All good things come to an end. This year, we watched as some of our favorite gadgets found a new home in a casket filled with the technology of yesteryear. Fill up a glass and get ready to pour one out for the tech casualties of 2017.
AIM
On December 15, AOL Instant Messenger posted its final away message. Its days of being the hip way to stay in touch with all your school friends are long gone, but AIM is where an entire generation forged their online identities[1]. Now, all those embarrassing screen names are six feet under along with the rest of the old web.
iPod Nano and Shuffle
Apple finally gave its flagship music player the boot this year by killing off the iPods Nano and Shuffle[2]. Sure, you’ve streaming all your tunes with Spotify or Apple Music by now, but that doesn’t mean we won’t miss the iPod. It sparked the modern landscape for music, and it’s where many of us build the playlists that defined our youth.
Vine
Before the lauded Pivot to Video, there was Vine. It had dogs jammin’ out on the cowbell[3], raps about Liam Neeson[4], siblings ruining vape tricks[5], and mystifying tricks of trash cans turning into whiteboard drawings[6]. Twitter gave it the axe[7] late last year, but kept it on life support until January. With its departure goes another experimental platform where people could be just a little weirder with their creations. Damn, Daniel.
Microsoft
MS Paint
It probably didn’t come as a shock when Microsoft dropped Paint[8] from its list of supported features,...