Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tech That Died in 2023”.
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 Maybe it was old and simply outdated.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 an eccentric billionaire destroyed it just because I’m Bridget Cary – 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 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 glasshole. Google stopped selling the first glass in 2015, but it re-entered the market as a hardware revamp and Google made an Enterprise addition 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. The real glass holes were inside us all, along also in March, Microsoft shut down, allspace 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 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 a lot 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 stopped supporting it in the summer and said any data would be deleted. Amazon first unveiled the health tracking bracelet in 20120, 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 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 Instead Lulu Blue Lemon struck a 5-year partnership deal to slap some pelaton 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 two subscribers at the end of September. This envelope changed how we watched movie at home and eventually lit 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. Wait, there’s still a disc in here. Let me see what this is. Oh, it’s just a old America Online CDs, yeah yeah, this one says uh 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 now, but, alas, it still lives on I’m sure I didn’t list everything so sound off in the comments. If there is a product or service that you had to say goodbye to using this year and cheers to scene. What’S in store for us in 2024, .