Remember when your DVR blinked at you like a stubborn clock? Or when Skype was the default way to call across oceans? 2025 felt, in part, like a long, slow clearing-out: companies pruning legacy products, governments tightening rules, and the marketplace mercilessly eulogizing gadgets that never quite learned to behave.
Little deaths, loud echoes
Some shutdowns were quietly practical. TiVo’s hardware was quietly removed from its storefront in October — the set-top boxes that once defined couch-time have been downsized into a software business serving TVs in Europe. Mozilla shuttered Pocket, the read-later app that once hoarded millions of saved links. Twitter’s final death rattle came not with a dramatic switch-off but with X formally retiring the Twitter.com trappings.
Other exits carried more nostalgia. Skype, the app that made video calls commonplace back in 2003 and popularized internet telephony, was formally retired by Microsoft as the company funnels users into Teams. For many users, that’s the end of a familiar era; for Microsoft it’s consolidation toward fewer, AI-infused platforms.
Then there were the functional pivots: Zelle removed its standalone mobile app and refocused on bank integrations, because apparently only about two percent of its transactions ran through that app. Microsoft, meanwhile, accelerated a move away from user-stored passwords and toward passkeys — a technical nudge designed to reduce credential theft and shoehorn stronger authentication into everyday sign-ins.
Flops and forced retirements
Not every casualty was sentimental. Some devices and services bit the dust because they simply didn’t work as promised. Humane’s AI Pin — the $700 attempt at a screenless, wearable AI assistant — was returned in droves after reviewers cited faulty projection, inconsistent gesture controls, and overheating. A ChatGPT-powered plush toy made by FoloToy was pulled after watchdog groups found it giving dangerously inappropriate or unsafe advice. And in the pantheon of vaporware, the so-called Trump Phone remained more press release than product throughout the year.
One welcome shutdown was the disappearance of Mr. Deepfakes, a site notorious for hosting nonconsensual deepfake porn. Its domain redirected to a shutdown notice after a service provider terminated support — a small victory that coincided with Congress passing the Take It Down Act, which beefs up federal tools against nonconsensual intimate imagery.
Bigger picture: regulation, consolidation and AI
These individual endings are symptoms of a broader pattern. Regulators are catching up to harms that once lived in legal gray zones. Tech giants are consolidating — folding marketplaces into larger ad-and-AI platforms, shuffling features into monoliths, and betting heavily on agentic AI (systems that plan and act across tools) rather than feature-by-feature novelty. If you want a deeper look at how Google is pushing agentic capabilities into consumer products, see how Google AI Mode added agentic booking features for appointments and how Gemini deep research began to touch Gmail and Drive.
Hardware and economics nudged the landscape, too. The year’s drama around GPUs, DDR5 shortages and the cost of AI data centers forced vendors to prioritize efficiency, battery life and thermals over headline-grabbing specs. That pragmatism shows up in quieter product launches and in people choosing longer-lived, repairable hardware over incremental spec bumps. Apple’s M4 MacBook Air update was read more as evolution than revolution — an outcome many buyers seemed fine with — and if you’re tracking the latest MacBook options, the M4 MacBook Air remains a practical pick M4 MacBook Air.
Software churn and user fatigue
Microsoft’s messy upgrade path for Windows — and the timing of Windows 10’s end-of-support — nudged a subset of users to look elsewhere. A year of buggy updates and feature creep left some people eager to declutter and quiet unwanted AI integrations; guides on how to declutter Windows 11 25H2 circulated widely. That fatigue also helped Linux enjoy a modest resurgence among gamers and privacy-minded users.
Google Assistant’s sunset from Android Auto (scheduled for March 2026) is another example: big firms replacing older assistants and utilities with newer AI platforms — Gemini in Google’s case — rather than trying to patch and extend aging codebases.
What these deaths tell us
- Consolidation is the norm. Big platforms are folding useful niche tools into larger AI-and-advertising businesses. That’s efficient for companies, but it narrows the diversity of standalone tools users could pick.
- Regulation is starting to bite. Content harms that were once tolerated or ignored are getting real-world takedowns and legal consequences.
- The AI shift is maturation, not magic. 2025 saw agentic AI move from demonstrations into operational roles — automating booking, research and triage — and that reduces the appetite for tiny, single-purpose devices that don’t integrate well.
- Hardware is boring in the useful way. Efficiency, thermals, and longevity beat raw benchmarks for many buyers.
If there’s a theme to this year’s obituaries, it’s that tech is trimming. Companies that can pivot to software or to AI-enabled services survive; those that promise too much without practical durability don’t. Nostalgia and novelty still make for headlines, but usefulness — and the regulatory and economic forces that enforce it — are writing the eulogies.
No funeral procession here is particularly neat or final. Some brands will re-emerge, others will linger as software relics, and a few ideas will be recycled into new, slightly better products. For now, keep an eye on where AI gets baked in — and on which toys and services actually make life simpler rather than louder.