The reviews for Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin are here, and they’re bad. These AI-enabled devices promised to reduce our dependency on smartphones, but now everyone is wondering why they’re not apps to begin with. I have no idea if we’ll be using Rabbits and AI Pins five years from now (if so, I hope they can set alarms by then), but much of the technology we use today received terrible initial reviews.
Early reviews of a device are important as they can set the tone of whether the hardware, the company that made it, and even the whole concept of the device will succeed or fail. Getting a bad review isn’t necessarily a death sentence, but it’s a big hole to dig out of.
In some cases, companies produce a product that flops with reviewers and then make a better version themselves based on those critiques as well as what customers want. Other companies never learn from the bad reviews, and someone else comes around to make the better product. In a special third group, no one made another version because it was just a dumb idea. The common thread here is that if there’s a good idea, it gets made eventually. We don’t look back at these negative reviews as being harsh, the products were just unfinished.
Some have been quick to scold reviewers of the AI Pin and Rabbit for bad reviews, but these critiques provide an important service to the tech industry. Negative initial reviews signal to the tech companies what went wrong with the first version of a product, and what needs to get better in version two. Countless products we use today had first versions that were pretty rough around the edges, or downright awful.
In startup culture, there’s a phrase thrown around a lot called “failing fast.” Say your project completely hits a wall, falls flat on its face, or maybe someone determines it’s just an Android app. Failing fast can quickly indicate what needs to be changed about the business. Some companies learn, and innovate, as long as there’s a good idea at the center of it all. Some don’t though.
Even looking back on some of these historically negative reviews, there’s a lot of positive remarks for the products that were truly great. Here are 10 tech products that initially got terrible reviews.
The Apple Newton MessagePad, originally released in 1993, was in many ways ahead of its time. The pen-based computer promised to be one of the first “post-PC” devices but ultimately flopped. At the time, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg called it “too expensive,” “too exotic,” and “too imperfect to lure most people from pen and paper.” Ouch. The product would be largely abandoned by Apple even though the idea carried on with personal digital assistants like the PalmPilot. Apple eventually did take another stab at the concept when it released the iPad in 2010.
When Valve shipped the original Steam Deck in 2022, it received a wave of negative reviews. Gizmodo called it “unfinished” while The Verge called it “broken and buggy,” though both noted it was also “glorious” and “full of potential.” Most people felt the initial Steam Deck was simply rushed out. Gamers, however, found the concept of having a somewhat powerful PC in their hands to be incredible, and they continued to buy the Steam Deck in droves. By 2023, the Steam Deck redeemed itself with the Steam Deck OLED. Valve resolved almost all of the issues reviewers noted in the first iteration. The Steam Deck’s success led to a stream of copycat handheld devices.
Who can forget the terrible reviews that came before the massively hyped iPhone launch? In this case, some reviewers were devastatingly wrong saying that the iPhone would flop. TechCrunch was one of them, noting that cracked screens would plague the glass device. AdAge also predicted the iPhone would fail, saying that do-it-all devices have historically been snake oil. And we can’t forget The Street saying the contract was too expensive, costing over $2,000 over the two years. The iPhone did prove to be a massive success, truly becoming a world-changing convergent device. The phone was expensive, and the screens did break, but that ultimately didn’t matter.
In 2012, Nintendo released the Wii U and received pretty “meh” reactions from the world. After the Wii upended the video game industry, expectations were high for the Wii U. The Verge called it a console “in no man’s land” with a clumsy interface. Ars Technica noted that on the day of the Wii U’s North America launch, Nintendo had failed to push out a firmware update which left many of the features disabled. Ultimately, the Wii U was a bit forgettable, as the Nintendo Switch was released in 2017, offering a more perfected version of the Wii U’s big innovation of having a controller that had its own touchpad.
I think people forget that tech bros, including Jeff Bezos, were pushing Segways super hard in 2001. There were negative reviews at the time, but less than you’d think. “A device that reduces the need for walking, one of the healthiest activities known to man, may strike many people as the last thing our culture needs,” wrote Time. “Three grand may strike many others as an awful lot to pay for something they’ve managed so far to live happily without.” Ultimately, the Segway sold horribly — I would argue people should have been more skeptical. These days, the company still sells its Segways which are more likely to be seen carrying a mall cop around, but for everyone else, it offers a line of electronic scooters and go-karts.
Before there was the Meta Quest, there was the Virtual Boy. In 1995, Nintendo came out with this futuristic gaming device and got absolutely slammed in the process. The Video Game Critic called this device a “dismal failure,” noting a warning on the box cautioning the possibility of “permanent vision damage.” The gaming device was discontinued less than a year later. Roughly 20 years later, Oculus released its first virtual reality headset in 2016. It’s been almost a decade since then, however, and though VR has gotten better, I wouldn’t call it a success quite yet.
Perhaps the most often cited tech failure, Google Glass became widely available for sale in 2014. One Washington Post reporter put it simply, “I hate it.” There were problems with the actual tech, but also privacy concerns. The high-tech glasses, which could take photos and videos, send texts, and show the weather, were ahead of their time. Google ultimately discontinued them. Now, roughly 10 years later, Meta is pushing a very similar product with Ray Bans and an AI integration.
Last, but not least, Juicero. This venture-backed company founded in 2013 sold $700 juice machines. This is one of those products that never needed to exist, so no one has made anything like it since. Juicero got famously clowned on for being a huge rip-off that was far more complicated and expensive than just squeezing fruit by hand. It was tech created for the sake of being tech. A solution in search of a problem. The company shut down in 2017 after a review from Bloomberg exposed its utter absurdity. Juicero forces us to ask about every new product, is the technology more useful than my own two hands?
8 Tech Products That Notoriously Got Wrecked by First Reviews - Gizmodo
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