Bid Farewell to the Tech That Died in 2024 video

Nothing in tech lasts forever. CNET's Bridget Carey says goodbye to the tech gadgets and services that vanished from our lives in 2024.

Hey, you made it to the end of 2024. Congrats. I can't say the same for a lot of gadgets in our lives because tech changes fast. Products come and go, and this is my annual video where I go over the tech products that failed, flopped, and lost funding this year. Some of it is a little sad, but some things you will be glad to see gone. Hey, did you know that you outlasted this and this and this fella? Yeah, I'm proud of you. I'm Bridget Carey, and it's time to say goodbye to the tech that died in 2024. Fossil smartwatches are now smartwatch fossils. The watch company Fossil is no longer making smartwatches. The last model was the Gen 6 that ran Ware OS. And if you say, Well, that's because Apple has the best smartwatch, don't hold your breath because Apple can't track your breath anymore. This year, Apple discontinued selling watches that use the blood oxygen sensor because Apple lost that patent dispute and was ordered to remove the feature. That's not the only Apple product to die. Apple Pay later became Apple. Will pay right away. The buy now pay later service was shut down less than a year after it launched. Apple also put an end to iTunes. Yes, iTunes still exists for Windows 10 and 11, but to get people to move on, Apple made sure that the apps it has in the Microsoft store could handle syncing media between Windows PCs and iPhones. That includes the Windows version of Apple Music, the TV app and devices app. If losing iTunes makes you sad. Well, Apple certainly does not care about your need to rip your old music CDs because Apple also discontinued its USB SuperDrive. But who needs something to read CDs and DVDs anymore? Best Buy stopped selling physical movie discs this year, and Redbox, a company that began 20 years ago, announced it was shutting down 24,000 of its kiosks when it filed for bankruptcy. And since I'm already breaking the hearts of nineties kids, here's another relic of the 90s that's now Gone. Instant messaging service ICQ shut down after 27 years. So the age of instant messaging is officially dead. Google wouldn't be Google if it didn't shut down a bunch of side apps that you didn't know about. So I'll just list them and let's see how many you used. Google Pay in the US ended in June to move everyone to Google Wallet. Google Podcast discontinued to move everyone to YouTube Music. Google discontinued the Stack PDF scanner app to get everyone to just use Google Drive. Which does the same thing. Google One VPN ended and it didn't move everyone to something else because no one was using it. Google Jamboard shuts down at the end of December. It's a digital whiteboard app for Google Workspace, but it also was an actual 55 inch whiteboard connected to the cloud that cost $5000 plus a $600 a year annual support fee for a whiteboard. Yeah, I wonder why it died. And probably the most notable, Google stopped making the Chromecast. After 11 years, which was a hit because of how cheap it was to stream content to a TV, to replace the Chromecast, Google began selling a $100 device called the Google TV streamer, which also streams video, but by calling it a new product, they can now charge you more to put YouTube videos on your television. Now some things died quickly and it's a relief they did. Mehta shut down the celebrity lookalike AI chatbots. They had the face of a celebrity, but they went by different names. Yes, please kill it with fire. Snapchat can't seem to ever get its hardware to take off. It launched a flying camera called the Pixie drone and then recalled all of them for overheating batteries. Spotify also crashed out in the hardware game. It shut down the accessory called Car Thing, which was a thing that streamed music in your car. It was $100. Now that thing is just e-waste. All units don't work and you have until January 14th to request a refund. Lots of tech. when it loses usefulness, and that applies to a well-known robot that retired this year. Boston Dynamics said farewell to its hydraulic atlas humanoid robot as it backflips its way to oblivion. It caused us so much collective discomfort to see what moves they could get this robot to do. And now they made a video of all the ways it also awkwardly rolled to the ground. Atlas has been jumping and lifting and doing this stuff for 11 years in development. But no time to mourn because the company is working on another more frightening humanoid product to take its place. This time fully electric. The journey to replace humans with robots is never easy, and one such robot has lost funding, Moxie the robot is a cartoon-faced AI chatbot. It's designed to serve as a close friend to a kid. It's a developmental toy for young kids to talk to. They can play games and learn. It was very ambitious and very expensive. It was first announced in 2020 and it cost. $800. Moxie cannot perform core functionality without connecting to the cloud servers, and those cloud servers cost money. There's no more funding. Owners were abruptly notified that the robot would just stop working because of funding issues, but as of the time I am recording this video, the company says it is trying to explore options to keep it operational as long as possible, and a lot of people online. Or really upset, there are videos of kids who are bracing for their robot buddy to die any day now. It is legitimately sad. Here's hoping for those kids that Moxie finds a new life in 2025. And if there's another tech product that disappeared this year that I did not include, pay your respects in the comments and I'll see you all in the new year.