USA TODAY International Edition
Spectacles are top tech turkey of ’17
LOS ANGELES – Which tech products did consumers find they could happily live without? For 2017, none was a bigger turkey than Spectacles.
The cute $129 video sunglasses initially were hard to get — until Snapchat parent Snap put them on sale nationally in February. Then consumers turned fickle on the plastic eye-cameras, leaving a backlog of thousands of unsold glasses and a $40 million writedown for Snap. Other top turkeys:
The iPhone 8
The state-of-the art iPhone X got most of the attention, featuring facial recognition to unlock the phone and a flashy OLED screen. The 8 and 8 Plus, in contrast, were considered incremental upgrades. Researcher Canalys says Apple sold fewer iPhone 8s in its fiscal fourth quarter than it did the 7, 8 Plus or even the 6S in the same period.
Juicero
A Wi-Fi enabled juicer with a skyhigh price tag of $400 didn’t make a lot of sense to consumers. After raising $120 million and seeing anemic sales, the company shut down in September.
Amazon’s Echo Show
With the Echo Show, Amazon looked to bring video to the connected speaker market. But beyond the ability to make video calls (for which we already have FaceTime, Skype and many other apps), it turned out there’s very little video Amazon could show us. Google’s YouTube pulled its content in October, saying the way YouTube was working on the Echo Show violated its terms of service.
The Essential phone
It sounded great on paper. From the creator of the Android mobile operating system, Andy Rubin set out to create the next-generation phone, one with a titanium body that promised to be smashfree. But consumers didn’t find it so essential. The initial $700 price has already been cut by $200.
Yahoo
The embattled Internet company, now a unit of Verizon’s Oath subsidiary, admitted in 2017 that some 3 billion of its customers were hacked in 2013. The initial estimate, revealed last year, was a mere 1 billion. Now that’s a turkey.