Maybe it has something to do with offering a metaphor for more and more out-of-shape Americans. The Segway—as hyped and as mocked as it has been—is a defining example of “last mile” transportation, an electrical scooter designed to make strolling out of date. (Recently, the idea has been somewhat revived by the emergence of so-called hover boards, which are actually additionally coming into a kind of post-fad twilight.) The Segway’s symbolic influence greatly exceeded its commercial success. Unit gross sales never exceeded the six-figure mark before the firm was purchased by a Chinese interest in 2015 for an undisclosed sum.
Obsoleting noisy, awful dot matrix technology, units like 1988’s HP DeskJet gave computer homeowners the power to quietly output graphics and textual content at a fee of two pages per minute. The DeskJet wasn’t the primary inkjet available on the market, but with a $995 price tag, it was the …