The Biggest Tech Flops of All Time

Nobody remembers this one, which is its own sort of verdict. Microsoft put the Kin ONE and TWO on the market on 14 May 2010 and, after only 48 days on sale, discontinued the line on 30 June. Photos and messages synced automatically to a cloud service called Kin Studio, which was the clever bit. Shipping a phone in 2010 with no app store, no third-party apps and no games was not.

Forty-nine days after the US launch, on 18 August 2011, Hewlett-Packard announced it was finished with webOS devices altogether. Then came the clearance: $99 for the 16 GB model, and the people who had ignored it at full price queued round the block. Underneath sat an ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and an operating system that deserved rather better than seven weeks in shops.

The iris recognition system, driven by a front camera and infrared illumination, was ahead of anything else you could buy. Released on 19 August 2016; on 10 October Samsung asked carriers and retailers worldwide to stop sales and exchanges, and permanently ceased production the day after. Fifty-two days. On 14 October American regulators banned it from every airline flight, powered off or not, which no phone had managed before.

Anyone in the US could first buy one on 15 April 2014, and on 15 January 2015 Google said it would stop producing the prototype. Nine months of open sale. The optics were the genuinely interesting part: an LCoS chip feeding a field-sequential color display, LED-illuminated, hanging above your right eye. At $1,500 for the standard Explorer edition it was never a consumer product, whatever the launch video suggested.

Suspended inside a 7.7-inch polycarbonate enclosure, with no fan anywhere in it and heat leaving through a grille on top, this was lovely to look at and almost nobody bought it. On sale from July 2000; on 3 July 2001 an Apple press release said production was being "suspended indefinitely", due to low demand, wording picked to avoid saying canceled. About twelve months.

Chiclet keys, small and flat calculator-style keycaps talking to the machine over infrared, drew such abuse that IBM offered free replacements with conventional typewriter keys. Sold from March 1984, discontinued on 19 March 1985, with IBM's own explanation that "the home market didn't expand to the degree I.B.M. and many observers thought it would". About a year from shop shelf to obituary, and the keyboard did most of the damage.

Six weeks after launch the on-contract price dropped from $199 to 99 cents, which tells you how the first quarter went. On sale from 25 July 2014, reported discontinued on 27 August 2015: thirteen months. Dynamic Perspective was the pitch, front-facing cameras and the gyroscope tracking your head so the interface leaned with you. Amazon took a $170 million hit and never built another phone.

The power supply for the entire system lived inside the printer, so a printer in for repair meant a computer you could not switch on. Released in October 1983 at $700 with 64 KB of memory; on 2 January 1985, after continuing complaints about failures and low sales, Coleco announced it was discontinuing it. Fifteen months, and one store manager reckoned five of every six sold had come back.

Beautiful hardware from a company that never got a second act. On sale from 17 August 2017, discontinued by announcement on 28 December 2018, so sixteen months. The titanium and ceramic body still reads as expensive next to a glass sandwich, and the display notch arrived before Apple made notches ordinary. What it never offered was a reason for anyone already holding a phone to move.

Blame the controller. Its non-centering analog joystick used a weak rubber boot instead of springs to return to center, and an editor at Next Generation reckoned the sticks "rendered many games nearly unplayable". On department-store shelves from October 1982 at $299.95; on 21 May 1984 Atari said it had been discontinued after less than two years on the market. Better machine than the 2600, undone by the part you held.

Toshiba's first consumer player reached Japan on 31 March 2006, and on 19 February 2008 Toshiba announced it would stop developing, manufacturing and marketing the format. Just under two years, and the backer walked. A 15 GB single-layer disc put it slightly behind Blu-ray on capacity and slightly ahead on manufacturing cost, which is a fight you can win. Warner Bros. dropping support by June 2008 was not.

Reviewed well, sold badly, and that gap is exactly why it belongs here. Released on 15 September 2009; on 3 October 2011 Microsoft announced it had discontinued all Zune hardware and pointed everyone at Windows Phone. Two years and eighteen days. The 3.3-inch capacitive OLED touchscreen, pushed along by an Nvidia Tegra chip, was lovely to use and arrived about four years after the argument had been settled.

Kickstarter money does not buy you a platform. The campaign closed at $8,596,475, some 904% of goal, and paid for a $99 Android box built around an Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. Retail release 25 June 2013; on 27 July 2015 Razer took the staff and the content library and the hardware was over. Every game had to include a free-to-try element, which sounded generous and left developers unable to charge properly.

Jobs insisted on no fan and no air vents, so the machine would run quietly. Serious stability issues then forced a design overhaul and a recall of the first 14,000 machines produced. Released in late November 1980 with a starting price of $4,340, and the original model was discontinued on 24 April 1984. Recalling your first fourteen thousand units is not a teething problem, it's a verdict.

Two "Twiggy" floppy drives, a detached keyboard, a thin-button mouse and a real graphical interface years before the rest of the industry managed one. Produced from 19 January 1983 to 1 August 1986, launching at $9,995. In 1989 roughly 2,700 unsold units went into a guarded landfill in Logan, Utah, so Apple could take the tax write-off on the unsold inventory. Burying your own stock is about as commercial as failure gets.

Launched in North America on 18 November 2012, with Nintendo formally announcing the end of production on 31 January 2017. In January 2014, citing lower-than-expected holiday sales, Nintendo cut its own forecast for the fiscal year from nine million units to 2.8 million. The 6.2-inch resistive touchscreen in the GamePad was both the whole idea and the whole trouble: costly to build, tethered by range, impossible to explain in a shop.

First units reached customers in early 2002 at around $5,000 each. In September 2003 the PT was recalled, because a rider who ignored repeated low-battery warnings could be pitched off it. Production ran on until June 2020, when the company said it would stop making the PT: eighteen years for 140,000 units sold across the lifetime of the product. The gyroscopic sensors from BAE Systems' Advanced Technology Centre never were the problem.