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Biggest tech flops of the decade

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tino

Banned
cicerone said:
43100610986.jpg

That's the best version of PS2, you can cache game on it. You know nothing dude.
 

RubxQub

φίλω ἐξεχέγλουτον καί ψευδολόγον οὖκ εἰπόν
ToxicAdam said:
Apple TV (2007-?)

While its price is gradually coming down and its storage capacity is increasing, Apple TV still restricts you to using just iTunes and YouTube, which limits its appeal. In recent years, it's been one of Apple's more disappointing products, particularly when you consider how inviting its name sounds.

You can see more at this link
Glad to see this in the OP, as I was going to come in here and post it.

Such a shame, but I imagine they are eventually going to give the product an overhaul and rerelease it with new branding. It's the right idea at the wrong time with not enough capability or viewing options.
 
I love MiniDisc. I have a lot of burned MDs and even some retail ones. As soon as I can find a cheap player with optical-out, I'll be exporting my collection. I think its biggest disadvantage was same-time recording, but it had many advantages to MP3 players of the time. If any aspect of it was a complete failure, I would say it's the Hi-MD disks, which could store 1GB but came out too late to compete with iPod et al.

I have a taco N-Gage and a QD. Side-talkin' and difficulty changing games were huge design lapses, but many of the games and the phones themselves were good.

I loved my Showstopper DVR, which had its modem fried during a thunderstorm. One day I'll build a MythTV in its casing. I much preferred it to Tivo. Is Tivo dead yet?

I'm sure many of us have dead tech lying around, since there are a lot of early-adopters here.
 

bengraven

Member
GSG Flash said:
Did anyone mention the Sony Net MD player yet?

41DH2B6112L._SL500_.jpg


I remember in grade 10, like every 3rd kid had one of these, and the next year in grade 11 I didn't see even one.

No, fuck you. That's too cruel a demon to bring up. :( I still have one, in fact. Somewhere. I couldn't afford an iPod, was working through college at Burger King (this was 2002-2004). When the Shuffle was affordable, I never went back to my piece of shit Net MD.

That said, if I had one 3, 4 years earlier, it would have been amazing.
 

Javaman

Member
Drkirby said:
I owned one of those, I just found it one day in my house :lol

It was fun playing around with it a for a few minutes, seeing as it worked as a normal bar code scanner, but since it was 2006 when I found the thing, it was useless other then to output barcodes into notepad by scanning them.

I think they work with the Movie/Game/Music collector series to let you scan barcodes to add to the collection instead of typing in names.
 

Boogie

Member
stephendedalus said:
Almost every major metropolitan police department in the US uses the Segway instead of on-foot officers and sometimes in place of bicycles.

Really?

Never seen a cop on a segway in Canada. Apparently a few are in use out west though.
 
stephendedalus said:
Almost every major metropolitan police department in the US uses the Segway instead of on-foot officers and sometimes in place of bicycles.
I've never seen an officer of the Miami PD using those things and there are shit tons of officers on foot in Miami on any given night.
 

djtiesto

is beloved, despite what anyone might say
I don't think I'd ever call the system that gave me games like Rez, Skies of Arcadia, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and plenty of others deserves to be called a "tech flop".
 

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
maharg said:
Sure, it wasn't very successful, but it's not like Sony was banking anything serious on it either. It was an attempt to breathe some last life into a dying format (as far as consumers were concerned), and it did that to some extent but obviously didn't last. Meanwhile, Sony was making mp3 players and pushing memory sticks like there was no tomorrow.

I don't think flop is really synonymous with unsuccessful.

In that way, yes it's not a flop, but you can also use the same argument to argue that the people calling the PS3 a flop are completely incorrect.

Also, someone up there mentioned the PSX, which reminded me of another flop:

GC_PanasonicQ.jpg


Although I still would want one because it looks kickass :D
 

Big-E

Member
Boogie said:
Really?

Never seen a cop on a segway in Canada. Apparently a few are in use out west though.

Think I have seen one out here in Vancouver but I am not 100% sure as I can't truly say that I did only that the statement sounds about right. Think they tried it when they first came out but probably stopped it to save the poor officers dignity.
 

NimbusD

Member
dol-011b.jpg


:(

Four Swords and Crystal Chronicles where fucking awesome. Wish they did some things with the Wii since you don't need that dumbass cable.

ereader.jpg


What a retarded idea. I own one because it came free with my GBA.
 

Burger

Member
CTLance said:
I wonder if BeOS can still be counted in this category. BeOS R5 was released in 2000, after all. Such a sleek OS. I'm still heartbroken that Apple went the NEXT route, regardless of justification and eventual success.

Yeah, BeOS was a nice romantic idea, but it was impossible to program for! I'm no coder, but writing software full of race conditions and heisenbugs sounds like a fucking nightmare.
 

Culex

Banned
GSG Flash said:
In that way, yes it's not a flop, but you can also use the same argument to argue that the people calling the PS3 a flop are completely incorrect.

Also, someone up there mentioned the PSX, which reminded me of another flop:

GC_PanasonicQ.jpg


Although I still would want one because it looks kickass :D

It wasn't a flop. There were so few manufactured of the Panasonic Q. If it supported Progressive Scan, it would have been a collectors dream.
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
I love my Apple TV so much. I use it every single day - listening to music, buying TV series, renting movies, showing clips from YouTube to friends, listening to internet radio. It's great value, in my opinion. Only downside is that I must pay iTunes prices for all video content.
 

DrEvil

not a medical professional
Wark said:
The store I work at has at least five or six of those HD-DVD 360 add-on drives. Although I already have a PS3 and buy blu-rays, I do admit it is tempting to buy a HD-DVD drive because it is around $10 and the HD-DVDs are around a buck or two a piece. :lol


It's also an incredible external DVD drive for your PC.. that's what I'm using mine for now days...
 

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
Culex said:
It wasn't a flop. There were so few manufactured of the Panasonic Q. If it supported Progressive Scan, it would have been a collectors dream.

The fact that production on the Q was halted far before Gamecube's, thanks to poor sales, does tell me that it was a flop. There weren't many manufactured because there wasn't much demand thanks to the insanely high price of the console.
 

Beezy

Member
stephendedalus said:
Almost every major metropolitan police department in the US uses the Segway instead of on-foot officers and sometimes in place of bicycles.
NYC says you're wrong.
 

Jado

Banned
tino said:
The biggest flop/disappointment was OLPC project, being run to the ground by that guy. Now its deader than dead.

http://www.undispatch.com/node/8859

It's still around. Check out the comments sections from overseas groups who are using it right now in classrooms and centers in developing countries. There is strong reason to believe that certain companies intentionally tried to sabotage the OLPC project.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/os...iness-Succeeds-with-GNULinux-Why-Not-OLPC.htm
 

D4Danger

Unconfirmed Member
Red Scarlet said:
What about that..Mac Air thing? That seemed to disappear pretty fast.

I was hoping it would be Apple's entry into the netbook market but they went a million miles in the wrong direction.

But yeah, nobody talks about it because nobody can afford one. I would say it was a flop but not a big enough one to make any list since it was a niche product to start with.
 

Jasoco

Banned
tino said:
:lol :lol :lol Proof that Steve Jobs can sell any crap if he put up a show.
That keynote is on YouTube. Steve did Not like having to introduce that pile of shit at all. Watch him talk about it. His enthusiasm is not even there. And I'm glad because it was probably that product that made him think "we can do better."
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
Red Scarlet said:
What about that..Mac Air thing? That seemed to disappear pretty fast.

posting from that piece of shit right here.


it kernel panicked due to overheating until I bought CoolBook app.

the hinge spontaneously got busted forcing a replace of whole display.

the sound flex cable has died so I have no sound now.

recently it has started to randomly shut down due to overheating.


but hey it's slim and everybody seeing me using it knows it was unnecessarily expensive!
 
Chittagong said:
posting from that piece of shit right here.


it kernel panicked due to overheating until I bought CoolBook app.

the hinge spontaneously got busted forcing a replace of whole display.

the sound flex cable has died so I have no sound now.

recently it has started to randomly shut down due to overheating.


but hey it's slim and everybody seeing me using it knows it was unnecessarily expensive!
:lol , I had a foreign exchange student from Norway come over and buy one and he loves it though :/
 

Chittagong

Gold Member
Baggatoast said:
:lol , I had a foreign exchange student from Norway come over and buy one and he loves it though :/

well to be fair when it's working it is a pretty awesome computer. form factor is still second to none. they just really made lots dumb of mistakes with Gen 1 in durability and heating. They always do. Thinking of it I'd still go for another one provided the issues are fixed.
 
Jasoco said:
That keynote is on YouTube. Steve did Not like having to introduce that pile of shit at all. Watch him talk about it. His enthusiasm is not even there. And I'm glad because it was probably that product that made him think "we can do better."
It actually crashes or locks up or something while he's showing it off, and you see this insane look of disgust on his face. It definitely launched the initiative to make the iPhone.
 
stephendedalus said:
Segway cops patrol here:

Coney Island, Central Park, Prospect Park, Orchard Beach, the Bronx Zoo and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

never seen them before, coney island? they'd get jacked in five minutes. :lol :lol :lol
 

ATF487

Member
I loved my netmd minidisc player

-durable as hell
-ran for 40+ hours off a single AA battery
-charged rechargeable batteries if you had them
-had optical in for recording
-infinitely cheaper than most MP3 players at the time

It's still a great technology for recording live shows; for some reason most MP3 players don't have decent inputs or any inputs at all.
 

Lyte Edge

All I got for the Vernal Equinox was this stupid tag
tino said:
That's the best version of PS2, you can cache game on it. You know nothing dude.

Just because the homebrew/pirate community found a use for the PS2 HDD, that doesn't mean it wasn't a flop. Which it was.
 
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