9 Failed Gadgets We Still Think About

Every failed gadget was, at some point, a room full of intelligent people who were certain. That is the part that stays with us. Not the failure, the certainty.

Here are nine that did not make it, and what each one was actually right about.

1. Juicero

The purest example ever produced. A four hundred dollar internet-connected press that squeezed proprietary juice packets, backed by well over a hundred million dollars of investment, and marketed on the claim that it exerted four tons of force, enough to lift two Teslas. Then in April 2017 Bloomberg published a video of a reporter squeezing a packet by hand and getting the juice out in about ninety seconds. The company was gone by that September, roughly sixteen months after launch. The press worked perfectly. It was simply competing with hands.

2. Google Glass

The 2013 Explorer Edition cost fifteen hundred dollars and put a small screen above your right eye. The technology mostly worked. What killed it was social, because the camera pointed wherever the wearer looked and nobody around them could tell when it was recording. The word Glasshole entered the language within months. Google pivoted it to warehouses and factories, where nobody minds, and finally discontinued the enterprise edition in 2023. Every company now building smart glasses is solving the same problem, which is not optics. It is other people.

3. Nintendo Virtual Boy

Released in 1995, a tabletop headset displaying everything in red monochrome because red LEDs were the only ones cheap enough. It caused headaches, it could not be worn, it had to be set on a table and leaned into, and Nintendo pulled it inside a year after selling a fraction of what they hoped. The stereoscopic 3D genuinely worked. It arrived roughly two decades before the components existed to make it pleasant.

4. Segway

Announced in 2001 under a cloud of secrecy so thick that observers speculated about a new form of energy. The claims were extraordinary. Cities would be redesigned around it. What actually happened was a device too expensive for consumers, too heavy for pavements, and too undignified for anyone who had seen a photograph of themselves on one. Production of the original ended in 2020. The self-balancing technology, meanwhile, is now inside every hoverboard and electric scooter on earth, which is a strange kind of victory.

5. Apple Newton

The 1993 MessagePad recognised your handwriting, sometimes correctly. Its failure was cemented by a Doonesbury strip mocking the recognition, which is the most humiliating way for a product to die. The Newton was cancelled in 1998. The team’s ideas, and in several cases the actual people, resurfaced years later in a rather more successful pocket device from the same company.

6. Amazon Fire Phone

Launched in 2014 with four front-facing cameras tracking your head to produce a three-dimensional effect, a feature called Dynamic Perspective that answered no question anyone had. Amazon wrote down something in the region of a hundred and seventy million dollars of unsold inventory. The interesting footnote is that its voice work fed into the team that later shipped Alexa, so the phone was less a failure than an extremely expensive prototype.

7. Microsoft Zune

Arriving in 2006, five years after the iPod, with a genuinely good subscription model years before subscriptions won. It also had a feature that let you wirelessly send a song to a nearby Zune, which the recipient could play three times before it expired, a restriction so joyless it became the punchline. Being right early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

8. CueCat

Around 1999, a company gave away millions of free barcode scanners shaped like cats. You scanned a code in a magazine and your computer opened the advertiser’s website. It required a desktop, a spare port, a magazine and a willingness to lean over and scan an advertisement. The business collapsed within a couple of years. Roughly a decade later everybody was pointing their phone at QR codes, doing precisely the same thing, willingly.

9. Coolest Cooler

A crowdfunding legend for the wrong reasons. A cool box with a blender, a speaker and a bottle opener raised over thirteen million dollars in 2014, at the time among the largest campaigns ever run. Manufacturing costs ran away, coolers went on sale to the public while backers waited, and many of the tens of thousands who funded it never received one. It is the case study every crowdfunding cautionary tale points to, and the reason platforms tightened their rules.

The Pattern

Read the list again and a shape appears. Almost none of these failed because the technology did not work. They failed on price, on timing, or on the simple fact that other human beings were present and had opinions. The gadget graveyard is mostly full of correct ideas that turned up at the wrong party.