Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works in a love all things tech,
Speaker 1: and today we're going to talk about a pretty amazing subject, vaporware.
Speaker 1: We're gonna do this for a couple of episodes. Actually,
Speaker 1: this one we're going to talk about hardware that is vaporware,
Speaker 1: or that was vaporware, or that never was. It gets complicated,
Speaker 1: and in our next episode we're going to focus more
Speaker 1: on software. So what exactly is vaporware? Vaporware is a
Speaker 1: future product that someone has announced, but one that is
Speaker 1: not yet available for purchase and possibly never will be available.
Speaker 1: These are products that could still be in development, or
Speaker 1: they could be in a design phase, and they might
Speaker 1: never see the light of day. So vaporware is kind
Speaker 1: of a you can't call it a definitive classification. Not
Speaker 1: everything or remain vaporware. Some stuff may eventually emerge from
Speaker 1: vaporware to become an actual product. Some stuff may ultimately
Speaker 1: collapse in on itself, and you could say, well it
Speaker 1: was vaporware because it never came out. But vaporware itself
Speaker 1: is sort of a transition. Now, you don't want your
Speaker 1: product to be classified as vaporware because that comes with
Speaker 1: it some pretty bad implied messaging, things like we have
Speaker 1: the intent to bring this product to market, but we
Speaker 1: don't know how to yet, or wouldn't this product be
Speaker 1: a great idea give us your money. So vaporware is
Speaker 1: not necessarily something you want to have associated with you
Speaker 1: or your products. And uh, this episode is sort of
Speaker 1: a preview of some stuff I'll be talking about in
Speaker 1: upcoming episodes for tech Stuff, because we are fast approaching
Speaker 1: episode one thousand, one thousand episodes of tech Stuff, And
Speaker 1: in that episode one thousand, I'll be dedicating a discussion
Speaker 1: about critical thinking and skepticism in general and how we
Speaker 1: can apply those skills towards technology in particular. And then
Speaker 1: I planned to do an episode about hoaxes and scams
Speaker 1: in technology stuff that was pretty clearly uh a falsehood
Speaker 1: from the beginning, And I need to be clear that
Speaker 1: vapor where is not necessarily a falsehood. There are many
Speaker 1: cases where companies and people probably believe they were going
Speaker 1: to bring this product to market and it just didn't happen.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that all vaporware I list in
Speaker 1: this episode represents an outright attempt to deceive people. Like
Speaker 1: I said, some of them may have been, but I'm
Speaker 1: willing to extend the benefit of the doubt and assume
Speaker 1: that most, if not all, of the products that I
Speaker 1: will be talking about, we're actually supposed to come out
Speaker 1: at some point, and they just did not for various reasons,
Speaker 1: uh legitimate reasons. As opposed to this was someone who
Speaker 1: is just trying to scare up a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: money really quickly. And I've talked extensively about some examples
Speaker 1: of vaporware in their own episodes, notably the Phantom game console.
Speaker 1: I did a full episode dedicated to that, but here's
Speaker 1: a quick refresher. The Phantom was supposed to be a
Speaker 1: video game console that relied exclusively on digital delivery. You
Speaker 1: would download games to your console directly over the Internet,
Speaker 1: and the idea was ahead of its time, and some
Speaker 1: of the folks in charge of the company had a
Speaker 1: bit of a shady reputation. But I still think that
Speaker 1: a lot of people who were involved on the Phantom
Speaker 1: team had every reason to believe that the thing they
Speaker 1: were working on would one day become a real product.
Speaker 1: I can't say for certain the folks at the top
Speaker 1: shared that belief. They may have been running a scam
Speaker 1: the whole time, but I know people who were attached
Speaker 1: to it really thought that they were working on something
Speaker 1: that was going to be an actual consumer product. At
Speaker 1: the end of the day. The phantom never or fist,
Speaker 1: which led to a lot of jokes about the phantom
Speaker 1: never materializing. But since I've done a full episode about
Speaker 1: that product that never was, I'm going to look at
Speaker 1: other gadgets that were promoted at some point by a
Speaker 1: company but never actually became a thing you could actually buy. So,
Speaker 1: sticking to the realm of video games, that is a
Speaker 1: a wealthy treasure trove of examples of vaporware, even if
Speaker 1: you're talking about the hardware side of things. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about the retro VGs a k a. The coll Eco
Speaker 1: Chameleon a k a. The Retro Chameleon. This vaporware game
Speaker 1: console gives proof to the old adage if it seems
Speaker 1: too good to be true, it probably is, although again
Speaker 1: not necessarily meant to be a way to fool people. First,
Speaker 1: this console was meant to be a cartridge based game
Speaker 1: system with no connectivity to the Internet, kind of like
Speaker 1: a throwback to the old classic cartridge based game systems,
Speaker 1: things like the Atari twenty, the coll Eco Vision and
Speaker 1: tele Vision, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo, the
Speaker 1: Nintendo sixty four, the Atari Jaguar, all of these cartridge
Speaker 1: based systems, and the value proposition for this device. The
Speaker 1: selling point was that games were going to be complete
Speaker 1: experiences the moment they hit store shelves. They would have
Speaker 1: to be because the whole game would have to exist
Speaker 1: on the cartridge. There was no way to patch or
Speaker 1: update games. There's no way to get downloadable content because
Speaker 1: the console itself would not connect to the internet. The
Speaker 1: developer for the console argued that this would be a
Speaker 1: return to the old days of gaming, where a player
Speaker 1: could be assured that the title he or she picked
Speaker 1: up was a playable, complete game. There'd be no need
Speaker 1: for a day one download. So this was sort of
Speaker 1: a response to a trend in video games where you
Speaker 1: go out, you buy a brand new game, and whether
Speaker 1: you have a physical copy of it or you buy
Speaker 1: it digitally, once you installed on your machine, immediately the
Speaker 1: machine searches for a download and arts to download a
Speaker 1: day one patch. Why because the game when it went out,
Speaker 1: when it shipped, when it went gold, was not actually
Speaker 1: complete and the developers were still working on things. And
Speaker 1: while the game had been mastered and sent out, uh,
Speaker 1: they were still working on code to make sure everything
Speaker 1: was playable, patching bugs, fixing things, um, all that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. And a lot of gamers get sick and
Speaker 1: tired of this. They think, well, by the time the
Speaker 1: game comes out for purchase, it should be a complete game.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't be waiting for another patch to make the
Speaker 1: game I just bought playable. So this game console was
Speaker 1: kind of a response to that, saying we should create
Speaker 1: a console that forces game developers to create a full
Speaker 1: game from start to finish. There's no way to patch it,
Speaker 1: there's no way to update it, so they have to
Speaker 1: be certain that their game works. They have to test it,
Speaker 1: and then they have to go through the whole manufacturing process.
Speaker 1: There's no way to just deliver the code. You actually
Speaker 1: have to hard code the game onto cartridges, which actually
Speaker 1: puts up a pretty big barrier to entry. It's not
Speaker 1: a cheap thing to do. Cartridge as though, have their benefits.
Speaker 1: They allow for some pretty fast load times. For example,
Speaker 1: there's no need for a an optical drive to locate
Speaker 1: a point on a on a disc and read information
Speaker 1: off of it. Cartridge games load very very quickly, but
Speaker 1: they also tend to have a limited storage space on them,
Speaker 1: and the retro console designers said that their special fpg
Speaker 1: A circuitry would allow for all sorts of retro based gameplay.
Speaker 1: F p g A, by the way, stands for field
Speaker 1: programmable gait array, and it essentially means that there's an
Speaker 1: integrated circuit in this device, and it's a blank slate.
Speaker 1: It can be configured by the end user. That's what
Speaker 1: the field programmable part comes from. That you can program
Speaker 1: this blank circuit in the field to make it do
Speaker 1: whatever it is you need it to do. So, in
Speaker 1: this case, the console itself would be an f p
Speaker 1: g A and the cartridges would contain the information that
Speaker 1: would essentially reprogram the console to make it behave like
Speaker 1: a specific type of console to run the code that's
Speaker 1: on that cartridge, whether it's emulating an S and E
Speaker 1: S style game or an Atari Jaguar style game or
Speaker 1: something like that, not that it was meant to play
Speaker 1: those old games that wasn't the point. This wasn't a
Speaker 1: clone console where you could shove an old S and
Speaker 1: E S cartridge into the console and play a classic game. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was to create a new ecosystem based off that
Speaker 1: style of game, the old retro games. So you would
Speaker 1: be making brand new games based off that old style
Speaker 1: of game making, and they would have that kind of
Speaker 1: retro look to them and that retro gameplay field to them,
Speaker 1: but they would be brand new titles. Originally, the project
Speaker 1: was pitched to kick Starter in early twenty team, but
Speaker 1: the team chose instead to port the project over to
Speaker 1: indie Go Go, allegedly because they did not have a
Speaker 1: working prototype to prove their hardware was actually feasible, and
Speaker 1: by Kickstarter was starting to get a little wary about
Speaker 1: tech based projects because there had been some pretty high
Speaker 1: profile failures on Kickstarter. I'll do an episode about that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff in the near future. So the company
Speaker 1: would cancel the indie Go Go campaign about a week
Speaker 1: in because it became clear the campaign was not going
Speaker 1: to have the momentum they would need to hit their goals.
Speaker 1: They had some pretty lofty goals, and while they raised
Speaker 1: something like eighty thousand dollars in their Indie Go Go campaign.
Speaker 1: Eighty thou dollars within a week was not tracking for
Speaker 1: them to actually hit their goals. Typically in crowdfunding campaigns,
Speaker 1: by the way, you make the most of your money
Speaker 1: in the very first week and the very last few
Speaker 1: days of a campaign. The middle section tends to be
Speaker 1: pretty quiet, So if you don't have a huge amount
Speaker 1: of momentum going into your campaign, you're probably not going
Speaker 1: to hit your goals. Well. The team would eventually show
Speaker 1: off a prototype of this retro video game system and
Speaker 1: the New York Toy Fair in February, but the only
Speaker 1: games they showed off were old S S n E
Speaker 1: S titles and they were plugged into a case that
Speaker 1: looked like in the old Attari Jaguar. They said, well,
Speaker 1: we got the molds for the Atari Jaguar, and that's
Speaker 1: what's going to be the casing for our our new console.
Speaker 1: But folks began to suspect the team was just using
Speaker 1: an S and E S circuit board that was housed
Speaker 1: in a repurposed Attori Jaguar case. A second planned kick
Speaker 1: started campaign failed to launch in that same month, the
Speaker 1: February sixteen. The company then posted a photo of what
Speaker 1: was said to be an early build of the console
Speaker 1: that which was now branded the Colleco Chameleon, And in
Speaker 1: the photo there was a clear case and you could
Speaker 1: see the circuit board inside the case, which I thought
Speaker 1: was a pretty cool design choice, except for the fact
Speaker 1: that people began to point now that the circuit board
Speaker 1: bore a striking resemblance to a CCTV DVR video capture card.
Speaker 1: They were actually naming the specific card it appeared to be,
Speaker 1: So this was not a a console motherboard or circuit board.
Speaker 1: It was instead a card that you would put into
Speaker 1: a computer in order to give it DVR capabilities. So
Speaker 1: then that image, that promotional image, disappeared from the company's
Speaker 1: social media accounts, but the damage had already been done.
Speaker 1: Collico demanded that their branding be removed from the device
Speaker 1: after the console team was unable to provide for Colico
Speaker 1: a working demonstration of the gadget, and the whole project
Speaker 1: pretty much fizzled out at that moment. Now, again, I
Speaker 1: don't want to suggest that this console was a scam
Speaker 1: or anything, although there was some very questionable choices that
Speaker 1: were made to show off these devices that clearly were
Speaker 1: not the retro video game system. It may well have
Speaker 1: been that the team in charge really one to create
Speaker 1: a console that catered to a certain breed of gamer,
Speaker 1: and they just kept running into challenges during the design phase.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they made some extremely ill advised decisions to showcase
Speaker 1: stuff that wasn't their actual design, all in an effort
Speaker 1: to keep support going for a project that was in
Speaker 1: danger of failing due to lack of funds. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, they just were trying to get more investment
Speaker 1: until they could catch up and actually produce the thing
Speaker 1: they wanted to make. But whether they made those choices
Speaker 1: poorly due to an act of desperation, or they were
Speaker 1: trying to fleece gamers, the result is the same. It
Speaker 1: never became a reality. Next, how about the Sega VR headset.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty nine, Sega had released the Sega Genesis
Speaker 1: in the United States. Uh that system had already debuted
Speaker 1: in Japan in nine. It was called the Mega Drive there.
Speaker 1: In fact, the Mega Drive is pretty much what the
Speaker 1: rest of the world calls this particular gaming console. In
Speaker 1: the US, we called it the Genesis. But Sega was
Speaker 1: doing really well for itself by the early nineties and
Speaker 1: In nine, the company first announced it was working on
Speaker 1: a home video game system peripheral that would be a
Speaker 1: VR headset. Now, at the time, virtual reality had generated
Speaker 1: a lot of buzz and excitement. This was back during
Speaker 1: the first real frenzy around virtual reality. This was the
Speaker 1: one that would eventually result in a bubble collapsing in
Speaker 1: on itself and destroying an entire group of technologies for
Speaker 1: about a decade, but in VR seemed like it was
Speaker 1: gonna be the next big thing. So Sega had a
Speaker 1: big prototype to show off in nine at various trade shows,
Speaker 1: and it planned to release the consumer model in At
Speaker 1: least that's what they announced. The headset featured a pair
Speaker 1: of l c D screens and speakers that would fit
Speaker 1: over your ears, It had sensors for head tracking, and
Speaker 1: there were at least a few games that were in
Speaker 1: development for the peripheral, and then Sega stopped talking about it.
Speaker 1: I'll mention of the VR headset disappeared. Later, the company
Speaker 1: would claim that the problem was that the experience of
Speaker 1: the headset delivered was just too darn realistic, and that
Speaker 1: there was a year that users might hurt themselves while
Speaker 1: wearing the headset because everything was two gosh darn real
Speaker 1: when you wore it. But some people said that maybe
Speaker 1: there were other issues at play here, such as some
Speaker 1: problems with head tracking, the resolution on the screens might
Speaker 1: not have been very good, or maybe there were real
Speaker 1: problems with latency that tends to lead to a nauseating
Speaker 1: experience in VR. Latency is that lag you experience between
Speaker 1: performing and action and having something actually happened in a game.
Speaker 1: So an example in VRS that you're wearing the headset
Speaker 1: and you turn your head to the left, and then
Speaker 1: a half second after you turn your head, your view
Speaker 1: starts to change, and there's that lag between what you
Speaker 1: see what you've done, and what you actually see happening,
Speaker 1: and that kind of gives you this sort of uncomfortable
Speaker 1: motion sickness. It's very off putting. But we never had
Speaker 1: to put off Saga VR headsets because they never came out. Well,
Speaker 1: I've got a lot more vaporware to talk about in
Speaker 1: just a minute, but first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. Back in the ES, a personal
Speaker 1: computer debut that in many ways left competitors like the
Speaker 1: Macintosh and the various IBMPC clones in the dust. And
Speaker 1: it was called the Amiga. It was the brainchild of
Speaker 1: a designer named J. Minor, who had worked for Atari
Speaker 1: and designed the chip set for the Video computer System
Speaker 1: also known as the VCS and also known as the
Speaker 1: Atari twenty hundred. Minor had advocated for a new machine
Speaker 1: running on more advanced chip sets, but he met with
Speaker 1: some resistance at Atari, so he left the company and
Speaker 1: eventually he landed at another company that had the name
Speaker 1: Hi Toro, and that company wanted to make a video
Speaker 1: game console, and so he started work on it. And
Speaker 1: his idea was, I'll make a video game console that
Speaker 1: can also act as a personal computer. I think that
Speaker 1: would be more interesting. I just will downplay the personal
Speaker 1: computer stuff to my boss is because they're really gung
Speaker 1: ho on this whole video game console idea. But then
Speaker 1: in three the video game market totally crashed, the home
Speaker 1: video game market. That's when all the consoles started going
Speaker 1: out of business. There was a glut of terrible, terrible
Speaker 1: games on the market, and everything collapsed in on itself.
Speaker 1: So then the owners of hy Too were panicking. They said,
Speaker 1: could you maybe instead of making a game console, could
Speaker 1: you make a personal computer? Because personal computers seem like
Speaker 1: they were immune to this problem they could keep going,
Speaker 1: and Miner said, well, here's the good news. That's what
Speaker 1: I've been doing the whole time. I've been working on
Speaker 1: creating this personal computer that also could run games. And
Speaker 1: the company also discovered that Hi Toro was a name
Speaker 1: that another company had over in Japan, so they decided
Speaker 1: to rename themselves Amiga. Commodore, the company behind the insanely
Speaker 1: popular Commodore sixty four computer, would end up acquiring Amiga
Speaker 1: in night four. Amiga was just on the verge of
Speaker 1: running out of cash at that moment. They had not
Speaker 1: yet been able to produce a computer and they were
Speaker 1: in danger of going out of business when Commodore came in,
Speaker 1: and then Commodore was able to pour some more money
Speaker 1: into the development of the Amiga, and the Amiga computer
Speaker 1: became one of the best machines to own if you
Speaker 1: loved sound and graphics. Came out in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and people who bought an Amiga, they loved it. The
Speaker 1: games that came out for the Amiga seemed to be
Speaker 1: world's ahead of the games you could play on IBM
Speaker 1: clones or on Apple computers. But despite this, the computer
Speaker 1: itself in sales was a distant third place behind IBM
Speaker 1: clones and Apple computers, especially when it came to software.
Speaker 1: Commodore would eventually have to declare insolvency on April twenty nine,
Speaker 1: nineteen nine four, and a German company called s Com
Speaker 1: swooped in and acquired the Amiga assets, and for a
Speaker 1: brief time it looked like there was going to be
Speaker 1: a new Amiga machine that was going to come out
Speaker 1: in nineteen and while the specs weren't particularly mind blowing,
Speaker 1: the case was pretty darn cool, and this was called
Speaker 1: the Amiga Walker. The Walker is a little tricky to describe. Physically,
Speaker 1: the case stood on four little feet, so it didn't
Speaker 1: sit flat against the ground. It actually had these four
Speaker 1: little peg feet. It was a squat rounded tower design,
Speaker 1: and some people said it looked kind of like Darth
Speaker 1: Vader's helmet. It was a forty Mega Hurts machine with
Speaker 1: a sixty eight e C zero three zero processor for Motorola,
Speaker 1: so it was not sporting the hardiest of processors at
Speaker 1: that time. The specs would have made it a pretty
Speaker 1: decent computer maybe in the early nineties, but by nine
Speaker 1: when it was going to come out, it would have
Speaker 1: already have been obsolete compared to the hardware on other machines.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, it never did hit store shelves.
Speaker 1: It never emerged from the vapor, and one day I'm
Speaker 1: going to have to do a full series on Amiga
Speaker 1: to talk about the history and evolution of that company
Speaker 1: in more detail. I've talked about it a couple of
Speaker 1: times in the past, but never in as much detail
Speaker 1: as the subject warrants, because it's a fascinating story. Transitioning
Speaker 1: over to film, let me talk about Silicon Film and
Speaker 1: the e F S one product, because this was another
Speaker 1: really interesting idea that did not quite materialize. So the company,
Speaker 1: which was originally called a Magic, announced in that it
Speaker 1: was working on a device that you could insert into
Speaker 1: a normal thirty five millimeter film camera and turn your
Speaker 1: film camera into a digital camera. This was at a
Speaker 1: time when digital cameras were still pretty expensive, especially a
Speaker 1: digital s l R, and it would allow photographers who
Speaker 1: had invested hundreds or thousands of dollars in their film
Speaker 1: cameras and their lenses to take advantage of that hardware
Speaker 1: while switching to the digital side of things. At least
Speaker 1: the concepts seemed to say as much. The initial claim
Speaker 1: was that the company's first product, the electronic film system
Speaker 1: unit called e F S one, would fit into any
Speaker 1: thirty five millimeter camera and it would call us less
Speaker 1: than a thousand dollars. The specs revealed the sensor would
Speaker 1: not be able to take full advantage of a film
Speaker 1: cameras field of view. It would only capture about thirty
Speaker 1: five percent of the full frame yikes, less than half.
Speaker 1: It had a one point three megapixel s MOSS censor,
Speaker 1: so not terribly high resolution, and enough memory to hold
Speaker 1: two dozen images at twelve eighty by ten twenty four
Speaker 1: resolution in uncompressed format. So it wasn't exactly a killer
Speaker 1: set of specifications, but still it was an interesting idea
Speaker 1: for a product. The problem was that years went by
Speaker 1: and the company had nothing to show off for it.
Speaker 1: Remember they made the announcement in and it wasn't until
Speaker 1: two thousand one, three years after that initial announcement, that
Speaker 1: representatives attended the p m A show and demonstrated the
Speaker 1: e F S one. The following September, the company had
Speaker 1: to stop operations when a majority stakeholder pulled funding due
Speaker 1: to issues The company was facing with European environmental standards agencies.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, the e F S one was
Speaker 1: never capable of working with any thirty five millimeter camera.
Speaker 1: It only worked with about half a dozen Cannon or
Speaker 1: Nikon cameras, and then it was not compatible with the others.
Speaker 1: But the company had hopes of making other systems that
Speaker 1: would have increased compatibility. It just never was to be.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, digital SLR cameras have become more attainable,
Speaker 1: and that largely negated the market for a digital adapter
Speaker 1: incapable of taking full advantage of a camera's features. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, they took too long to bring their
Speaker 1: their device to market. They had announced it and they
Speaker 1: got some interest early on, but by the time they
Speaker 1: were getting ready to have something to come to market,
Speaker 1: the the alternatives were more attractive and easier to get.
Speaker 1: So bad timing. One gadget I do have to talk
Speaker 1: about was supposed to come out from Polaroid several years ago,
Speaker 1: and I'll need to do a full episode about Polaroid
Speaker 1: at some point because that's another fascinating company story. Let
Speaker 1: me give you the super short version of this particular tale.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eleven, Polaroid was trying to mount a
Speaker 1: late innings comeback. The company had been in pretty rough
Speaker 1: shape twice over the last decade or so. But to
Speaker 1: understand where they came from. In nineteen thirty two, Edwin
Speaker 1: Herbert Land, who was the inventor of instant photography, partnered
Speaker 1: with a guy named George Wheelwright to create the Land
Speaker 1: Wheelwright Laboratories, and in nineteen thirty seven that company would
Speaker 1: become Polaroid, and for decades the company was known as
Speaker 1: an innovator and popularized photography. It was the it was
Speaker 1: the company that brought photography to the average person. And
Speaker 1: of course their work inspired a song. Obviously you probably
Speaker 1: are all thinking about it's in that classic line and
Speaker 1: hey yeah, and which we're told to shake it like
Speaker 1: a Polaroid picture. By the way, shaking instant film does
Speaker 1: not make it develop any faster. So you can shake
Speaker 1: it like a Polaroid picture. It's just I'm not going
Speaker 1: to make the picture developed any faster, but it might
Speaker 1: get you some some appreciative looks on dance floor. Anyway.
Speaker 1: One thing Polaroid was a little late on was adopting
Speaker 1: digital camera technology. They were sticking with film for the
Speaker 1: most part, and as a result, they were starting to
Speaker 1: fall behind in the market. That might be one of
Speaker 1: the big reasons the company found itself in financial trouble
Speaker 1: towards the end of the nineteen nineties. In two thousand one,
Speaker 1: Polaroid would file for bankruptcy protection and it would stay
Speaker 1: in protection until two thousand six, but then its parent
Speaker 1: company would have to file for bankruptcy protection in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight. So there were stretches of years during those
Speaker 1: times when Polaroid wasn't making any products at all. There
Speaker 1: were no new Polaroid cameras coming out or being manufactured. Instead,
Speaker 1: the name Polaroid really only existed as a brand name,
Speaker 1: something that could be licensed. Flash forward to two thousand eleven, right,
Speaker 1: so the company is trying to re establish itself. It's
Speaker 1: trying to make this big comeback, and it had secured
Speaker 1: booth space at CS two thousand eleven. I was actually
Speaker 1: there that year, and in fact I visited their boot
Speaker 1: that year and they had something interesting on display. It
Speaker 1: was a digital camera in the form factor of sunglasses,
Speaker 1: and it was a product linked to Lady Gaga. Lady
Speaker 1: Gaga had joined Polaroid in two thousand and ten as
Speaker 1: a creative director of specialty products, of which these glasses
Speaker 1: were an example. And the glasses included not only a
Speaker 1: camera lens, but also a pair of l c D
Speaker 1: screens inside the glasses, so you could see the pictures
Speaker 1: you snapped. And there was an earpiece on the glasses
Speaker 1: that had a USB drive attached to it that served
Speaker 1: as the storage device for the glasses, so you could
Speaker 1: store a certain number of images on them. They're supposed
Speaker 1: to come out during the holiday season in two thousand eleven,
Speaker 1: but they didn't. In fact, they never came out, though
Speaker 1: several online retailers had pages set aside for pre orders.
Speaker 1: Eventually Lady Gaga would leave Polaroid, and no telling if
Speaker 1: it was because someone tried to poker face Pap Pap,
Speaker 1: Pap poker face. Next, I'll talk about touring phones, all right,
Speaker 1: So come and listen to the tale of the Touring
Speaker 1: Robotics Industries, a company that intended to rise from the
Speaker 1: ashes of Nokia in Finland. And if you've listened to
Speaker 1: my Nokia episodes, you know that the famous cell phone
Speaker 1: branch of the company moved over to Microsoft before effectively
Speaker 1: getting shut down. Touring Robotics Industries set up shop in
Speaker 1: an old Nochia manufacturing facility, and former Nokia employees were
Speaker 1: the founders of this company, and they had high ambitions.
Speaker 1: They planned to make luxury smartphones and their first such
Speaker 1: device was called the Touring Phone. Originally, it was meant
Speaker 1: to be a secure communications device, and if you were
Speaker 1: to send and receive messages on a couple of these
Speaker 1: touring phones, you would be certain that all communications were
Speaker 1: safe because they were using end to end encryption on
Speaker 1: the devices, which would theoretically make it impossible for a
Speaker 1: snoop to see what you were sending back and forth.
Speaker 1: If they if they intercepted anything, it would be meaningless gibberish. Now.
Speaker 1: Originally the company wanted to use Android as their operating
Speaker 1: system of choice for the phone, but when they were
Speaker 1: eventually able to ship a working model several months after
Speaker 1: the originally planned ship date, the operating system was Sailfish,
Speaker 1: which was a little known Linux based operating system for smartphones.
Speaker 1: And when they shipped these it wasn't really the customers.
Speaker 1: They mostly sent them to reviewers. They only a few
Speaker 1: Touring Phones ever made it out to people who had
Speaker 1: pre ordered them, so they never were really widely available.
Speaker 1: They didn't and they certainly didn't get to everyone who
Speaker 1: had backed the company. But some of those early builds
Speaker 1: did get to reviewers, who I have to say, did
Speaker 1: not have a lot of good things to say about
Speaker 1: the device. At least one of the reviewers ruined a
Speaker 1: review model because they dunked it into water. The actual
Speaker 1: touring phone was supposed to be able to withstand such treatment,
Speaker 1: as supposed to be water resistant, but turned out the
Speaker 1: review models that were sent out, we're not built on
Speaker 1: that specific hardware specification. Yet. They were working with the
Speaker 1: Cellfish operating system and they had the software on them,
Speaker 1: but they weren't the actual hardware handsets, and so the
Speaker 1: review model was ruined. The company kept talking about other
Speaker 1: phone models in the various design and production phases, with
Speaker 1: frankly unbelievable specifications, such as a sixty megapixel camera, which
Speaker 1: is insane, or hydrogen fuel cell batteries, which people have
Speaker 1: talked about, but no one's really used those for cell
Speaker 1: phones as far as I can tell. These uh these
Speaker 1: concepts had names like the Touring Monolith Shakne and the
Speaker 1: Touring Phone Cadenza. None of them ever came to market.
Speaker 1: People who pre ordered the phone received an unfinished build
Speaker 1: of the Touring Phone, which was really just meant to
Speaker 1: be a temporary solution, but it never became less temporary.
Speaker 1: The same was true for what would have been the
Speaker 1: second phone to actually make it out of the manufacturing facilities.
Speaker 1: That one was the Apaschea Nato. Only a beta version
Speaker 1: of the handset ever made it to reviewers and a
Speaker 1: few early customers who had pre ordered the phone. This
Speaker 1: one ran on Android, not sail Fish, and the security
Speaker 1: features that were so central to the original Touring Phone
Speaker 1: were absent in this one. In February two, Thoeen Touring
Speaker 1: Robotics Industries declared bankruptcy in Finland. The CEO, Steve Chow,
Speaker 1: said that it was a strategy meant to push pause
Speaker 1: on business operations while developing a new approach. But general
Speaker 1: consensus seems to be that the company is put and
Speaker 1: no phone from them will ever be available for customer purchase.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a little bit more to say about
Speaker 1: gadgets that are vaporware. But before I do that, let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right,
Speaker 1: I gotta talk about a proposed Apple product that never
Speaker 1: came out, and it was a communications device. It was
Speaker 1: actually a telephone capable of sending facts messages. It could
Speaker 1: recognize handwriting and had a touch screen and a stylus
Speaker 1: user interface. You could choose custom ringtones for it. But
Speaker 1: this was a landline telephone, not a smartphone that you
Speaker 1: would carry. You would actually have this plugged into the
Speaker 1: outlet in your house. And Apple announced it all the
Speaker 1: way back at Macworld. It was called Walt, and Walt
Speaker 1: was an acronym that stood for and I swear I'm
Speaker 1: not making this up. Whizzy Active Lifestyle telephone. Boy, does
Speaker 1: that sound like an Apple product? Whizzy Active Lifestyle telephone.
Speaker 1: You can tell that this was not during Steve jobs
Speaker 1: run over at Apple. Is one during the time where
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was not at that company. Apple had partnered
Speaker 1: with Bell South on the design of this proposed product,
Speaker 1: and what appeared to be a production model, as in
Speaker 1: not just a prototype, but something that would have actually
Speaker 1: gone out to store shelves of this Walt telephone showed
Speaker 1: up on eBay back in two thousand twelve with a
Speaker 1: cool asking price of eight thousand dollars. And I found
Speaker 1: conflicting reports online about whether the auction actually went through,
Speaker 1: or whether it was taken down early. I don't know
Speaker 1: what the case is. Maybe it actually went through and
Speaker 1: someone bought it for eight grand, or maybe for some
Speaker 1: reason the auction was taken down, but either way, the
Speaker 1: walt never saw the light of day on an official basis. Now,
Speaker 1: sometimes we actually will get a product, it's not true vaporware,
Speaker 1: but the product that we get is different from the
Speaker 1: one we were originally pitched. Actually, that happens quite a bit,
Speaker 1: and if you're lucky, it happens in the good way,
Speaker 1: and that the thing you get has more features than
Speaker 1: what you were originally promised, and that's awesome, like you say, well,
Speaker 1: this is even better than what they were talking about before.
Speaker 1: But more frequently than not ends up being a case
Speaker 1: where you get something that has fewer or completely different
Speaker 1: features than the ones you were promised. So to start
Speaker 1: off with, I want to talk about Vessel V E
Speaker 1: S S y L. This is one of those cases
Speaker 1: where you've got a lot of unhappy people ready to
Speaker 1: accuse the founder of the company mark one of shenanigans.
Speaker 1: That founder's name is Justin Lee. So what's the story. Well,
Speaker 1: Vessel was supposed to be a smart cup that could
Speaker 1: actually analyze the contents that were inside the cup using sensors.
Speaker 1: The chemical analysis would include a nutritional breakdown of the
Speaker 1: liquid inside the cup, and then by pairing the cup
Speaker 1: with a mobile device via Bluetooth, you could keep track
Speaker 1: of your nutritional habits. And it was all part of
Speaker 1: this quantified self philosophy that was really a big deal
Speaker 1: just a few years ago, where people were trying to
Speaker 1: track and analyze all sorts of data about themselves, and
Speaker 1: some of us still do, like I still track all
Speaker 1: of my meals, and I still track all of my stuffs.
Speaker 1: But this cup was supposed to be able to analyze
Speaker 1: anything you poured into it and then automatically send that
Speaker 1: information to a companion app. So if you poured soft
Speaker 1: drink into it, like coca cola or pepsi, it would
Speaker 1: identify that and say, here's how many calories you're consuming,
Speaker 1: here's how much caffeine, etcetera, how much sodium that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, it would identify it as, whether it's coke
Speaker 1: or pepsi. Even at least that was the concept or
Speaker 1: of his fruit juice or coffee or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: The principle was supposed to be the same no matter what.
Speaker 1: Lee would start taking pre orders for the smart cup
Speaker 1: starting in two thousand fourteen at nine a pop, with
Speaker 1: the idea being that the eventual actual cup once it
Speaker 1: goes on sale, would be a hundred dollars, so essentially
Speaker 1: you get it for a hundred dollars off by pre ordering,
Speaker 1: and he raised more than a million dollars that way.
Speaker 1: The cup was supposed to ship in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: but it didn't. Eventually, his company issued a statement that
Speaker 1: said the cups were taking longer to produce than anticipated,
Speaker 1: that finding a sensor technology that would work for mass
Speaker 1: production was problematic, and that the company would instead offer
Speaker 1: out kind of a stop gap. They wanted to offer
Speaker 1: up a cup called the Prime Vessel Prime spelled p
Speaker 1: r y m E. For some reason, the Vessel company
Speaker 1: likes to get rid of perfectly fine vowels and replace
Speaker 1: them with wise Anyway, this Prime Vessel would track how
Speaker 1: much water you drank in a day, assuming you use
Speaker 1: your cup for all your water drinking, which was a
Speaker 1: big step down from the originally promised gadget, and according
Speaker 1: to a statement from the company made to the Better
Speaker 1: Business Bureau, anyone who chose not to get a Prime
Speaker 1: Vessel could request a refund. So, in other words, you
Speaker 1: you had a choice. You could say, I'd like my
Speaker 1: money back because you have not delivered the thing that
Speaker 1: you promised, or I will take this prime vessel in
Speaker 1: the meantime and I will keep waiting for the actual
Speaker 1: cup to come out. I should also note that unlike
Speaker 1: the promised vessel, the Prime model actually shut. A lot
Speaker 1: of people had problems with it, but did shut. Whether
Speaker 1: all of the models shipped to all the customers, I
Speaker 1: can't say, but something did actually leave the company and
Speaker 1: go out into the world. In fact, you can find
Speaker 1: Prime Vessel on stuff like Amazon. The company, by the way,
Speaker 1: has since gone out of business. And while some people
Speaker 1: have essentially accused Mark One of perpetuating fraud, I'm not
Speaker 1: ready to do that. I am not certain that that's
Speaker 1: the case. Justin Lee studied biomedical computing at Queen's University.
Speaker 1: He had a background in that field, and he partnered
Speaker 1: with a designer named Eves Bihar who had worked with
Speaker 1: jaw Bone to build wearables. I suspect that Lee was
Speaker 1: perfectly sincere in trying to bring this product to life,
Speaker 1: but he tackled a project that was far more complicated
Speaker 1: than he anticipated, not necessarily just technologically, but economically, and
Speaker 1: that this might be an honest failure. I do think that,
Speaker 1: based off reading various forums and Reddit threads, that Mark
Speaker 1: one was not very good at communicating things and being
Speaker 1: transparent about what was going on, and so that ended
Speaker 1: up sewing a lot of discontent. I should also point
Speaker 1: out that there were lots of people who are skeptical
Speaker 1: that a sensor or even a group of sensors that
Speaker 1: could perform chemical analysis with any degree of accuracy in
Speaker 1: the form factor of a cup would be unrealistic. So
Speaker 1: there's some who say there's no way this could work
Speaker 1: just because the technology doesn't exist. We don't have a
Speaker 1: technology that could work in that form factor. So this
Speaker 1: sort of fits in with the episodes I'm going to
Speaker 1: do later on critical thinking and skepticism, that concept of
Speaker 1: if something sounds really, really incredible, then you need to
Speaker 1: take a step back and look for the evidence that
Speaker 1: supports those incredible claims. It doesn't mean that the claims
Speaker 1: are automatically false, but it does mean that they require
Speaker 1: that evidence to support the claim. At c. E. S
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, a new company called Emmiota captured interest
Speaker 1: with their prototype product design. Here's a quick insight into
Speaker 1: c e S. C S is a show where you
Speaker 1: see a lot of the same sort of stuff year
Speaker 1: after year, and you'll see incremental improvements in that stuff,
Speaker 1: which is totally understandable, but it also gets a little boring.
Speaker 1: If you've been to ce S more than five or
Speaker 1: six times. There's only so many times you can look
Speaker 1: at a big wall of televisions and actually feel excited
Speaker 1: about it. And so occasionally you'll run into a product
Speaker 1: that is outside the normal types of stuff you see
Speaker 1: at c S and you get really excited because it's different.
Speaker 1: Doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not. Necessarily,
Speaker 1: it just matters that's different. Well, in this case, the
Speaker 1: product that was a smart belt buckle that could automatically
Speaker 1: loosen or tighten the belt around your waist, so if
Speaker 1: you were to sit down or stand up, it could
Speaker 1: keep your trousers nice and snug without being uncomfortable or
Speaker 1: presumably after you orch it yourself. Let's say you're at
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving dinner, it would be able to let out a
Speaker 1: little space, you know, loosen that belt a little bit.
Speaker 1: It also vibrate occasionally let you know that you've been
Speaker 1: sedentary too long and that it was time to haul
Speaker 1: yourself up to your feet and take a little bit
Speaker 1: of a walk. And a lot of folks also said
Speaker 1: it was really ugly as sin it looked more like
Speaker 1: a safety belt than a fashionable accessory. But then again,
Speaker 1: this was a prototype that they were showing off. Then
Speaker 1: you flash forward a year and now it's c e s.
Speaker 1: The m Eota team was out again with Belty, only
Speaker 1: the new design of Belty was very different. For one thing,
Speaker 1: it looked more like a fashion item. For another, it
Speaker 1: had ditched the self adjusting feature entirely and no longer
Speaker 1: could tighten up or loosen by itself. Um Instead, it
Speaker 1: would sync up with an app on a smartphone. Now
Speaker 1: would still vibrate to let you know you need to
Speaker 1: get up and walk around, and it would let you
Speaker 1: know if you need to drink more water to stay hydrated.
Speaker 1: I'm not really sure how that last feat was supposed
Speaker 1: to work, As the folks at Emiota said the belt
Speaker 1: would continue to give you notifications even if you did
Speaker 1: not have your phone on you. So how your belt
Speaker 1: happens to know whether or not youven drinking water is
Speaker 1: beyond me. I don't know what the mechanism was supposed
Speaker 1: to be. For that the projected pre order price for
Speaker 1: this belt was the princely sum of three. Now let's
Speaker 1: flash forward again to today. You can order a Belty online.
Speaker 1: You can actually go out and buy one of these things.
Speaker 1: It costs a hundred forty nine dollars, so less than
Speaker 1: half of what the price was quoted as being back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and sixteen. But as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, all the previous features are no longer part
Speaker 1: of this belt. It does not tighten up or loosen
Speaker 1: up on its own. It no longer vibrates to let
Speaker 1: you know to walk around, doesn't keep track of your
Speaker 1: water consumption. Instead, BELTI acts as a supplemental battery. You
Speaker 1: recharge the battery it's housed in the belt buckle, and
Speaker 1: then you can plug in a device into the buckle
Speaker 1: for a quick recharge via USBC. So you can stand
Speaker 1: there with your phone plugged into your belt buckle and
Speaker 1: it looks about as great as it sounds. So the
Speaker 1: product you can actually purchase is a far cry from
Speaker 1: the one that was shown off back in two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: and again that's just a demonstrate how vaporware might refer
Speaker 1: to a build of something and that you do eventually
Speaker 1: get that product, but it ends up being very different
Speaker 1: from the one that you were promised. It's always a
Speaker 1: smart thing to think of whenever you're looking into a
Speaker 1: crowdfunding campaign. Will cover more about that in a in
Speaker 1: a future episode, but that wraps up this one about gadgets.
Speaker 1: In our next episode, we're going to take a look
Speaker 1: at the software side of vaporware. It's just as entertaining
Speaker 1: and varied as the hardware side. And uh, if you
Speaker 1: guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it's a type of technology, a company, a person
Speaker 1: in tech, maybe there's someone you would like me to
Speaker 1: interview or have on as a guest host, send me
Speaker 1: a message. The email address is tech Stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Or draw me a line on
Speaker 1: Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is
Speaker 1: tech Stuff H s W. Don't forget to follow us
Speaker 1: on Instagram and I'll talk to you again. Really sit
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Speaker 1: at how stuff Works dot Com,