- The 2010s had its fair share of bad tech - including Google Glass, Snapchat Spectacles, and butterfly keyboards.
- Exploding batteries, unusable keyboards, and poor overall design are some of the things that put products on the "Worst" list.
- Insider reflected on the tech of the decade that fell short of expectations.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Abby Tang: It's a prank, right? Hoverboards are pranks?
Jason Sanchez: It's a lie. It's not, like, it's not a hoverboard.
Jacqui Frank: They're just ugly skateboards. Like, just call a spade a spade. It doesn't make any sense to me.
Jade Tungul: Hoverboards. Jesus Christ.
Sanchez: "Back to the Future II" introduced this concept of the hoverboard. I've been dreaming of a hoverboard since I watched that movie, and that was 1989. Kind of flash forward to a couple years ago, and it's not a hoverboard. It's, like, a thing with a wheel. One thing has, like, a single wheel I see people on, they're like, "Oh, a hoverboard." I'm like, "You're not hovering." It's a wheel; it touches the ground. There's no hover.
Frank: I have, like, a huge, massive problem with them to start, just, like, at the very beginning, which is that they are called something that they do not do. They do not hover, so what the heck?
Tungul: They were on Vine a lot, actually. People used them a lot on Vine. Tang: Terrible start for a hoverboard, right? If you're starting a hoverboard with wheels, you have gone in the wrong direction.
Sanchez: You know, the only real hoverboard I've seen was, like, this Lexus ad stunt that was done in a skate park outside of Barcelona. You needed, like, tons of liquid nitrogen to fuel the thing to get it to levitate.
Frank: There was, like, the fake Lexus hoverboard. Essentially what makes that fake is that it only works on this, like, specific metal ground that Lexus created, and that was cooler. If it were real and, like, you could use it everywhere, that would be a whole thing. I'd pay a billion dollars, and I'd have one today! It's like, "Oh, what happened to Jackie?" "Uh, I think she's homeless. She got a really sick hoverboard, though." Like, that would be my whole life, OK?
Tungul: I remember when they were getting really big, there were multiple stories that came out about hoverboards, like, blowing up. It just became a safety concern, and that was a whole nother thing.
Tang: Oh, my God, I forgot, hoverboards exploded! I legitimately forgot that they exploded. I'm just mad at the mere concept of them. I forgot the actual dangerous, detrimental things that they did.
Tungul: Kind of a fail. Sadly.
Shannon Murphy: I don't think foldable screens are worth it. I think, in the long run, they're gonna cause problems and they're gonna make phones last for a shorter amount of time.
Antonio Villas-Boas: Different companies have different reasons why they're making foldable screens. The primary reason that we're hearing a lot right now is to turn your phone into a tablet when you want it to, you know?
Frank: What I don't understand about foldable screens: What is the actual, like, necessary aspect of them? They make the screen bigger, OK, but, like, we have iPads and we have tablets. Like, big screens are something we already have, so I don't know why we need that. That's one.
Tang: Why? Why do you?
Villas-Boas: It's really for sort of "power users," per se. The extra screen real estate lets you run three apps at the same time, for example.
Frank: The Samsung one they recalled. It's, like, soft and, like, clearly soft in, like, weird places. I'm not willing to sacrifice general durability, and I wouldn't even consider the phones we do use that durable, like, for it so that it can be slightly bigger for, again, an unknown reason! Did I ask for that? Like, who were they giving that to? Who needs it?
Tang: I understand that it is objectively cool technology. Like, rolling up a screen or whatever.
Villas-Boas: It's the most fragile thing in the world. You can barely look at it without even trying to, like, you know, potentially damaging it. It lets in a lot of dust. Like, there's a lot of gaps everywhere.
Murphy: I do feel like they bring back a nostalgia almost of, like, flip phones.
Villas-Boas: I think companies are under a lot of pressure to be the first at something.
Tang: People are like, oh, it's convenient, 'cause it's smaller. It's not smaller. It isn't. It's the same size, but in half!
Lydia Ramsey: Theranos was the brainchild of a woman called Elizabeth Holmes. She started this company when she was 19, shortly after dropping out from Stanford.
Starr Chen: Their premise was that with one drop of blood, they were gonna be able to run all of these different diagnostic tests. Like, kind of just do a lot of blood work with just a single drop of blood.
Nich Carlson: It was fake; the whole thing was fake. The tool didn't work. You know, they didn't ever get close to having a tool that was, like, testing a drop of blood in a, you know, in a little thing. They actually ended up having a microwave-sized box that also didn't work, and, in fact, what they were doing was getting people's blood and then sending it off to regular blood-testing laboratories, and then sending it back and pretending it was the little box that was doing it.
Ramsey: And she got massive amounts of funding to pull it off, and it was this Silicon Valley darling. She was on the cover of magazines; she was really putting her name out there. She had, like, the iconic black turtleneck, Steve Jobs-esque look. That was a lot of fun.
Chen: Elizabeth Holmes was kind of one of the first big female tech founders to really make it big, and for her whole story to be a sham, it was, like, very disappointing for a lot of folks who were really rooting for her.
Ramsey: This was a lot of powerful people, like the DeVos family, the Walmart family, big names were invested in this company.
Chen: I think Theranos really exposed how little investors sometimes have before they give money to a company.
Carlson: I also think that Theranos is very emblematic of the past decade or so in the United States and in the tech industry. People can throw money at things and hope it's gonna be the next, you know, Apple or Facebook or Google or something like that. And so what you see is you see capital flowing into things that are not necessarily good ideas but are just being presented as brilliant ideas.
Chen: It is really disappointing, I think, because just as far as, like, the actual thing that they were trying to sell would've been really cool.
Ramsey: The fact that it got to be as big of a thing as it was without anybody questioning it, and then for it fail just so spectacularly, I think would definitely qualify it for one of the worst tech products of the decade. Matt Stuart: Snapchat Spectacles are the worst! Oh, they're terrible!
Paige DiFiore: Snapchat Spectacles I think are so dumb.
Danielle Cohen: I don't think you need a pair of sunglasses to record something.
Chris Snyder: I woke up, like, really early to get them in line when they were doing the pop-up shops.
DiFiore: Do any of us know what Snapchat Spectacles are? So, I'm convinced that they only made, like, 15 of them, gave them to, like, the biggest YouTubers in the world, convinced us all that we needed them, but never really explained what they are and, like, never actually produced them, 'cause I've never met anyone in my life who owns them.
Will Wei: So, these are Snapchat Spectacles. Right, as you can see right here. So it's like, there's a button here, you press it, a little light goes, but the camera's here, I think. So it records, like, this circular video, then it goes straight into your Snapchat archive, video, whatever, that you can then upload to your story.
Stuart: It took a snap, and that's all they did. So you knew exactly what you were getting. If you're gonna buy expensive sunglasses like that, you want them to last a while, and eventually the battery on those is gonna degrade over time, so you'll just have to get a whole new pair.
Cohen: My dad got given several free ones at his office. They came with very, very little instructions. I do have a few other videos from my Spectacles because I didn't know I was recording, and I would often take videos of myself putting away the glasses and closing the case.
Snyder: I knew this was trendy, and everyone was talking about them, and they were only offered in limited quantities at first, so if you had them, you know, it was kind of cool to walk around wearing Spectacles and be like, well, I got them first, you know. But I don't think I ever actually did that. I don't think I ever actually walked around wearing them.
Wei: The only issue was that, yeah, it's circular video, right? Like, it can only live on Snapchat basically. No other platforms really adopted that.
Cohen: Most of the technology we've tried to put in glasses has not really hit off. People aren't really interested in it. This was such an embarrassing flop for Snapchat. I feel like they just tried to make one product, and no one liked it.
Stuart: I have a butterfly keyboard. I hate it. Butterfly keyboard was Apple pushing for, "Everything has to be thinner," "Everything has to be lighter," and so they made this keyboard where the keys barely go in.
Villas-Boas: Tiny specks of dust, even maybe apparently just one or two specks could get underneath a key and cause it to malfunction.
Stuart: I have one on my laptop right now, and it's constantly creating double spaces for me and weird period effects, and it just makes me look like I'm a terrible typer, because it screws up all of these things that I do.
Villas-Boas: I actually wrote a post about the butterfly keyboard. I wrote several, but one of them was written with my butterfly keyboard on my 2016 MacBook Pro. I was affected by the issue, and I wrote the post without correcting any of the typos. The issue for me, specifically, was that my G key was not working. So try, as a tech reporter, writing Google without a G key. It sucks. It's been somewhat resolved. Apple's replacing keyboards for free. The replacement keyboards are the same butterfly keyboards, so this might be happening over and over again.
Stuart: Apple decided to sacrifice functionality for thinness, and then it became this whole scandal because an entire line of laptops were unusable because of this dumb keyboard.
Villas-Boas: The Apple butterfly keyboard is certainly one of the worst pieces of tech of the decade, certainly in recent memory. An unreliable keyboard is a bad piece of tech.
Stuart: Google Glass was this weird thing they did in the middle of the decade or so that was supposed to put, like, kind of augmented reality of Google stuff in front of your face, on glasses.
Carlson: It was supposed to be that you could, like, look out and see a heads-up display, but actually, it was a little tiny monitor. You had to, like, look like this to see, and it was, like, useless information, and it was really terrible.
Wei: It wasn't ready for prime time. It was bulky. If you wore it outside, you looked pretty weird.
Carlson: It was, like, a junk gadget that people thought would revolutionize, like, personal computing before it came out, and then the second it came out, everyone was like, "This is really terrible."
Stuart: For, like, six months, everybody wanted Google Glass, and then everybody realized it was terrible. So nobody wanted Google Glass anymore.
Carlson: The biggest and worst problem with Google Glass is that you look like a moron when you wear it. And so, no one's ever gonna wanna wear it, and, by the way, the functionality didn't at all make up for the fact that you look like a moron. Wei: I think there was a phrase going around called, like, "Glassholes," where a bunch of people in Silicon Valley, they had versions of Google Glass, they wore it out in public, some people got punched in the face for wearing it. Silicon Valley is a weird place.
Stuart: Google loves building hype for their products and then not living up to it. They have a whole graveyard of discontinued products. So I think they were trying to build hype for this product they were doing, and then what they actually created did not live up to the hype that they built for it.
Nikki Torres: Bluetooth has always sucked.
Taryn Varricchio: I don't like Bluetooth.
Victoria Barranco: Not a Bluetooth fan.
Alyse Kalish: A lot of times, it'll be like, my headphones will attach to the wrong device 'cause, like, I'll automatically have Bluetooth on, like, my laptop and my phone, so then accidentally, like, connect to the wrong thing and then I'll be playing music, like, out loud, which is unfortunate.
Varricchio: Bluetooth made me run a red light, and it kind of scarred me. So, like, Bluetooth is an absolute no.
Torres: Bluetooth has always been horrible. Actually, I'm kind of having nightmares in my head. Bluetooth is kind of the bane of my existence. So many missed calls, so many things that never came through.
Barranco: And then battery-life problems, plus there's the, like, ecological issue of basically all Bluetooth headphones are gonna end up in a landfill. So, not really pro-that.
Kalish: It's definitely not intuitive as someone who's not super techy. It's kind of confusing where I'm like, "Oh, gosh, how do I...?" The only solution I have is to just turn it off, but there's got to be an easier way to, like, pair things.
Varricchio: So, I do like Bluetooth headphones. OK, no, actually as much as I like it for my headphones, I run into several issues where the connection just doesn't work or it's not recognizing my device and it's like, that's literally your one purpose as Bluetooth, to recognize my device. I don't know, I don't know why it's not better. I don't know if it's, like, my internet connection or if it's me, but, like, heard this from several accounts that Bluetooth just kind of sucks.
Barranco: Virtual reality is the use of technology, like a headset, to put a person into another reality, a digital world by putting, like, a screen in front of their face.
Carlson: I was really, really excited about VR because, I mean, I tried it once and it was so cool.
Michelle Yan: I feel like it's a battle. Like, there are some people that are like, VR is so awesome right now and, like, why are you hating on it, and there are other people who are like, VR isn't meeting the expectation that people had.
Tang: I want VR to be better so bad! I want to be able to use it with all of my favorite games. Like, I just want to put it on and be in Fallout, or like put it on and be Red Dead Redempting.
Carlson: I think I wanted to use VR for something that crossed gaming, art, narrative, that was, like, the next great invention in storytelling. I thought it would be something like the movie. It is not that, which is really disappointing. Hopefully it will be. It was supposed to be. It is not.
Yan: I think also VR is trying to be half-gaming-systems/half-, like, 3D-experience. VR, nobody really knows what it wants to be in the future, in a sense.
Tang: I feel like we were promised something so much better, and now as more companies roll out their own VR sets, they just keep getting more convoluted.
Yan: VR headsets are platform-specific, you know? And that's a problem, because you don't have that flexibility. You have to really stick with the same ecosystem, and it's limited.
Tang: It's the worst compared to its own expectations.
Carlson: I think the biggest disappointment for VR is, yes, it's expensive, and it's prohibitively expensive for many people. Yes, it requires too much space, and those are very disappointing things, but actually, if you go further and get it, it's not gonna feel worth it, because I don't think you get the fully immersive experience that you really were expecting when you first tried it for the first time.
Tang: Phones shouldn't explode.
Villas-Boas: So, the Galaxy Note 7 is well known because it was exploding.
Stuart: You just don't want things exploding around you. It's good life advice.
Villas-Boas: Specifically, the battery would explode; it was poorly designed. The enclosure for it was poorly designed. The battery was not reliable, and it would catch fire for certain people.
Stuart: It was, eventually, I think, banned from airplanes. Like, if you got a Note 7, you couldn't fly with it, because they were worried that the battery would explode. Exploding batteries are a deal breaker when it comes to a phone. You don't want that. No, uh-uh.
Villas-Boas: To be fair, the Note 7 debacle, it was a relative small amount of users that had issues. But the danger was so high that it was worth a recall.
Tang: It just, phones should explode! I am confident that I am in the right about this.
Frank: Surely there's some kind of legal problem with calling it a hoverboard when it doesn't hover! It just makes no sense to me! It's like if I started calling, like, my gloves shoes. They're obviously not shoes! They don't serve the purpose of shoes! It makes no sense! So that's how I feel about hoverboards.