- As near and dear as some
- Sony Walkmans were replaced by CDs, which were then replaced by iPods, which were then replaced by our smartphones.
- Gone but not forgotten, here are 51 tech gadgets we miss.
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51 discontinued tech gadgets we once loved and will never see again
These tech gadgets may be gone, but they're definitely not forgotten.
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It happens all the time — for one reason or another, a company gives up on a beloved product and gives it the "End of Life" kiss of death.
The company stops producing it. It stops supporting it. It diverts its resources to other pursuits in hopes of creating something bigger and better than before.
And then, that gadget we once loved is gone.
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Whether it's for purely nostalgic reasons or practical purposes, here are 51 discontinued products that we miss.
Released in 1971, the PhoneMate 400 allowed twenty messages to be recorded on the machine's reel-to-reel tapes. It couldn't survive the digital era however, as digital answering machines eventually rang in.
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The first commercially available cell phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, clocked in at 1.75 pounds and cost almost $4,000 when it debuted in 1983. It garnered an association with business-types until it was replaced with newer versions.
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A relic of the late 1990s, PalmPilot devices were the de-facto standalone handheld organizers before people made the jump to smartphones in the early 2000s.
The BlackBerry Quark released in 2003 was the first BlackBerry gadget that let you check email, make phone calls, send text messages, manage your calendar, and more all from one device. It was eventually discontinued and, as of 2016, BlackBerry no longer produces mobile devices at all.
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The brainchild of former Apple employees, the Sidekick was the "cool kid" mobile device of the early 2000s and was a hit with everyone from teens to celebrities until Android phones and iPhones booted it off its throne.
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Motorola's Razr V3 flip phone was another "it" tech statement piece, ingraining itself into early 2000s culture. It, too, saw its end as the Android and the iPhone rose to power.
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In 2005, Motorola partnered with Apple to release the ROKR E1, the first phone that could play music straight from the iTunes store. But thanks to its 100-song limit, this little phone spent less than a year on the market.
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The heavily-anticipated Galaxy Note 7 sadly crashed and burned in 2016 — literally. Reports came streaming in of the device overheating and exploding due to faulty batteries, leading to Samsung recalling all Note 7 phones.
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Unlike Apple, Google opted out of the typical flashy release of its line of smartphone devices, shelling out the Nexus One, 4, 5, 6, 5X, and 6P with relatively low-key launches before nixing the line in 2016.
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Google Desktop was a handy piece of PC software released in 2004 that provided users with a central location to perform multiple tasks. It was one of several products discontinued all at once as Google refocused its resources.
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The Sunrise calendar was at one point one of the best digital calendars. Microsoft bought the app in 2015 for $100 million before rolling Sunrise into its Outlook platform, much to the delight of devoted Sunrise users.
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Ah, MySpace. It brought social networking into the mainstream in 2003. It was relaunched ten years after as "New Myspace," with a bigger focus on music and less of a focus on status updates.
Vine became Twitter's very own video platform when Twitter shelled out $30 million for it in 2012, but as Twitter's business grew, focuses had to be narrowed, and Vine was cut loose from the site.
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Peer-to-peer music sharing service Napster let users freely listen to music through MP3 files in the early 2000s. An infamous lawsuit over copyright infringement with the band Metallica led to its downfall after just two years.
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Fellow filesharing service LimeWire walked the line a bit better, but it too met the same fate, shuttering in 2010, ten years after launching, for letting millions share a vast amount of copyrighted music.
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HitClips gave music listeners short snippets of hit 2000s songs from artists like Britney Spears. If you were extra cool, you looped the clips onto a keychain on your school backpack. MP3 files eventually pushed through the fad.
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Songbird, an open-source software alternative to iTunes, was incredibly popular among the Linux community. Then in 2010, the company stopped its Linux support, disappointing loads of users.
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The Pebble smartwatch was an iconic Kickstarter project, but following Fitbit's 2017 acquisition of the company, Pebble announced its products would cease to be compatible with smartphones.
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Nintendo's Game Boy handheld gave us legendary games in the 1990s like Super Mario Land and held up 14 years in the market before it was replaced with the new and improved Game Boy Advance.
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The PlayStation released in 1994 was Sony's first generation of what would become a line of the world's most popular gaming consoles. Games like "Final Fantasy VII" and "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" became all-time classics.
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The Sony PlayStation 2 launched six years into the original console's lifespan and would go on to claim one of the longest running production periods of a gaming system.
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It had a faster, more powerful processor, better graphics, and it was compatible with PS1 games as well as the DualShock controller produced for the original.
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Sega's Dreamcast was home to beloved games including "Phantasy Star Online" and "Sonic Adventure," but was scrapped in 2001 so that the company could focus more on software.
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The Nintendo 64's M-shaped controller broke ground in the gaming world. But it used pricey cartridges instead of the cheaper CDs, so it never had the same success as the Sony PlayStation. Nintendo halted production of the N64 in 2002.
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The PlayStation 3 launched in 2006 and boasted a handful of features that made it stand out against the PS2, like wireless controllers, internet connectivity, and the ability to play Blu-Ray discs — plus a ton more computing horsepower.
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The Nintendo Wii landed on the market in 2006 and found competitors in Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Before getting discontinued in 2013, the Wii taught a whole generation how to control video games by moving their bodies around.
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Sony launched its PlayStation Portable in 2004, but pulled the plug on it after nearly ten years to focus its attention on its new handheld console, the PS Vita.
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Sony has confirmed that in 2019 games will no longer be made for the PlayStation Vita, a handheld console known for boasting games like "Uncharted: Golden Abyss." The company will continue producing the hardware.
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The Regency TR-1 was the first transistor radio and gave listeners more portability than they were previously afforded. It debuted in 1954 for about $50, or $458 in today's money.
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Long before Apple's iPod hit the market, the people of the 1980s used a Sony Walkman to listen to music on-the-go. It saw a dip in popularity in the early 2000s, leading to its discontinuation in 2010.
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Microsoft launched the Zune five years into Apple's iPod reign before discontinuing the portable players in 2012. The Zune let you "squirt" songs to your friends who also had one — too bad it never found iPod-levels of success.
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These bulky VHS tape boxes were a living room staple up until the 2000s. Before the rise of DVDs shuttered their production, movies recorded on video cassettes are what we entertained ourselves with at home.
Sony's Betamax was a contender in the videotape format wars of the 1980s, but ultimately lost to VHS. However, Betamax tapes actually stayed in production until 2016.
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Google delved into the streaming market in 2012 with the $299 Nexus Q player, allowing users to hook up media from the Google Play Store to the TV. It never actually hit store shelves — it was cancelled before release, after a lukewarm initial response.
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A year after the Nexus Q's demise, Google launched the slimmer, less expensive ($99) Nexus streamer that was praised for its voice search capabilities and its pairing with Google's Android TV platform. It was killed off after two years.
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The Commodore 64 was an 8-bit computer of the 1980s that competed with the Apple ll series. It enjoyed a comfortable six-year period of success, with an estimated 19 million units sold in all.
All good things must come to an end however — Commodore filed for bankruptcy in 1994. But after some internal shuffling, in 2011 the Commodore 64x was released with the same design as this relic.
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Apple's Lisa project in 1983 aimed to provide business-centric customers with a powerful personal computer. Instead, it flopped with the Macintosh garnering more success with its launch later on.
As for the device's namesake, the daughter of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, revealed in an excerpt from her new memoir "Small Fry" that it took years for her father to admit that he named the Lisa computer after her (he originally denied it, claiming that it stood for "Local Integrated Software Architecture.")
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The polycarbonate White MacBook was a new version of the line of laptops, originally launched in 2006. It retailed for $999 before meeting its sudden demise.
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The colorful clamshelled Apple iBook spurred a larger market movement towards laptops equipped with WiFi, giving users some extra mobility until it was replaced by the MacBook in 2006.
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Apple's Newton in the 1990s involved a stylus and handwriting recognition software to capture notes. The most reasonable explanation for its discontinuation seems to be that Apple was in financial distress and had to make cuts where it could.
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A decade before Apple launched the iPad, Sony released what was essentially a portable computer, allowing users to watch TV and access the internet. Its lofty price tag and poor picture display sent the Airboard out the door by 2008.
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What is now known as the Kindle Keyboard was officially the third generation of Amazon's famous e-reader, and is possibly its most classic look. It remained on the market while Amazon pushed out other models, but it was quietly discontinued in 2013.
Barnes and Noble's first Nook in 2009 gave readers a platform to purchase digital copies of books. This past June, the company announced that it was stopping support for these devices due to users transitioning to competing e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle.
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The 2011 discontinuation of the HP TouchPad, an early iPad competitor, is almost laughable. Despite showing some promise, it got the axe after just a month and a half on the market.
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The JCV VideoMovie Camcorder shook up the video world in 1984 with its in-camera slot for tapes. It endured for more than two decades before getting pushed out by its compact, more digital successors (looking at you, smartphone.)
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Kodak launched slim cameras that used ultracompact discs of film instead of rolled film strips in the 1980s. But people eventually grew weary of the low photo quality, and these cameras were completely kaput by 1988.
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Apple's QuickTake 100 in 1994 was the first digital camera for consumers, and held space for at least eight photos. It could only work with a Macintosh computer and didn't have autofocus or zoom features, but it had a digital display.
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A beloved, pocket-sized camera that shot up to an hour of video and stored it digitally — what's not to love in the Flip camera? In 2009, Cisco acquired Pure Digital Technologies, the company behind the device, and ended up ceasing production.
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Before DSLRs came equipped with WiFi, photographers had to physically transport their photos to a computer. Eye-Fi's 2 GB SD card in the early 2000s was WiFi-enabled, letting users automatically upload photos straight from their camera.
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In the mid 1990s, Adobe PageMaker was a groundbreaking desktop publishing program that made it a snap to produce compelling text and image-based media. The company chose to focus on InDesign instead.
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Google Reader was a powerful RSS feed management tool beloved by many, but not enough for Google to keep busy supporting it. It was discontinued eight years after its 2005 release.
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Sparrow was an awesome email client used by employees every day at one point, but it's no longer supported since the company was acquired by Google in 2012.
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Karyne Levy contributed to an earlier version of this article.
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