Actual 21st-Century Innovations Dumber Than Sabre’s Triangular Tablet from ‘The Office’

5

The Juicero

Juicero was supposedly the juicer of the future! The sleek device could compress “pre-sold packets of diced fruits and vegetables” for the low, low price of $400. The company went belly-up after it was reported that the machine was less efficient than just squeezing said packets with a pair of good old-fashioned human hands. 

4

TwitterPeek

Like a smartphone but without the capability to do anything useful, TwitterPeek was a $200 device that allowed people to check Twitter, and… that’s it. It was just for Twitter. If that doesn’t sound like enough of an existential act of digital torture, even its one function was reportedly “painfully slow,” while the screen only displayed the first 20 characters of each Tweet, and “linked websites were inaccessible.” It’s unclear how many Ls of memory it had.

3

Google Glass

Google Glass was the tech giant’s smart glasses that hooked up to the internet, allowing users to check messages and view photos without the painful ordeal of tilting their head down like two inches to check a smartphone. It didn’t catch on, partly because the invention turned walking down the street into a goddamn nightmare and also raised major privacy concerns. That said, like a sci-fi horror villain, it could always come back…

2

Dog PC, the Computer for Dogs

From Tesla (no, not that Tesla) came another electronic device that involves triangles: the “Dog PC.” It was literally a $500 computer for your dog and included touchscreen games like Fruit Ninja — presumably for canine companions too stupid to learn how to play Call of Duty.

1

The Segway

Another terrible invention of the early 21st century was the Segway, the pricey two-wheeled alternative to walking that was briefly used by Michael Scott in a clip show most people probably skipped.

If it didn’t seem dumb enough to begin with, in 2010, the owner of Segway died while riding a Segway after throwing it into reverse to make room for a dog walker on a pathway and falling off a cliff. Which you have to imagine might not have happened if he was, you know, walking.

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