I'm willing to bet that you have dozens of USB-powered gadgets in your house.Be it USB-C or USB-A, we all have masses of random electronics, many of which often lie there for ages, unused.If they disappeared tomorrow, you might not even notice.
(Or is that just me?) Forgettable as some of them are, there have been many rather iconic USB accessories over the years, too.Here are some you probably remember but won't be able to find in stores anymore.Flip Video put a USB connector inside a camcorder Super convenient, ultimately unnecessary Close As I compiled the list of gadgets that ultimately ended up in this article, I realized that there was a bit of a running theme with early USB products: a lot of them were sort of unnecessary.
As in, USB was this great new thing everyone wanted to get a piece of, so naturally, it was implemented in products that didn't seem to need it, in ways that weren't what you'd imagine them to be thinking back on it now.The Flip was a pocket camcorder that, in my opinion, fits that description to a T, but it's still a memorable reminder of the creativity companies and inventors freely explored back in those days.Instead of making you use a USB cable, the Flip had a USB-A connector that swung out of the side of its pocket-sized body.
You took your videos and then plugged the camera straight in, with no extra steps: no software, no cables, no card readers.Pretty neat, although I'm not sure how necessary it was for the general population.My ranting is one thing, but the convenience clearly meant something, as Cisco paid around $590 million for the company that invented this nifty little gadget.
Two years later, the entire product line was shut down, and no surprise—it was 2011, and phone cameras would never have allowed a product of this type to co-exist alongside them peacefully.Once everyone had a decent enough camera in their pocket, there was little reason to also carry a decent enough USB camera.Related This is the cheapest solution to your PC's dead USB port USB port is toast? Don't worry, you can fix it up Posts 4 By Monica J.
White U3 smart drives tried to turn a flash drive into a whole computer A fake CD drive was always doomed I like to have a few USB rescue drives.They're basically what it says on the tin: a USB drive that contains all the software you might need to run a fresh install on any PC.But before I started treating these drives as a habit/precaution, U3 drives came preloaded with a launcher called the U3 Launchpad.
In retrospect, there are some similarities.The idea was that you could carry all your software, settings, and even your browser profile on a tiny USB drive.Then, you'd plug this thing into any Windows PC you wanted to use, and voila—it just worked.
Again, convenience was the name of the game in the case of U3 drives.The best part was something that would make any privacy buff happy: you didn't actually leave anything behind.Back when places like internet cafes were still common (when's the last time you saw one?), the U3 drive made a lot of sense.
So, what killed off the U3 drive? The drive announced itself to Windows as if it was a USB hub with a CD drive attached.That, obviously, wasn't really the case, but it got the drive to autorun the software.IT departments weren't a fan of this approach, so the clientele of the U3 drive slowly faded out.
The USB Zip drive is remembered for more than just the USB that came later The click of death became infamous I've talked about the Zip drive before, and no wonder.Those things were huge, both in impact and in actual size, and they actually slightly predate USB-A.They just started out on SCSI and parallel ports, and USB only became an option later on down the line.
The USB version, while introduced later, had a lot going for it.At 100MB, and then 250MB and 750MB, a single cartridge held around 70 floppies worth of files, so it was an excellent alternative to the other storage solutions that were available to us at the time.Alas, Zip drives had their faults, and the "click of death" is perhaps the one they're remembered for the most.
Some drives developed a head fault that could damage any disk you inserted, and then that disk would damage the next drive you used it with, creating a loop of failure that stretched past its original Zip.Iomega, the company behind these drives, said that this only affected a fraction of units, but hey—where data's concerned, most people prefer not to take any chances.Beyond that, the cost per megabyte eventually pushed these drives out of the market.
Cheap CDs followed by USB flash drives became the obvious alternative soon enough.The Griffin PowerMate simply failed to keep up Poor software support during a hugely transitional period The Griffin PowerMate sort of looked like a pop socket, the thing people stick to their phones to not drop them.But, of course, it was a lot more elaborate; it was more of a knob with a blue LED under it, and you could interact with it in various ways.
Similar to what you can do with a gaming mouse these days, you could map actions to the PowerMate, making it easier to execute certain tasks by pressing, spinning, pressing and spinning, etc., on the device.It was definitely handy for a lot of uses, from controlling volume to specialized software (although a lot of programs didn't even have shortcuts that would work with the PowerMate).The issue was that Griffin failed to keep up with the changing times, and most of all, with new OS requirements, never moving past Vista on Windows or Sierra on macOS.
It was ultimately discontinued in the late 2010s, and these days, you'll find things like the Elgato Stream Deck serving a similar purpose.Long live USB Although messy and difficult to make sense of, USB is here to stay.These gadgets, made during its early days, are long gone now, but new ones have taken their place.
What are some of the weirdest ones you've seen lately?
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