Spectacles are top tech turkey of ’17
But let’s not forget Bixby, Juicero on list of year’s biggest misses
LOS ANGELES – Which tech products did consumers find they could quite 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.
Oh well, give the company credit for trying something new.
The iPhone 8
Spectacles had company when it came to gathering showroom dust.
Take the iPhone 8, one of three new models introduced this year by Apple. The redesigned, 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. While the 8 Plus has new photo software tools to offer professional-like images, the 8 doesn’t, with little to tout but a more powerful processor.
As with Spectacles, consumers turned away from the 8. According to researcher Canalys, Apple sold fewer iPhone 8’s in its fiscal fourth quarter than it did the 7, 8 Plus or even 2015’s 6S in the same period.
Juicero Bixby
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.
Voice-activated computing is one of the hottest trends of the year, led by Amazon’s Alexa, the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri. Samsung tried to join the party with Bixby. But it got a delayed start, and then when released, it received really bad reviews.
The Verge called Bixby “structural bloated” software, and Ars Technica called it “unfinished and annoying.”
Samsung refers to Bixby as a “smarter way to use your phone,” but as USA TODAY’s Ed Baig pointed out in his initial review, while Bixby could make phone calls and open the rear camera for a selfie, it couldn’t do basics such as answer how tall the Eiffel Tower is or convert 100 Canadian dollars to U.S. dollars.
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.
Amazon has since seen a sales dip for the device, according to measurement firm Camelcamelcamel, and a new slate of negative online reviews, basically saying “where’s the video?”
Epson’s $699 Moverio
These goggles are a great idea. Connect them to your drone and don them to see what your drone is seeing in flight. But there’s one big issue. Federal rules state that you must have line of sight when flying a drone. With the goggles on, you are lost in flight, and thus lose track of the drone. Back to the drawing board, Epson.
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 smash-free. But consumers didn’t find it so essential. The initial $700 price has already been cut by $200, and more cuts could come in 2018.
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.
Jawbone
For a time, many of us listened to bluetooth speakers or wore fitness trackers from the company, then one day in July, the company stopped making products, with no directions to all those consumers who’ve made purchases over the years. As of Monday, the website has yet to offer updates to consumers.
The rising price of smartphones
Finally, there’s no bigger turkey than the rising prices of phones. We’ve come a long way from the days when we spent $200 to get the latest phone, along with renewing a two-year contract. Prices for our beloved gadgets are supposed to go down, not up. Just look at 4K TVs, which were near $1,000 just two years ago and now could be had for as little as $300, or less.
The Samsung Galaxy S line has gone from $600 two years ago to $724 with the S8, while the top of the line iPhone was $749 in 2015 and now tops $999 for the new iPhone X.
Let’s give one collective turkey to the tech companies for this alarming trend, but also a big Happy Thanksgiving to USA TODAY readers, watchers and listeners.