Speaker 1: Every year, technology comes and goes in with the new out with the old and out with the old again, when it tries to come back and fails a second time, you can’t truly appreciate today’s beloved tech unless you can also pay your respects to the tech that failed. Maybe it was old and simply outdated. Maybe it was risky and flopped, or maybe in eccentric billionaire destroyed it. Just because. I’m Bridget Carey, and this is one of my favorite annual segments. As we dive into the drama of the past year, it’s time to look back on [00:00:30] the tech that died in 2023. Well, Google Glass died again. It’s not often an iconic product. Gets on my Dead tech list twice, but Google didn’t want to give up on its augmented reality glasses that may have been ahead of its time when it launched in 2013 for $1,500, folks thought this was invasive and too expensive, and if you wore one, they would say you’re a glass hole.
Speaker 1: Google stopped selling the first glass in 2015, [00:01:00] but it reentered the market as a hardware revamp, and Google made an enterprise edition for businesses specifically for factory workers and surgeons. Now, that lasted a while, but in March Google said it would stop selling the headset and it is not getting more software updates. The funny thing is that in the past decade of tech advancements we learned it wasn’t Google Glass that turned people into glass holes. All you need is one of these and a social media account to be up in everyone’s face filming people’s private lives. [00:01:30] The real glass holes were inside us all along. Also, in March, Microsoft shut down Altspace vr, the social virtual reality platform that it acquired in 2017. It was one of the first social VR experiences, but times were changing Metaverse and VR stuff wasn’t trendy. Artificial intelligence was becoming the hot new thing.
Speaker 1: And yes, the end of Altspace VR came just as Microsoft cut 10,000 jobs and said it would be focusing more on ai. Amazon gets into a lot [00:02:00] of different tech products, but it tried and failed with fitness. In April, it announced it would no longer sell its line of Halo health and fitness devices, and then it just stops supporting it in the summer and said any data would be deleted. Amazon first unveiled the health tracking bracelet in 2020, and it didn’t just track activity. It also tracked your emotional state. Well, if that left any users devastated. Amazon did refund purchases made in the past year and Amazon shut down Halo right when it was in the middle of [00:02:30] the largest layoffs in its 29 year history. CNBC reported one round of layoffs impacted 18,000 people, and another round hit 9,000 people. So what did Amazon do next? It put more of a focus on ai. You see, it’s a theme. Sometimes wild new products don’t work out for your workout. Lululemon stopped selling its studio mirror fitness device, you might say. It threw in the towel for this thing that displayed workout videos that you followed along to from home.
Speaker 2: Instead, Lululemon [00:03:00] struck a five-year partnership deal to slap some Peloton content on that thing. So if anyone has a mirror, their fitness dreams weren’t totally shattered. It’s supposed to still work with on-demand content. Sometimes there’s a product everyone assumes was long gone, but then surprise ending, after 25 years, Netflix shipped. Its last DVD ending, the red envelope era. The final discs were shipped out to subscribers at the end of September. This envelope changed how we watched movies at [00:03:30] home and eventually led to everyone streaming everything. It’s kind of sad because it feels like physical media is really going away. Best Buy announced this year it was going to stop selling physical DVDs both in store and online, but physical media should not be obsolete when we are seeing streaming services, just instantly remove a whole series or a movie, making it near impossible to ever find something digitally again.
Speaker 2: Wait, there’s still a disc in here. Let see what this is. Oh, it’s just Old America [00:04:00] online CDs. Yeah. Yeah. This one says 1,099 hours free. Pretty sweet. Well, that’s the end of another year of tech ups and downs. Surprise surprise that Twitter didn’t make the list. CEO Elon Musk did, however, kill off a lot of features like the original verified Blue Checks and killed off free API access, which broke a bunch of apps people liked using and then they killed the name Twitter. It just likes to go by the name X now, [00:04:30] but alas, it still lives on. I’m sure I didn’t list everything. So sound off in the comments if there’s a product or service that you had to say goodbye to using this year and cheers to seeing what’s in store for us in 2024.
