Tedium - Dead-End Hardware 💾

Today in Tedium: The great thing about a lot of technology is that even if its ideas fail, they often re-emerge elsewhere, influencing the thinking of others in the field to come up with something better and more interesting. But often isn’t always, and sometimes ideas just die on the vine, with no innovator coming up behind to make it better. It was an idea that deserved to fail, but that nobody thought might be worthy of giving a proper follow-up for whatever reason. Tedium is a place where failure deserves to live forever, where we embrace it, so with that in mind, today’s Tedium brings you a list of 10 examples of hardware features, devices, and gadgets that did not change the world, or really even influence it much. They mostly just ended in disappointment for everyone involved. — Ernie @ Tedium

(via Silver Spoon Gaming)

1. The giant infrared field within which you controlled your video games

The idea: Rather than controlling games via a controller, let’s have you wave your hands in front of an IR-blasting pseudo-laptop.

The device: The Brøderbund U-Force

The era: Late 1980s

The mainstream success of the Nintendo Entertainment System created a situation where companies were increasingly willing to experiment with new approaches in an effort to find the thing that would wow the public and get them to part with their hard-earned cash.

The problem is, infrared technology was just not the way to do something like this, and honestly made the device something of a nightmare to use. It was also built quite cheap, making it a generally hit-and-miss controller in more ways than one.

The device, like many dozens of other peripherals from the NES era, were quickly forgotten about.

» The same idea, but better: By making it so that you don’t have to be tethered in one place, Nintendo developed a version of this that people actually liked for the Wii, and was miles more successful than the forgotten Brøderbund device. But the makers of the U-Force shouldn’t feel so bad—far larger companies than Brøderbund have messed the general idea up, including Leap Motion and Google’s Motion Sense.

The 32X was a device that existed because its parent company didn’t know which direction it was going.

4. The cartridge slot upgrade path

The idea: Let’s upgrade an existing game console with a device that sits in the cartridge slot and has faster chips.

The device: Sega 32X

The era: Mid-’90s

Although some attempts to upgrade the capabilities of an existing console had come and gone by this point—infamously, the keyboard component of the Intellivision, which ended up sinking that whole console—the 32X was a unique beast.

A device that effectively replaced the guts of the Sega Genesis with a much better console, it came late in the life of the Genesis, but seemed like an ugly duckling from the start, in part because it emerged at a time when it was already well-known that a dedicated 32-bit Sega console, the Saturn, was already on the way.

The rushed nature of the device led to rushed games and a lack of third-party support, and that ensured the 32X would remain a novelty in Sega’s history.

» The same idea, but better: The 32X was built in part because Sega felt it could not get away with an upgraded console, but later devices proceed my Microsoft and Sony later proved that a mid-cycle refresh was very much a device would pay for.

In case you thought the hand crank on this device was awesome, I have something to tell you.

7. The hand-crank charger

The idea: The people who are intended to use this device may not be an electricity source, let’s give them a crank to generate some power.

The device: One Laptop Per Child XO laptop

The era: Mid-2000s

The One Laptop Per Child project, a fascinating experiment that tested the powers of tech and philanthropy working together, got a lot of momentum from a peripheral that didn’t actually end up shipping with the final product. It was the buzziest design feature of the whole thing, yet it didn’t actually make sense for it.

As a 2018 Verge retrospective of the project recalled:

If you remember the OLPC at all, you probably remember the hand crank. It was OLPC’s most striking technological innovation—and it was pure vaporware. Designers dropped the feature almost immediately after Negroponte’s announcement, because the winding process put stress on the laptop’s body and demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare. Every OLPC computer shipped with a standard power adapter.

Oh sure, a third-party hand crank eventually came out—and you can find battery adapters with hand cranks on Amazon. But since OLPC won a lot of headlines with this peripheral, nobody has been willing to embrace the idea of a device where a primary method for charging is something you power with your arm.

» The same idea, but better: Solar is often embraced for these kinds of use cases instead—and OLPC itself came out with a solar add-on a few years later.

In real life, the phone was subject to nearly as much hype as it was in “Don’t Look Up.”

10. The overhyped phone by the ultra-high-end video camera manufacturer

The idea: A phone intended for high-end professional videographers and tech enthusiasts, complete with a planned add-on system and unique 3D capabilities.

The device: The RED Hydrogen One

The era: 2018

A couple of years back, the film Don’t Look Up got everyone’s attention for its take on climate change and the way that we tend to focus on anything else other than the real, genuine, obvious risks in front of us.

So it’s understandable if you watch it and don’t notice some of the details, like the fact that all of its characters are rocking the RED Hydrogen One, a device that came and went in a matter of months. It was heavily hyped as a phone that would be compatible with future RED cameras, while being capable of on-device 3D.

But reviewers hated the damn thing, with The Verge being particularly harsh, calling it overhyped and its 3D technology a not-worth-it gimmick.

RED has not moved back into the smartphone market since making this thing, and odds are, they won’t be back.

» The same idea, but better: Sony, another company with a contingent of professional creators using its stuff, has been making phones with extra bells and whistles for the professional market for years.