Name: Top 20 Overhyped Inventions That FLOPPED
Uploaded: 2025-03-16T11:05:33.000Z
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Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the top 20 overhyped inventions that flopped.

Adverbs of degree

For this list, we're looking at products that might have looked great on paper, but the execution just wasn't there, either in reality or in the minds of the customers.

Which of these products do you think never got the love it deserved?

Betamax For those of you asking, what's Betamax?

And while we do realize that many of you also have no clue what VHS is, it was huge.

Before there was streaming, and before there was Blu-ray, and before DVDs, there were videocassette tapes.

And beginning in the mid-70s, there were two main videocassette formats competing against each other, VHS and Betamax.

While it could be argued that beta was better quality, many factors, including price, led to VHS owning 60% of the North American market by 1980.

And they just grew their dominance from there.

Beta was never the alpha they'd hoped to be. 19.

Microsoft Kin 1 and Kin 2 This one is a double failure of magnificent proportions.

The 2010 Kin 1 and Kin 2 were phones designed by Microsoft aimed at the younger social network-loving generation.

The problem, though, was that the younger generation didn't like them.

So when her Facebook friend Questlove played an impromptu show in the park, Kendra knew about it right away.

The Kin phones didn't have third-party apps or an app store, and the web browser on the devices didn't support flash video, which back in 2010 was kind of a big deal.

An even bigger deal was the lack of any instant messaging services, which for a social phone seems like a crazy omission.

Microsoft worked on the Kin phones for two years and spent over $1 billion.

And within two months, Verizon stopped selling them.  Oakley Thump We don't know about you, but two items we tend to lose the most are our sunglasses and our headphones.

Well, back in 2004, Oakley gave us the opportunity to lose them both at the same time when they introduced their Thump sunglasses with built-in headphones and MP3 player.

The Thumps were the first ever sunglasses to have an audio player built into them.

And while it might sound cool, it certainly doesn't sound $400 to $500 cool, depending on if you wanted 128 megabytes or 256 megabytes.

What if you wanted to take off your sunglasses but keep listening to your music?

For that kind of money, we'd be sleeping in those things.

Needless to say, they never really caught on.

Microsoft Bob These days, even a 10-year-old could probably navigate a Windows home screen with their eyes closed.

However, back in the mid-90s, it was all still pretty new and not as intuitive to many users.

This brings us to Bob, Microsoft's attempt to switch out the standard Windows program manager for something more user-friendly.

Well, at least an image of a house with rooms and items that everyone was familiar with.

It almost sounds like a bad joke, but it wasn't.

Managing credit, managing bonds, buying a car, let's buy a car.

It was a major Microsoft product launch released in March of 1995 and discontinued in 1996.

Yeah, baseball scores, pizza places that deliver.

From posters to restaurant menus, we've all whipped out our phone to scan a QR code at one time or another and found it rather quick and useful.

Well, back in 2000, before smartphones, the Digital Convergence Corporation had an idea for a barcode reader that users could use to scan URL barcodes found in various magazines, catalogs, etc.

You see, this QCat barcode reader had to be plugged into your computer, which means you had to have the item there with you.

Just swipe the QCat across a special Q code and watch the exact webpage you want download right before your eyes.

Not to mention the lengthy installation and registration process.

To quote one reviewer, the device was quote, not solving a problem.

Gizmodo dubbed it the worst invention of the 2000s.

Microsoft Zoom Despite Apple's huge market share in the portable music player space with the iPod in the mid-2000s, some very smart people at Microsoft still believed they could be beat.

So, they spent lots of time and a whole lot of money coming up with the Zoom.

And if you were around in 2006, you probably remember it.

Not because you bought one, unless you were Sheldon Cooper, but because Microsoft promoted it everywhere.

On the plus side, all that promotion made it the second best-selling PMP when it launched with 9% market share.

However, iPod was still number one with 63%.

And they never really got much closer than that.

In the end, the Zoom wasn't a bad product, it just wasn't an iPod.

Premier Smokeless Cigarettes In the 80s, the R.J.

Reynolds Tobacco Company didn't just see their industry lead fall to Philip Morris, but growing anti-smoking sentiment was a concern as well.

So, in an attempt to provide a healthier option, they came up with the Premier brand of smokeless cigarettes.

These definitely were not healthy, but they did reduce smoke and eliminated the inhalation of tar.

The problem was, they were hard to use and generally unpleasant to smoke.

According to multiple testers in Japan, they tasted like bull.

Well, of all the groups we tested, the response to Premier was just about uniform.

Even the company's CEO said they smelled, quote, like a fart.

They were discontinued within a year with total losses coming in between $800 million and $1 billion.

HP Touchpad Like what happened with the iPod, once Apple introduced their iPad tablets, everyone else was pretty much competing for second place.

You might remember two of the biggest hyped competitors, HP and BlackBerry, and their respective touchpad and playbook devices.

Or actually you might not remember them because neither device, despite the big companies behind them, made much of an impact on consumers.

Both devices were launched to big fanfare in 2011, and while the playbook would stick around for a year or two, it only took 49 days for HP to give up on the touchpad and cut prices to sell off their inventory.

On Friday after HP's announcement that it was going to discontinue its touchpad tablet, the company announced an inventory fire sale.

Apple Newton Yes, it's true, not everything Apple touches turns to gold.

The Newton was a personal digital assistant.

In fact, the term personal digital assistant was actually coined in reference to Apple's device.

It's also proof that being first to market isn't always a guarantee of success.

The Newton was certainly intriguing and innovative, but it wasn't perfect.

One of the most exciting features was the handwriting recognition.

However, upon launch, the kinks still hadn't all been worked out and it was, let's call it, not very good.

Then there was the high price tag that we've all come to expect from Apple products.

The Newton was developed during the time when Steve Jobs had left the company.

DMC DeLorean If we're talking about a product's lasting recognition in popular culture, then the DeLorean is one of the great successes of all time.

However, just because we all loved Back to the Future does not mean the DeLorean was a big seller.

Maybe if they'd been actual time machines, they would have sold better.

But not only did they not help you travel through time, the low-powered and generally poor-performing cars didn't even live up to their sporty image.

The gull-winged sports car produced in 1981 and 1982 filed for bankruptcy in 1983 and only ended up producing about 9,000 vehicles.