on the market, its parent company Ninebot rolled the last unit off the production line and ended the original Segway for good.
The gap between the hype and the result is the entire story. Before anyone had seen it, the device drew claims that it would be “to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy” — a remark that captured the breathless register of the pre-launch leaks. Investor John Doerr reportedly suggested it might be bigger than the internet; Steve Jobs is said to have called it as big a deal as the PC. Cities, the prophecy went, would be redesigned around it. What actually arrived was a $5,000 contraption that topped out around 10 mph, weighed too much to carry, and looked faintly ridiculous in motion.
Reality arrived quickly and stayed. At five thousand dollars the Segway was priced like a used car for the performance of a brisk walk; it was too fast and too heavy for sidewalks, which many jurisdictions promptly banned it from, and too slow and exposed for roads. It found real customers — police departments, security teams, warehouse staff, and tour operators steering tourists in single file past landmarks — but never the mass market it had been promised to remake. The pop-culture verdict was sealed by Paul Blart: Mall Cop and a decade of comedians: the Segway was what you rode to look important while going nowhere fast.
A darker note hangs over the company’s history. In December 2009 the British entrepreneur Jimi Heselden bought Segway Inc.; on September 26, 2010 he died at 62 after riding an off-road Segway model off a cliff into the River Wharfe near his Yorkshire estate. Across roughly nineteen years the PT sold only about 140,000 units in total, and by the end accounted for around 1.5 percent of the revenue of Ninebot, the Chinese firm that had acquired Segway in 2015. The company that killed the PT did so to concentrate on the e-scooters and self-balancing gadgets the Segway’s own technology had quietly helped inspire.
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.