The year has come to an end, and so are the tech fails that are worth the facepalm moments. In this year-end Fast Five edition, we take a look at some of the worst tech moments this 2015.
In a year that we saw companies releasing products left and right in an attempt to woo your hearts and pockets, these good intentions sometimes take a bit of an overdrive and miserably fail right before our eyes. As always, listed in no particular order.
Table of Contents
Lenovo and the Superfish
We kicked off this year with a critical security vulnerability from one of the top laptop makers in the world. It was found out that Lenovo’s in-your-face Superfish adware program could potentially be a host for attackers to snoop out information from whichever browser you’re using. The company then scrambled for solutions, such as working with McAfee and releasing a Superfish removal tool that promises 100% elimination of the said adware.
Apple’s ‘Innovations’
We know that the Cupertino giant likes to be on the forefront of everything, but Apple has a lot to catch up on, design-wise. Who would want that odd-looking case with a battery capacity that’s even less than that of the phone’s? Or how about that Pencil where you have to charge it via the iPad Pro’s Lightning port? What do you think of that mouse with a lightning port at the bottom? And most importantly, how can that single USB-C port in the MacBook revolutionize the way you work with laptops? We do hope that we won’t see more hardware functionality getting sacrificed for aesthetics in 2016.
Snapdragons breathing fire heat
Qualcomm had a rough year, too. Its flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 810, suffered overheating issues that reportedly made a few manufacturers switch to the less powerful cores for their flagship devices. Other chips such as the Snapdragon 615 have been reported to bear the same problems too, on initial release. We do hope these are already fixed, as what the news are saying.
Hacks and data breaches
2015 is not a safe year for tech, as they share some of the hacks, vulnerabilities, and data breaches we’ve seen and reported. Remember when there was a reported vulnerability for Samsung handsets using SwiftKey? We’re glad Samsung acted swiftly and released a patch for it.
Up on the forefront for the worst data breach of the year comes from adultery site Ashley Madison, which leaked data revealed mostly Filipino males use the service in the country. We hope your name’s not on that list, because who knows what might happen next.
‘Hoverboards’
Last but not the least, we have the ‘hoverboards’. There isn’t really any problem with the product per se, but rather how companies market this product. We have one really cool hoverboard made by Lexus (which we think is worth putting on the bucket list), and the rest are just two-wheeled balanced scooters that are banned on some airline flights and is currently under investigation for health risks by the DTI and the DOH.
And that rounds up some of the biggest tech fails this year. Failure leads to success, they say, and we hope that we’ll see less of these next year. Do you have more to add to this list? Chime in the comments below.
#6 Starmobile’s overprice phones
Hopefully, these “hoverboards” will be banned everywhere and that will be the start of their demise.
I’ve expected the HTC One A9 to be on this list, lol.
Now it’s time for Success Tech Stories of 2015…
You forgot Intel’s mobile processor. That is one big failure.
I beg to disagree. Nothing wrong with their SoCs. May issues lang pero it does not hinder performance. Unlike sa Snapdragon 810 and 615 na may throttling problems lang.
Wow, sir, paano naging fail ang mobile SoC nila considering the the acclaimed Asus Zenfone 2 flagships are using it?
It’s just Intel’s late entrance to the market and manufacturer’s preference to their already mature ARM supply lines. That’s why we see Asus, a relatively new entrant to the smartphone market, use Intel processors. They already have this strong tie with Intel with the PC side of things.
However, from a purely technological viewpoint, there’s no reason why Intel mobile processors are inferior. Though they aren’t exactly class leading (that would go to Apple’s SOCs), they’re quite efficient if manufacturers and OSs do power management right (manufacturers using ARM has years of experience on this, so they’re often more efficient, but the SOC isn’t the underlying reason).
I expect Intel to slowly get more market share as their 14nm process matures, something that I predict they will stick to more than they would like.