The early adopter: Part trailblazer, part pollyanna, he’s never met an unproven technology he didn’t like. He doesn’t just want the best gear, he wants to believe. He wants to believe that new tech is the best tech, and that products simply wouldn’t be released if they weren’t ready for prime time.
In many cases, the early adopter has the right instincts, but pulls the trigger too soon. He buys consumer electronics premised on solid ideas, but handicapped by immature execution — like a good portion of the nine historical curiosities I present here. Not all of the following technologies were flops, but every single one required a brazen leap of faith.He’s an optimist. He’s a betting man. He’s pulling out his wallet, and going all-in.
Think you have better examples of early-adopter folly? Let us know in the comments section of this article, and we’ll use your best suggestions in an upcoming list.
Above:
The First Backward-Compatible Color TV
In 1954, RCA began producing the CT-100 — 15 diagonal inches of blurry, headache-inducing image quality. The set sold for $1,000 (about $7,850 in today’s economy) and included two sets of circuitry to ensure backward-compatibility with black-and-white broadcasts. Warned Consumer Reports: “Only an inveterate [and well-heeled] experimenter should let the advertisements seduce him into being 'among the very first' to own a color-TV set."
Only some 4,400 CT-100s were ever made, and unsold units were quickly reduced in price to $495. Given that color broadcasting didn’t become a prime-time staple until the 1966-67 television season, it’s easy to see how RCA’s 1954 launch was so egregiously premature.
Sony Betamax
Sure, you’ve heard the jokes. Whenever a comedy writer wants to demonstrate some hapless character’s complete futility as a human being, he throws in a gag about the poor stiff’s balls-to-the-wallsBetamax investment in 1975.
As a tape-based video-recording format for the consumer market, Betamax was initially limited to just 60 minutes of recording time, but delivered good image quality for its day and age. But mere image quality couldn’t provide cover for Sony in a format war against JVC, whose VHS spec offered longer recording times, and appeared in less expensive machines.
Betamax eventually surfaced in a longer recording format, but it was too late. The movie video rental market exploded, and Hollywood movies — then as now — have a pesky habit of lasting more than 60 minutes.
Digital LED Watches
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the very first digital LED watches introduced in the early '70s. In fact, how could you even resist them? The digital displays in the original Star Trek, after all, were analog flip wheels! Yet some three years after the last Star Trek episode aired, real-world people were wearing digital displays on their wrists, and the numbers weren’t printed on wood or metal, but rather shined in our faces via “light” that was “emitted” by some strange thing called a “diode.”
No, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with '70s-era LED watches. But you still had to pay a princely $2,100 for the very first digital LED watch — the Pulsar, produced by the Hamilton Watch Company in 1972. Sure it was ensconced in an 18-carat gold chassis, but adjusted for inflation that watch would cost $11,400 in today’s dollars. A smart buy? No, not at all considering LED watch prices plummeted by the time Star Wars hit the big screen in 1977.
Photo: Courtesy jamesbondwatchesblog.com
IBM 5150
The definition of “personal computer” will vary (some would say an abacus fits the bill), but the IBM 5150, released in 1981, is generally regarded as the very first PC. Prices varied from $1,565 for a base model (16K of memory with no storage drive) to $6,000 for the Cadillac model (floppy storage, 256K of RAM and color monitor support). The machine's Intel 8088 processor ran at a staggering 4.77MHz — or less than 1/200th the speed of processors in today’s run-of-the-mill smartphones.
There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the 5150, however impotent its performance might have been in today’s terms. In fact, the 5150 spawned a revolution of nerdery that we still benefit from today. But to ditch one’s typewriters, adding machines and slide rulers for this newfangled contraption? Only an early adopter would have the guts to throw down.
Apple Lisa
Apple didn’t create the computer mouse — it merely was the first company to introduce one for a personal computer, the Apple Lisa, in 1983. As Bill Gates famously told Steve Jobs when Jobs accused him of stealing the mouse idea for Microsoft Windows: “Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Maybe Jobs should have attenuated his hubris, because only his second moused computer, the Macintosh, really impressed anyone. The Apple Lisa, in fact, was a poor seller that left purchasers to flail in early-adopter quicksand. It cost way too much at $9,995, its floppy drive ran slowly when it ran at all, and available software was scarce.
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X
It’s really no wonder that Motorola wanted to show the world it could build the world’s thinnest cellphone (the RAZR in 2004) and the world’s thinnest smartphone (the Droid RAZR in 2011). The company released the world’s first cellphone, the DynaTAC 8000X, in 1983, and the mere sight of this monstrous, ear-gobbling ectomorph made small children cry.
Looking a bit like an improvised explosive device, the world’s first cellphone was unfeasibly large (13x1.75x3.5 inches) and heavy (1lbs, 12oz). It also cost $4,000, or about $8,800 in today’s economy. Gordon Gekko famously used a DynaTAC in the 1987 movie Wall Street — you know, to prove he was a player — but as the '80s wore on, true players established street cred by carrying pagers.
Oh, and the phone tapped into the AMPS analog cellular network. As analog network cells have essentially been excised from the planet’s surface, the DynaTAC 8000X really is nothing more than a big hunk of uselessness — thus supporting its original nickname, “the brick.”
IBM Simon
You need not ever suffer smartphone envy again. Anytime you look at your iPhone 3G and wish it were a 4S, or glance at your Gingerbread phone and wish it were running Ice Cream Sandwich, just refer back to this article and find solace in the fact that you’re not packing a Simon.
Celebrated now as the world’s first smartphone, Simon was introduced by BellSouth in 1994, and marketed as a PDA with cellular phone call support. Anchored by a 160x293 monochrome touch screen display, Simon came with 11 different built-tin apps, including ones for two-way wireless faxing, email, a calendar, a calculator and even a pen-based sketchpad — you know, so you could ditch the cocktail napkin, and instead make wireframe drawings of your “avatar based chat room” on an LCD screen instead.
Priced at $900, the Simon was a stunning early-adopter fail. According to one report, “Only about 2000 Simons were made, the majority being returned to BellSouth and destroyed.”
Portable MP3 Player
Back in my day, we didn’t have fancy-pants, pretty-boy “iPods” and “shuffles” and “nanos.” Noooo. We had regular-old, meat-and-potatoes “MP3 players.” They were hard to operate, made of flimsy far-eastern flibbity-flu, and some didn’t even display artist and song title information. But we liked ‘em, damn it! We liked ‘em!
Actually, we did like them. Portable digital audio players like 1998’s Diamond Rio shown here didn’t have the industrial design panache of Apple’s first iPod, and they certainly lacked the iPod’s ultra-intuitive user interface. But those earliest portable audio players typically offered drag-and-drop file management, giving hardcore MP3 collectors (read: Napster, LimeWire and Kazaa thieves) an easy way to transfer tracks from desktop to portable player, en masse.
So, no, the earliest portable digital music players weren’t failures. But they were made obsolete when the iPod launched in 2001, proving that even well-played early adoption is often poorly rewarded.
Tablet PCs
No, Timmy, Apple hasn’t invented everything. Besides not inventing the computer mouse, and not inventing the portable music player, Apple also didn’t invent the tablet.
Yes, the iPad might seem like a new invention, but the very first “modern” tablets were released in 2002. The Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 shown here was somewhat of a flagship device for Microsoft’s Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. And like the Toshiba and Fujitsu devices running the same OS, Compaq’s TC1000 offered data input of unparalleled futility.
These weren’t multi-touch devices, per se. Instead, you used a bundled stylus to either take notes with “digital ink,” or you tapped away on a small, unresponsive virtual keyboard. No wonder everyone kept their keyboards attached, and used these tablets as notebooks instead.
So these are my choices for early adoption infamy — what are yours? Let us know in the comments section of this article! LINK
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