19 TOXIC Tech Fails that will last Forever.

prepare yourself for 19 of the most tragic toxic tech fails of all time from straight up bad ideas to some of the most malignant harmful products to have ever existed number one is an absolute travesty so number 19 you know for the last 60 years the key input device to your computer has been the mouse right well in the year 2000 someone had the very bright idea to also make a cat to go along with it this is the qcat it was made to be able to quickly scan codes within newspapers and magazines and then because it's connected to your computer directly open up a web page in your browser to learn more think qr code it was a very easy sell to companies because you know their newspaper ads would be more likely to drive sales if people were scanning them and for consumers well i mean everyone has a mouse of course they're going to want a cat right that's what i thought too before this one ah fudge be proud of yourself the problem was that the q-cat completely misunderstood readers like what kind of person is going to open up their newspaper in the morning but then think oh wait no i might want to get more info about the ads today i'd better take this up to the study and sit 10 centimeters from my computer to read so i'll give the cue cat a 2 out of 10 on the fail scale why do the mice always win number 18. so you know when companies launch smartphones it's not uncommon for there to be a flood of people complaining that it didn't have this feature or it didn't have that feature well the zetty hawkeye is what happens when a company listens a little too much to this feedback in january 2016 zt announced that they were going to build a phone based on what their users wanted it might sound like a great idea but they would soon come to realize that while their fans were voting for features that they wanted to see those weren't necessarily the same features that they'd actually want to buy and based on the most upvoted comments what zetti ended up with was an eye-tracking operated self-adhesive smartphone or in other words a device that you could operate completely through micro eye movements and one that you'd be able to stick to any service you wanted thanks to a special rubberized material on the back problem was how on earth do you follow through on that zt had committed to building this eye tracking tech before they actually knew how to do it this adhesive backing was not actually for the phone itself because if your phone is sticky all the time it's gonna stick to things that you don't want it to stick to so they applied the grippiness to the phone's case instead of the phone itself and just to be able to cram all these wacky features in while keeping the price affordable the actual specs of the phone sucked it's a good example of how sometimes consumers don't know what they want hey so nike's a pretty cool company right great shoes cool tops impressive tech i mean this is the company who came out with those self-lacing trainers a few years ago but nike's magneto was a not their coolest idea the company was looking at athletes at the time and they couldn't help but feel like these highly optimized almost superhuman beings were being burdened by bulky cumbersome glasses and headwear and so their answer was sunglasses without temples the bits that go over your ears how do they stay in place you might ask well by gluing magnets to your face so that the glasses can snap to them obviously the much better solution is it fair to say they had no i dear i risk my case okay point is three out of ten fail okay welcome to a very unfortunate case study on the importance of naming all the way back in the 1930s one of the big companies on the rise was called aids you can probably see where i'm going with this this company had apparently developed a technologically miraculous candy that you could eat and it would fill you up to the point where you wouldn't have to have a proper meal and therefore lose weight and i mean the concept of eating to lose weight is is kind of everyone's dream milo would be a very thin cat wouldn't you oh wait you just ate that so when you combine that with some very loose advertising standards back in the day how the papers were filled with aids ads how it's being recommended by movie stars without conclusive research this brand was understandably and ironically ballooning until 1981 where medical officers at the center for disease control and decided to name the breakout deadly immune system infection that was spiraling out of control at the time aids it did make the candy company viral just not the good kind it gave a whole new meaning to these ads that's for sure why take diet pills when you can enjoy aids three out of ten fail there's a there's no treatment for that okay let's step this up another level ever closer to the 10 out of 10 nightmare that is number one you might know this already but i'm a big fan of ikea and actually if you've watched my videos right from the very beginning you might know that i've built this channel up by filming on an ikea table for a simple reason they have a killer business model instead of selling pre-built furniture ikea instead sells customers the parts to be able to build that furniture themselves this is what allows ikea to make their products quicker it saves them costs from assembly and shipping plus it just means that when people build their own furniture they grow that little bit attached to it kind of like lego like if lego just sold the finished sets without you needing to assemble them i don't think anyone would care however in the mid-80s ikea suddenly had an ike deer a way to take this philosophy to the absolute extreme a sofa that you can blow up yourself using a hair dryer it would be the easiest possible thing to assemble and given how big sofas usually are the ability to be able to send one in a form factor barely larger than a pizza box would save ikea so much money versus their competitors the slight issue though was that ikea forgot the simple fact that hair dryers blow out hot air and the plastic melts see where i'm going with this but even if you did manage to blow one up these sofas weren't completely airtight which led to a sinking feeling and the fact that they were so unbelievably light meant that every time you sat down they would move so in the end less of a stroke of genius more just hot air 4 out of 10. and on a similar note of overlooking a simple but very important fact nintendo now nintendo is a company not afraid to experiment and the power glove was possibly the most extreme example of that this thing was straight out of science fiction it turned your hand into the controller and if that sounds familiar that's because this technology was actually what formed the basis of what eventually became the nintendo wii and we can't say that the tech wasn't clever essentially this glove has an ultrasound speaker inside of it which can fire out a sound wave you mount three separate receivers all around your tv and then each one of those receivers would record how long the sound wave from the glove took to get to them which then allows the calculation of the glove's position in the three axes of motion if all three receivers record the same time for example then they know the glove is in the middle people are absolutely blown away seeing their hands projected inside of these games and initial sales were through the roof but the company forgot about one quite important facet it needed to be fun i think they got so caught up in the logistics making sure all old nintendo games worked with it and just getting all the tech into an affordable package that no one stopped to ask the question of is holding your hand out for two hours at a time actually enjoyable and is it actually a better form of input for 99 of games to both questions no and so people quite quickly lost interest and the nintendo power glove was buried in the cupboard four out of ten okay you've heard of espn right the sports broadcasting company well in 2006 they decided to build their own phone that would excel at keeping you up to date with sports they built new features like push notifications for when a goal was scored which laid the foundations of espn's future smartphone app but the phone itself was uh not a home run for starters they priced the unit itself at 300 yeah this 300 but the worst bet is that they then charge people up to 220 a month to actually get new features 220 per month who do they think the target consumer is here like the queen needless to say very few people signed up five out of ten failed yeah and something i thought was quite funny is that the first time steve jobs heard about this phone he said directly to the president of espn your phone is the dumbest effing idea i've ever heard kind of sounds like a toxic relationship you know what else we don't need a phone to do smoke no really just a few years ago the e-cigarette company known as vaporcade actually came out with a legit smartphone that you could puff it had dual batteries inside and if you decided one time that you didn't want to use the vape both could be put towards just using the phone and there was even an app built into it that could tell you what flavor was loaded up and how much was left they were actually pitching themselves as a way to get off smoking like the app would alert you when you'd had more puffs than you should i can kind of see the intention but surely surely anyone who would possibly consider buying this would already have a cigarette they liked with far more flavor options and probably also a decent working phone the lesson is when you try to make a product that's two things at once most of the time you're shooting yourself in the foot because you're not going to be the best either and so you're limiting your reach to really people who are specifically searching for both five out of ten what were they smoking okay just before we get to the truly toxic fails here's a social media platform that nearly had it all it was called yik yak and it was a really intriguing concept basically you're completely anonymous no username no profile picture and anything you post is visible to anyone in a five mile radius of you so you might have seen this coming this app spread like wildfire at universities i used to be on it too students would use yik yak like a running commentary on local life posting things like am i the only one who's falling asleep in this lecture or that awkward moment when you lock eyes with someone in the canteen toilets the fact that it was local content only made it super engaging because almost everything you see was relevant too and this made the app contagious prolific at its peak yik yak was even ranked above facebook in downloads however the app's biggest strength the anonymity was also its downfall because when no one knows who you are people become the most extreme versions of themselves the app started evolving from light-hearted jokes to just try and get the most upvotes slightly creepy i actually remember one time i was sitting in a lecture and i remember reading a post that said something like that boy in red is looking saucy today i was wearing red i can see where they were coming from i'm kidding but no seriously i remember spending the whole rest of that lecture just looking around the crowd trying to figure out who posted this if they were actually talking about me if it was someone who actually liked me or if it was just my friends trolling me on an anonymous platform you've got no idea people started using yik yak for hate speech racism and bullying and you can see how as well as being a super engaging form of social media it also has all the ingredients for a terrifying venomous platform so then it started getting banned and with its now hampered image it was tough to recover but now we're in the top ten we're talking serious even dangerously big fails so when you think of electric cars right now there's a pretty good chance that you think of tesla but in some alternate timeline we may well have instead been talking about elio motors this company started in 2009 with a very similar goal to tesla reduce emissions from cars but they had a really different way of going about it they realized that the number of people driving five-seater cars with just one or two people in them was going up and so instead of pivoting all the way to electric which 10 years ago was seen as a bit of a gimmick they instead decided to make normal petrol cars but with just two seats and three wheels now that probably sounds like a pretty dumb idea but it becomes a lot more enticing when you realize that it would be half the price to buy and because it was so much lighter it could be twice as fuel efficient saving you even more in the long run the issue seems to be simply the fact that making cars is hard the sheer amount of money that you need to kick-start the manufacturing process just makes cars arguably the single toughest market for newcomers to enter but without clear communication with their customers over the years elio motors has started to turn from the underdog company everyone was rooting for to one we're a little concerned with to now suspicions of fraud they've taken over 65 000 pre-orders and not delivered a single car they've revised their delivery date so many times we've lost count and they've stopped replying to a lot of their customers given that people have been waiting for almost a decade for their deliveries now it's safe to say i don't think they're getting them six out of ten fail now i don't think i've ever wanted a product more than i wanted the scribble pen a pen which using a color sensor on the back can scan anything you see with then a specialized barrel that can mix various different inks to allow you to draw in that exact color you scanned tell me that's not the coolest thing you've ever heard of i mean clearly people thought so literally this 50 second clip racked up over 7 million views and the products kickstarter campaign passed its funding got all in just get this 24 hours but then i ready to notice something that in one frame of this trailer the ink that you see written on the paper suddenly vanishes why would that be the only explanation that makes sense to me is that the pen in the video was just a prop and all these drawings that we've seen were actually done with an editing program afterwards and as the years went on it became more and more clear that this company they had made a promise to people before knowing how to follow through on it it's been 10 years since that initial reveal and still no retail ready product just a load of shady no face shown product unboxings of a product that looks nothing like the original but of course you've been able to pre-order it this entire time with your money being taken up front this company is the definition of toxic marketing six out of ten and in a similar vein of failed crowdfunding projects anyone hear shave if you do you're doing it wrong or at least you are according to the laser razor company in 2015 this group of people released a video saying shaving as we know it is far from perfect it talks about how normal shaving is a disaster because of how it causes redness and razor burn so they built their own razor it has a thin fiber stretched across it and a laser that travels down the length of that fiber in such a way that when this fiber comes into contact with the hair the energy is transferred from that laser to the hair to burn it off they sold it to us like it was a piece of science fiction but they conveniently missed out the one important detail that their current best prototype could only burn off one hair at a time i just can't i i don't even have words razer raised over four million dollars in funding but was then cancelled when enough backers started calling it a scam six out of ten while i don't think there were malicious intentions here this was a tremendously bad product that nobody needed and hey if you like being told which tech products to definitely not bi then a sub to the channel would be intoxicating now it's not very often that we see a viral game on the scale of hq trivia it was a novel concept for sure you could use your smartphone to not just watch a game show but actually participate in it everyone would tune in at a specific time they'd be met with an actual game host sometimes a guest celebrity host like the rock it would feel like they were talking directly to you and if you could correctly answer 12 questions in a row you would be a winner and you would get an actual cash prize split with anyone else who'd also done the same this was a game like no other being a live experience competing directly against others only having 10 seconds per question having an actual cash reward at the end the level of tension this could drive was off the charts like this was someone's reaction after winning just 11 on this game the difficulty though with paying the winners real money is that you've got to get that money from somewhere and so as the number of users skyrocketed the app just couldn't keep up with the funding and so you were getting to a stage where even though one quiz might have had a 100 000 prize pool with the amount of players who ended up winning each one might have only ended up taking home like two dollars so the sheer stakes that the app initially had started to lose their appeal and the app actually hosted one final quiz with two hosts who were both completely drunk who started swearing at the crowd only then to reveal part way through that the total prize money for that quiz was just five dollars because they'd run out of cash five dollars split between the 500 winners was one cent each what a way to go six out of ten just because of how fast this went from phenomenon to bankrupt you've heard of twitch right the game live streaming platform that's absolutely flying right now but how much do you know about mixer microsoft's answer to twitch microsoft correctly predicted that gaming was a huge and growing market and so their whole idea was to basically make something that was just like twitch but with higher quality streaming the thing is though it is really really hard to get audiences to shift social media platforms microsoft overlooked the fact that viewers aren't just there for the content each platform has its own communities a sense of belonging and really its own language so no one joined mixer and when microsoft realized that organically building their own audience was really tough they tried to buy one in 2019 they announced a deal that i think it's fair to say shook the gaming world they basically played two of the biggest streamers on twitch shroud and ninja an obscene amount of money we're talking 10 million dollars and 30 million dollars to quit twitch and now post exclusively on mixer but even though this did bring in some new users it was far from enough to start a new community so mixer died but the funny part of it is that these streamers that they paid piles of cash to got to keep the money and were then free to go back to twitch again six out of ten what a mess oh but microsoft is actually really good at fails it must be contagious because they've also secured a place in the top five with skype okay so you know how pretty much everyone now when they want to video conference someone school classes university lectures work meetings we use zoom right well did you ever wonder what happened to skype i remember the year 2011 when skype was king they were so far ahead that their name was all but synonymous with the term video call it was literally a verb but then they got bought by microsoft who long story short got very complacent they knew skype was ahead in the calling experience but instead of reinvesting to keep it ahead they instead spent all their efforts bedazzling the rest of the app bloating it with updates and features that no one really wanted and slowly but surely allowing the competitors to overtake them in what mattered video quality they missed the fact that people didn't want to use skype as a social media platform they just wanted to send a link to someone be able to have a clean uninterrupted video call and then move on with their life and zoom just did this way better and so over the years zoom's market share has been trickling up while skype's trickling down but as soon as the pandemic hit this trend was catalyzed to the extreme all of a sudden you had floods of people searching or asking their friends what's the best conferencing app only to hear zoom and then proceeding to download it within a few short weeks zoom zoomed ahead from 100 000 downloads a day to 3 million and i think this sudden surge has been enough to cement zoom as the default and bury skype is a legacy platform given that microsoft paid 8.5 billion dollars for skype and they scuppered the entire thing within a decade this is an enormous failing worthy of a seven out of ten now this number four i was not expecting to put this high up on the list on the face of it it's just yet another run-of-the-mill failure but the more i've looked into it the more i am genuinely in shock at how this happened picture this it's 2009. we've just had the iphone 3gs early androids are starting to emerge and smartphones are just starting to lift off so a company called pique who'd previously seen success with a device that only run emails decides to release a 200 handheld device that only ran twitter not a smartphone let's be very clear about that this did one thing and it did that one thing poorly you'd see all your tweets organized in a list but in this list you could only read the first three or four words of each tweet any linked websites that took you off twitter were practically inaccessible it was incredibly slow but even more tragic than that it could only ever keep the 10 most recent tweets on it at any time if you had more than that which let's be honest someone buying a dedicated twitter handheld probably would you had to use your pc or you would lose them i mean this fail isn't putting anyone at risk no one's losing billions of dollars but i'm giving it a 7 out of 10 because of how unbelievably stupid it is gizmodo labeled it so dumb it makes my brain hurt tedcrunch said they were sure this would be relegated in the dustbin of history i couldn't agree more okay three you know if you ask most people what apple's biggest mistake was they'd probably say oh apple maps or the mac pro they look like a trash can or those socks they tried to sell people to keep their ipods in but actually i think apple's biggest most alarming and dangerous fail was the facetime bug of 2019. if you started a facetime call with someone and used a really easy loophole to make it a group call by just adding your own number into it this would trick apple into thinking the other person had answered the call just to be very clear without their permission with just a phone number you'd be able to hear and see what someone else's phone was seeing and hearing it was giving potentially a complete stranger a window into your life that is like a proper top-tier security risk good reminder though of how much trust we are putting into these companies eight out of ten on the fail scale okay at this point you've probably heard of cryptocurrencies basically virtual money and in this new world you have legitimate cryptocurrencies that are founded on strong watertight principles and you also have scam cryptocurrencies created by people to fool others into investing in them and we've just seen one of the worst ones ever squid game yeah the netflix show if you haven't watched it you'll at least have heard about it this show broke so many records that netflix actually decided to change their entire metrics for measuring viewership and for a few weeks it felt like the entire world was just riding this wave of squid game everything people made squid game themed videos they ate squid game themed food they hosted squid game themed parties well hey that's one party that i'm glad i wasn't invited to but also invested in a squid game themed cryptocurrency now this was not official it wasn't created by netflix but the people who made it did make it seem legit the starting price was one cent per coin and almost immediately people piled on all rushing in and buying expecting the value to go up so they could sell and make a quick buck and sure enough within a few days it flew all the way to 30 a coin then within a week managed to hit an all-time high of 2 800 to put this another way if i'd spent just 50 on squid coin at the start i'd have turned that 50 into 14 million but then people realized something that unlike with most cryptos where you can buy and sell freely if you wanted to convert your squid coin back to dollars you had to play a game and the game didn't exist the developers had promised that they were working on it but it very quickly became apparent that they weren't and you've probably never seen anything like the fallout that came after this within five minutes of the scan being outed five minutes squid coin dropped from two thousand eight hundred dollars to zero 0.00079 or in other words your suite 14 million dollars would become less than four dollars it wasn't really a failure on the developer's end they walked away with full pockets and still no one knows who they are thanks to the anonymity of crypto but for the over eager investors who didn't do their research they lost everything a huge nine out of ten fail but still not on the scale of number one and just before number one do remember that if your favorite fail isn't on this list i do have a whole series of tech fails i will link them after this one okay we all love a revolution don't we when someone comes and says that they're going to completely redefine something it's an easy thing to root for well this is exactly what dr ruja ignatova capitalized on she was a strong promoter of cryptocurrencies and how they take power away from the banks and give them to the people but she felt like the current leading crypto bitcoin just wasn't quite right so came up with one coin bigger better and easier to use a revolution she basically took the things that bitcoin does exaggerated them and then made those the features of onecoin for example bitcoin payments take 10 minutes to arrive one coin would take just one minute and she seemed legit she studied at oxford she had a phd a successful career she was on the front page of forbes the trust pilot reviews for onecoin were overwhelmingly positive people didn't have a reason to not believe her so money started pouring in and i don't mean a few million 15 billion dollars worth of cash was invested by people all around the world she got everyone from the richest to the poorest people investing in onecoin people sold their farms and their houses said they could be a part of it and then she disappeared one day in 2017 she was meant to be on stage speaking in lisbon and she just didn't show up no one has seen her since because it turns out that onecoin was actually a pyramid scheme ruja and the people she'd hired would travel around the world brainwashing people into putting their cash into her currency and then convincing them to get others on board they created a system such that if an investor could get another investor on board they would get a commission on that and likewise if that new investor could then get another investor in board they'd get a commission too so onecoin had an almost cult-like following everyone who was in it had a very strong incentive to make sure it succeeded the slight complication being that onecoin was not actually a proper cryptocurrency ruger said that the reason it was better than bitcoin was because it was based on its own unique blockchain technology except what that actually meant was it wasn't blockchain at all it's like me saying oh this iphone costs a hundred dollars and that's because it's running on my own version of ios which isn't actually ios and as a result you couldn't actually use onecoin to buy anything and this is presumably why ruger disappeared she knew that it would catch up to her eventually and so she vanished before it did what i think is really interesting about this case is that if you knew what you were looking for the red flags were all there from the start her being on the front page of forbes was actually fabricated to give her more credibility the website was rife with grammatical errors even in one instance spelling cryptocurrency with an i all those trust pilot reviews onecoin had they'd all been left in one single month fake reviews people lost everything this was a horrific fail on a scale that crypto had never seen before and i hope we'll never see again 10 out of 10. things i do for these videos to check out the last nightmare tech fails that video is here or to see some of the biggest tech that you've ever seen in your entire life that video's here my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss i'll catch you in the next one

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 7,800,320

Keywords: tech, fails, tech fails, smartphone fails, mkbhd, marques brownlee, gadgets, inventions, samsung fail, apple fails, apple, samsung, microsoft, rant, technology

Id: IErvIekMD3U

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LinneBNewtonia]

truly the peak of twitch

[u/__tai_lung_]

I don't believe it. I watch Mrwhosetheboss religiously and the one video I miss, Miz shows up.