All good (or bad) things must come to an end! Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down our picks for various objects and technologies that have been discontinued in 2023.
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00:00 excited to talk about all the fun that's happening and of course to try this delicious milkshake.
00:04 Welcome to WatchMojo and today we're counting down our picks for various objects and technologies
00:09 that have been discontinued in 2023. Free your mind at the one place for all the ways we play.
00:16 Number 10 Sierra Mist Sierra Mist
00:21 taste one shockingly refreshing lemon lime. Pepsi's answer to Sprite and 7-Up, Sierra Mist
00:27 was a lemon lime drink introduced back in 1999 was being the operative word here. Suffice it to say,
00:33 Sierra Mist simply couldn't compete with its juggernaut rivals. We're just leaving with the
00:37 Sierra Mist you gave us. It certainly had a strong run sponsoring major league soccer and attaining
00:42 great popularity with its Mistake series of commercials starring the likes of Kathy Griffin
00:46 and Tracy Morgan. A ton of variants were also introduced including orange and cranberry flavors
00:51 but Sierra Mist went flat in the crowded lemon lime market and Pepsi decided to pour it out.
00:56 It was officially discontinued in January 2023 being replaced by a drink called Starry.
01:01 Number 9 MagSafe Battery Packs Apple is always progressing and in 2020
01:09 they introduced a wireless phone charger called the MagSafe. Coming in different varieties and
01:13 shapes the MagSafe magnetically attaches to the back of the phone and charges it without the use
01:18 of cables. We're enabling a whole new ecosystem for MagSafe. One year after its introduction,
01:23 Apple introduced the MagSafe battery pack, a small brick that was charged via a lightning port.
01:28 Well, this didn't last very long. The MagSafe battery pack was in production for just two years
01:33 before it was discontinued in September 2023. Owing to a recent mandate from the European Council,
01:38 Apple will drop lightning in favor of a universal USB-C thereby making the lightning-powered battery
01:44 pack obsolete. It's the future, we're going in a good direction. So it's one less cord you gotta
01:48 care. Number 8 Maestro Cards Introduced back in 1991, Maestro is a brand of debit cards overseen
01:55 by Mastercard. Maestro debit card, the smart new way to pay. Unlike the parent company's
02:00 signature use of red, yellow, and orange, the color scheme of Maestro used a far colder red,
02:04 blue, and purple. Despite being around since the early 90s, Maestro is slowly being phased out
02:09 around the world. China stopped issuing Maestro cards in 2016 but Maestro took its biggest blow
02:14 on July 1st, 2023 when Mastercard removed Maestro from the entire European market. According to one
02:20 Mastercard representative, the Maestro was out of date and incompatible with modern banking needs.
02:25 Number 7 Lilt The soft drink market is clearly ferocious.
02:29 2023 not only saw the end of Sierra Mist, but a European drink called Lilt. Manufactured by the
02:36 Coca-Cola company, Lilt was introduced back in 1975 with the slogan "Totally Tropical Taste".
02:42 Fitting, seeing as how the original concoction was a pineapple grapefruit blend,
02:49 new flavors were introduced throughout the years including mango and mandarin and banana and peach.
02:54 The popularity of the brand was also bolstered with the help of some great marketing,
02:58 featuring characters like the Lilt Ladies and the Lilt Man.
03:00 Unfortunately, neither were enough to keep the drink fizzing and it was discontinued in February
03:08 2023. However, the flavor can still be found in Fanta Pineapple and Grapefruit, into which Lilt
03:13 was rebranded. Number 6 Google Stadia
03:21 There is no getting around it, Google Stadia was a mess from the start.
03:24 A gaming service meant to compete with PlayStation Plus and Xbox Cloud Gaming,
03:31 Stadia was a huge disappointment upon release in 2019. Reviews were not favorable, with most
03:36 singling out the lack of features in good games, which, you know, is important for a video game
03:41 service. They also never developed in-house games, despite a promise to do so. Stadia Games and
03:56 Entertainment was shut down in February 2021 and Stadia itself soon followed. Without prior
04:01 warning, Google announced in September 2022 that they would be ending support for Stadia
04:06 and it was officially discontinued the following January.
04:08 Number 5 GAS
04:16 The social media market is a tough nut to crack. It seems like the behemoths are simply unbeatable,
04:20 but then a new app like TikTok comes along and completely decimates our preconceived notions.
04:25 That's what GAS was hoping to do, and for a while, it did.
04:33 Geared towards high schoolers, GAS allowed its users to anonymously vote in polls regarding
04:37 their classmates. These were complimentary in nature, and the winner was GAS'd up,
04:46 hence the name. GAS was enormously successful upon release, even beating TikTok to become the
04:51 most downloaded app in October 2022, but it quickly ran out of gas, and service was ended
04:56 in November 2023 owing to a lack of users. Number 4 Apollo
05:00 Just as 2023 was a bad year for soft drinks, so too was it a bad year for social media apps.
05:06 Independently created by an Apple intern named Christian Selig, Apollo was a third-party app
05:11 that allowed iOS users to access Reddit. The app was universally praised, being named in
05:16 Editor's Choice and landing top spots on various Best Reddit Apps lists. Things went swimmingly
05:21 until April 2023 when Reddit announced that they would begin charging for its application
05:25 programming interface. Huffman announced in April that Reddit would start charging for access to its
05:29 API, which is the gateway through which companies can download all of Reddit's user-generated content.
05:34 Selig quickly announced that he was not able to afford the charges, which could balloon up to $20
05:38 million a year. As a result, the app was shut down on June 30 amidst a prolonged site-wide protest.
05:56 Number 3 Windows 8.1 Operating systems are a fickle thing.
06:00 As technology expands, so too does the software that controls it. And like all things tech,
06:05 older options are eventually made obsolete, being unable to provide the growing needs of the
06:09 consumer. So, we'll miss you Windows 8.1. Released back in 2013, this operating system was
06:20 quickly overtaken by Windows 10, which was unveiled less than two years later. 8.1 was a bit of a mess,
06:30 desperately trying to fix the issues that 8 had introduced. However, it still had a healthy run
06:35 of nine solid years. Alas, 8.1 finally reached the end of support in January 2023, meaning it
06:41 would no longer be given software or security updates. Number 2 The Grimace Shake Well,
06:46 Grimace Shake, you didn't last long, but you left behind one heck of a legacy. Created to celebrate
06:51 Grimace's birthday, the popular milkshake was berry-flavored and a distinct shade of purple,
06:56 which obviously mirrored the character it was celebrating. This was always meant to be a
07:02 limited-time promotion, and it ended up running for less than a month. Of course, its brief time
07:09 on this earth was greatly magnified by the popular TikTok trend, which showed people drinking the
07:13 shake. Why? Because it's funny. Despite the wild success of the Grimace Shake, the promotion was
07:18 not extended, and it was taken off the McDonald's menu on its allotted date of July 9. Before we
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07:34 your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications. Number 1 The iPod
07:42 May 10, 2022, a historic day for Apple and on a grander scale, technology. It was then that,
07:48 after more than 20 years, the iPod was finally officially discontinued. This amazing device went
07:54 through some major alterations throughout its years. iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket.
07:59 The first contained a monochrome LCD screen, the iconic click wheel, and the slogan,
08:04 "1000 songs in your pocket." And then eventually came the iPod Touch. Alas, all good things must
08:09 come to an end. Apple's standalone music players were made obsolete in 2017 with the removal of
08:14 Nano and Shuffle, and the greater iPod line was taken out of circulation with the Touch.
08:19 The end of an era, indeed. As a business decision, this makes a lot of sense. People are not buying
08:25 iPod. Do you still have any of these objects, or have you let them go? Let us know in the comments
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08:50 [Music]