THE WORLD IS A STAGE

THE GRAVEYARD OF GADGETS

CASS BYTEE

June 9, 2025

Every era has its ghosts. Our ghosts have touchscreens, blinking LEDs, and discontinued support. This article is a tour through the landfill of ambition—a place where Google Glass, the Amazon Fire Phone, and other once-hyped “miracles” now gather dust. These are not failed ideas so much as misplaced hopes. Read on, and perhaps you’ll recognize something you once believed in, now in residence where tech dreams go to die.

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You could miss it entirely, tucked away between the digital detox retreats and a slightly nervous refurbished Roomba. But there it is: the graveyard. Not a literal cemetery, but a conceptual one, vast and cluttered, filled with the ghosts of gadgets past. It’s where good intentions wired into plastic shells meet their untimely death—not with a bang, but thanks to discontinued firmware updates.

BlackBerry: Once the king of the pocket inbox, now a museum piece for thumbs that typed faster than thought

Here lie the hopefuls and the hype machines. The futurisms that once promised liberation and delivered—mostly regret. Some made it to Best Buy endcaps before vanishing. Others never left their conceptual infancy. A few still blink quietly in drawers, waiting for a charging cable no one can find anymore.

This is not a story about bad ideas (well, with a few exceptions). It’s about ideas whose time came too soon—or never at all. It’s also, in a way, a story about us: our fragile attention spans, our desperate longing to be early adopters, and the way we break up with technologies like lovers we once thought we’d marry.

In 2013, Google told us the future would sit lightly on our faces. Google Glass, a tiny wearable computer mounted on eyeglass frames, promised to make reality “augmented.” You could record video with a wink. Read text messages while maintaining eye contact. Navigate the world hands-free, all while looking like the least popular member of Daft Punk. The backlash came swiftly. Privacy advocates called it Orwellian. Bars banned it. And regular people—despite being told this was the next smartphone—just didn’t want to talk to someone whose face was blinking. Google pulled the plug quietly in 2015. But Glass never really died. It slipped into the shadows of enterprise use, helping surgeons see X-rays mid-operation or factory workers monitor assembly lines. It lives on—not as the future we were promised, but as a really expensive flashlight for people in lab coats.

Google Glass: a wearable glimpse into a future nobody asked for—and that nobody could stop staring at

Some failures are born of hubris. Others are born of Jeff Bezos. In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone, a device that tried very hard to be everything: 3D interface, dynamic perspective, deep integration with Amazon’s vast retail empire. But it was less a phone than a glorified shopping cart. Unsurprisingly, users wanted less “buy now” and more “please just work.” Reviewers were unkind. Consumers were uninterested. By 2015, Amazon was offering the phone for 99 cents with a contract, which is still 99 cents too much for a paperweight with LTE. The Fire Phone didn’t just fail; it face-planted so hard it left a Bezos-shaped dent in the mobile market. But from those ashes rose Alexa, a voice assistant who learned never to ask users to tilt their heads awkwardly to see a product review in parallax.

The Fire Phone: The phone that caught fire...not with consumers, but in a boardroom somewhere in Seattle

Few takedowns in modern tech history were more perfect than the Juicero debacle. The year was 2017. Investors had poured $120 million into a start-up that made a sleek, Wi-Fi-connected machine for squeezing juice packets—packets which turned out to be perfectly squeezable by human hands. Bloomberg delivered the fatal blow with a video of someone doing exactly that: making the $400 device obsolete with nothing but fingers and mild effort. The company folded faster than a kale-and-lime-pulp sachet. Juicero is remembered not as a health product, but as a parable. It’s the tech world’s equivalent of building a nuclear-powered butter knife. It asked not what problem needed solving, but how beautifully it could solve a non-problem.

The Juicero: A $400 Wi-Fi-enabled juicer undone by the discovery that you could just squeeze the bag

Some failures age better. Microsoft’s Zune, for example, was widely mocked when it debuted in 2006 as a desperate iPod clone. It had a brown model. A literal brown model. And yet, years later, tech nostalgists speak of its interface with the kind of reverence usually reserved for Betamax or long-dead indie bands. Apple’s Newton, launched in 1993, fared even worse. Touted as the first “personal digital assistant,” it famously failed to recognize handwriting, a problem for a device built around handwriting recognition. Still, it planted a seed. The Newton begat the Palm Pilot, which begat the iPhone, which now holds your entire practical and emotional life hostage behind a facial recognition scan. There’s a special place in the tech graveyard for these lovable losers. They didn’t quite work, but they dreamed the right dream. And sometimes, that’s enough to get them a memorial plaque.

Zune: Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone the iPod. It had fans. Three of them.

In the early 2010s, television manufacturers bet the house on 3D. They imagined living rooms transformed into IMAX-lite viewing chambers, complete with clunky glasses and a vague sense of nausea. Unfortunately, consumers didn’t share the dream. They wanted crisp images, not headaches and the feeling that your sofa was floating off a cliff. The technology was quietly retired. But like a ghost in the HDMI port, 3D TV still appears in clearance bins, whispering promises of Avatar marathons no one will ever watch.

3D TV: the living-room revolution that required glasses and left behind a generation of dusty remotes

The reasons gadgets fail vary. Some arrive too early (Newton, Glass). Others are overengineered solutions to nonexistent problems (Juicero, Fire Phone). Some suffer from poor execution, others from worse marketing. But many are undone by something simpler: human behavior. We don’t like looking silly in public. We don’t want to recharge five different devices every night. We’re skeptical of closed ecosystems. And we tend to want tech that works intuitively—nothing requiring a phone-book-size tutorial. What unites these products isn’t just failure. It’s ambition. They wanted to change something—how we eat, talk, walk, work, see. Some were ridiculous. Others, just unlucky.

The Humane AI Pin: A screenless, wearable assistant meant to replace your smartphone—until users realized it couldn’t even replace a smartwatch

Even now, fresh ghosts are joining the pile. Humane’s AI Pin, a tiny wearable that is a phone without a screen that only responds to voice commands, projecting onto the palm of your hand, is having a rocky launch. Reviewers say it’s confusing, expensive, and maybe a few firmware updates away from functionality. It might be the next big thing, or the next Juicero. Folding phones are still trying to convince us they’re not just gimmicks. Smart glasses are staging a quiet return, again promising productivity and coolness, with minimal results. And AI-generated hardware—a kind of ghost-in-a-shell design philosophy—is looming on the horizon, full of strange promise and stranger failure modes.

The Palm Pilot: the original personal digital assistant—because in 1997, writing with a stylus felt like the future

Not every gadget dies because it is bad. Some die because they are trying to do too much, too soon. They are cautionary tales. But they are also monuments to possibility. We live surrounded by the bones of digital ancestors. Some we laugh at. Some we miss. And some, if we squint, still look a lot like the future we were promised. But until then—until the next sleek rectangle whispers that it will change everything—we’ll keep opening drawers, blowing dust off ports, and wondering what might’ve been if only we’d given the Zune just one more update.

The Rabbit R: A pocket-sized AI gadget with a vintage dial-up vibe—promising to simplify your digital life, and mostly succeeding in confusing it

If you’re wondering who might be next, the future graveyard is already casting shadows soliciting down payments on tombstones. The Rabbit R1, a pocket-size AI companion, is being quietly reboxed. The Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses still can’t decide whether they’re fashionable or useful. The Oura Ring blinks away underwhelming metrics. And the Apple Vision Pro, that $3,500 headset that makes FaceTime feel like a hostage negotiation, may one day be remembered as the most expensive forehead accessory of its time. These are the devices we welcome with fanfare and abandon like festival tents. Which is to say, the graveyard is always open—and it has room for more.

Cass Bytee is a tech writer known for his incisive takes on the creep of connected devices and the physical infrastructure behind digital surveillance. He once worked for a shadowy sub-subcontractor of a secretive Canadian government agency, mostly on things that beeped and blinked. His writing blends insider insight with outsider skepticism. For operational security, Cass Bytee is not his real name (and probably not yours, either).

Cover image: Before the iPhone, there was this: part notepad, part sci-fi dream, mostly misunderstood