‘What’s a piece of tech everyone hyped up that quietly turned out to be useless?’ – 23 so-called advancements that absolutely bombed

Tech companies love to tell us that their latest invention is going to change the world and completely revolutionise our lives, but, as anyone who has witnessed a ChatGTP hallucination will tell you, they often turn out to be utterly unhelpful.

They’ve been discussing rubbish inventions on the AskReddit page after the appropriately named SofiaLearnsAI posed this question:

What’s a piece of tech everyone hyped up that quietly turned out to be useless?

And it turns out there are a lot of total failures to choose from. Check these out…

1.

‘Those Amazon reorder buttons you can place around your house.’
–espresso__martini

2.

‘Younger people won’t know the pre-launch hype around the Segway, man it was HUGE, people were talking about whole new cities being built to support them. Then when we got to see the product that hype fell off a mountain, but it was a really big deal for a while.’
–Chopper3

3.

‘Everyone was convinced we’d be sitting in our living rooms wearing plastic glasses for every movie night. It turned out to be such a hassle that manufacturers stopped making them entirely within a few years.’
–milkyqtxo

4.

‘Google+ was a much better idea than Facebook, but people were already set in one widespread social media and didn’t want to juggle two, especially if not everyone was invited to the second one.’
–bythog

5.

‘I wanted a Nintendo Power Glove more than anything one Christmas. Played for 10 minutes and never again. Totally worthless, but looked so awesome.’
–fatherpatrick

6.

‘Most ‘smart’ devices are just regular devices with worse battery life and an app you stop opening after a week.’
–Separate-Okra-4611

7.

‘We bought a new fridge few years ago, next thing I know it’s on our network and my wife has an app that tells her the door is open. I blocked it from the router.’
–sebrebc

8.

‘Anyone remember Google Glasses?’
–No-Leopard-556

9.

‘The Metaverse, literally no one gives a fuck about it.’
–sirhowy

10.

‘Ouya. Thinking about it makes me cringe.’
–Beard341

11.

‘Cold press juicers. There is a huge market for cold press juice. It does not justify an expensive piece of tech to squeeze product out of a bag.’
–Themeloncalling

12.

‘Laser Disc. The player was too expensive compared to VHS and Betamax, with low availability of films. You also couldn’t record on them compared to VHS. They were also inconvenient when you had to flip the disc half way through to watch the end of a film. By the time they became affordable, DVD’s were just as affordable and were the obvious choice for consumers.’
–happymisery