If 2025 felt quieter than the tech-year firework shows of 2022, that’s because many of this year’s losses were subtle — a last update turned off here, a hardware line quietly discontinued there. These aren’t the headline-grabbing collapses of platforms and billion-dollar debacles so much as the slow fade of things we’d treated as fixtures: the comforting noises, the weird single-purpose gadgets, and the tiny conveniences that stopped being worth the cost of maintenance.
Little funerals with big meanings
AOL’s dial-up finally went dark after decades, taking with it the screeching modem handshake that is, for many, the audio logo of the web’s infancy. It’s an odd kind of nostalgia to mourn — not because we want to go back to 56K speeds, but because the end of dial-up underscores how access and infrastructure have outlived an entire commercial model.
Microsoft’s famous blue screen of death got a wardrobe change too: the BSoD’s bright-blue, frowny-faced theatre of panic was replaced by a quieter black-screen UI in the October release. It’s cosmetic, yes, but it’s also symbolic of a platform trying to appear less like a system that crashes and more like a managed experience. The change came on the heels of Windows update turbulence — a reminder that even long-lived operating-system rituals can be edited out of the cultural script. For background on the update headaches administrators still complain about, see the coverage of how October patches triggered BitLocker recovery prompts in business environments Windows October Update Triggers BitLocker Recovery Prompts on Business PCs, Microsoft Warns.
Meanwhile Apple quietly retired the last iPhone with a physical home button when the iPhone SE gave way to a full-screen model. Small hardware touches — the button you could feel, press, blame when a phone acted up — matter to users in ways companies sometimes forget. Little losses like that change the muscle memory of how we interact with devices.
When one-trick gadgets die, the AI lesson is obvious
Humane’s AI pin — a voice-first wearable that promised a new way to chat with an assistant — fizzled within a year. HP bought the IP and talent, but the hardware itself is unlikely to be reborn. The pin’s brief life was less a product failure than a market lesson: users prefer multipurpose devices. The same lesson was writ large across 2025’s Kickstarter and prelaunch graveyard. From pet “translators” like Pettichat to desk companions and “emotional AI” toys, 2025 produced a long list of charmingly delusional hardware ideas. Wallpaper* documented many of these design duds and the circus of crowdfunded overpromises; these projects are part of the same pattern — AI added as a buzzword does not a useful product make.
If you follow Google’s experiments with agentic AI assistants, the appetite for voice and agent capabilities is real; companies are just still finding the right form factors. For how big companies are trying to bake assistant-like features into existing products, look to recent moves around Google’s AI Mode and booking agents Google’s AI Mode Adds Agentic Booking for Tickets, Salons and Wellness Appointments.
Planned obsolescence, corporate pivoting and the quiet push to the cloud
Google’s decision to end cloud support for early Nest Learning Thermostats this year felt less like a technical necessity and more like a corporate nudge toward newer hardware. Devices that once promised endless updates and remote control simply lost key functions. That left a cottage industry of tinkerers and hobbyists trying to revive legacy hardware — and it’s part of a broader conversation about who owns the lifecycle of connected devices. If you want an optimistic coda, see how hobbyists stepped in to bring old Nest units back online after official support ended Hobbyist Firmware Brings Old Nest Thermostats Back Online After Google Ends Cloud Support.
Memory-maker Micron’s decision to pivot away from consumer Crucial-branded RAM toward high-bandwidth AI memory is another example of market incentives reshaping what gets made. The result for PC builders is less product choice and, some months, higher prices for enthusiast-grade parts — the sort of downstream effect that shows up in forums and build guides long after the corporate press release.
Amazon changed the rules for Android apps on Fire devices, shuttering the general Android app store and focusing on apps tuned to its ecosystem. It’s a reminder that platform owners will always lean into vertical integration when it helps margins.
Apps and services that quietly exited
A few familiar names also went away in 2025. Mozilla’s Pocket — the lightweight “save for later” read-it-later service — shut down. Amazon tightened how Kindle purchases can be used across non-Kindle devices, sharpening questions about what “owning” digital content really means. Zelle phased out its standalone app and folded its transfers more firmly into bank partners’ interfaces. And Microsoft finally folded Skype into Teams, turning a once-disruptive consumer darling into a legacy feature inside a productivity behemoth. VICE ran a handy roundup of some of these app-level departures, which collectively map a shift from standalone utilities toward consolidated platform experiences.
Hardware relics and geopolitics
Google stopped issuing firmware patches that turned the old Stadia controller into a useful Bluetooth gamepad — a small but emotionally resonant moment for cloud-gaming collectors. And in December a US ban on imports of many foreign-made drones complicated buying and availability of popular models, pointing to how geopolitics and trade policy now shape the gadget aisle as much as engineers do.
Why these “small” losses matter
Taken together, the things we lost in 2025 aren’t just nostalgia fodder. They reveal the forces that will shape the next five years: consolidation of services, AI sprinkled unevenly across products, hardware vendors chasing data-center margins, and a portability of user attention to fewer, more managed platforms. Some losses were inevitable evolutions (BSoD’s makeover), others were avoidable (product strategies that abandoned long-term users). A few were simply silly experiments that deserved to fail.
If there’s a through-line, it’s this: we’re moving away from quirky, single-purpose ideas and toward ecosystems that promise convenience — for better and worse. The question for users, regulators and designers is who gets to define convenience, and what they’re willing to trade for it.