Pour one out for AOL dial-up, Windows 10, and a host of other tech gadgets and services that powered down and logged off this year.
It’s time once again for a final look back at the technology that said farewell in 2025. From stalwarts like Skype to AI devices that never had a chance, everything on this list made its way to the digital trash heap over the last 12 months. JANUARYFacebook Fact-Checking
Mark Zuckerberg kicked off 2025 by ditching Meta’s formal fact-checking program, which was put in place to counter the fake news that hit the site during the 2016 US presidential election cycle. Almost a decade later, however, Zuckerberg said Facebook would take a page from X and adopt a community notes approach. “This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content”, he said at the time. This came shortly before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, who once threatened to put the Meta CEO in prison for perceived misdeeds during the 2020 election. So, axing fact-checkers was likely in part intended to curry favor with a president who is very susceptible to flattery. Zuckerberg (and other top tech CEOs) then attended Trump’s inauguration after Meta donated $1 million to the inaugural fund. The company also paid Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit over the president’s post-Jan. 6 ban from Meta’s platforms.
Venu: This joint effort from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery was supposed to be a single sports streaming platform for all the major leagues (NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA, WNBA, NCAA, and more). But it hit the skids following a lawsuit from Fubo. Ultimately, we ended up back where we started, with separate services competing for our cash: ESPN and Fox One both launched in late August, while Disney combined its Hulu + Live TV business with Fubo.
Amazon Prime Try Before You Buy: This service, launched in 2018 as Prime Wardrobe, competed with similar try-before-you-buy offerings, such as Stitch Fix. But as customers increasingly used AI-powered features like virtual try-on, personalized size recommendations, review highlights, and improved size charts, it no longer made economic sense, Amazon said.
Meta Quest Pro: A little more than two years after it hit the market, Meta discontinued its $1,500 Quest Pro headset and stopped selling it in January. In our review, we found that it was “aimed at professionals as much as enthusiasts, with a high price that reflects its impressive feature set.” However, Meta’s more affordable follow-up, the Quest 3, earned our Editors’ Choice award thanks to its swift processor, high resolution, and color pass-through cameras that enable high-quality augmented reality.
AT&T 5G Home Internet in NY: Fixed-wireless (or 5G home internet) services tap cellular networks instead of cable or fiber connections to keep you connected at home, and offerings from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and their various prepaid brands are quite popular. In New York, however, AT&T droppoed out of the market after the state’s Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) required ISPs to offer “broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps” to qualifying households. AT&T said that made it uneconomical for it to invest in and expand its broadband infrastructure in the state, so it exited the market there.
Net Neutrality (Again): We’ve been down this road several times, but with Trump returning to office and selecting Brendan Carr as his FCC chairman, the court put a final (?) nail in the net neutrality coffin. In a January ruling, a three-judge panel sawed out the legal framework for the rules the commission had adopted in 2024, holding that the FCC was wrong to classify broadband providers as “telecommunications services.” FEBRUARYHumane AI Pin
Chatbots and AI tricks like video generators have captured the attention of web users worldwide, but AI hardware gadgets have struggled to break through. We saw that firsthand in February, when HP acquired Humane, a startup that developed a Star Trek-like smart pin that flopped amid negative reviews and a $699 price tag. That meant the end of the AI Pin, as HP was only interested in “key AI capabilities from Humane” and its 300+ patents and patent applications. At this point, AI devices are a tough sell, given that we can accomplish most of what they do with a smartphone or smartwatch. Can OpenAI and Jony Ive (or this hacker) come up with something more compelling?
Facebook Live Video Saves: Remember when Facebook Live was all the rage? In a bid to compete with now-defunct services like Meerkat and Periscope, Facebook courted publishers and other brands to go live on the social network. When the stream was done, those shows were archived to a profile. But that eats up a lot of server space, so Meta is only saving streams for 30 days going forward. Streams that weren’t downloaded were deleted.
Getaround: Cars are expensive, especially if you’re living in a big city with limited parking, so rental services like Zipcar, Turo, and—until recently—Getaround offer daily or hourly rentals for quick trips around town. Getaround launched in 2009, and became known for letting car owners rent out their vehicles to consumers. But it struggled to offset the high costs of maintaining the business. After suspending car-sharing operations in New York last year, it closed up shop altogether in the US in 2025, though it’s still operational in Europe. (In the UK, car-sharing service Zipcar also shut down its operations this year.)
Downloading Kindle Ebooks to Your Computer: For years, Amazon allowed readers to download its ebooks to their computers, where they could be transferred to other devices or saved as a backup. Effective Feb. 26, however, Amazon axed that option, along with the ability to transfer books from a computer to a Kindle via USB.
Amazon Chime: Amazon launched its video-conferencing app in 2017, when we found it to be an “app in progress” that was “not ready for the major leagues just yet.” It never got there, particularly as Zoom exploded in popularity during the pandemic. It shut down in late February, and Amazon reportedly replaced Chime with Zoom at its offices.
Windows Defender VPN: Microsoft offered free VPN protection in Windows Defender via a feature known as Privacy Protection. Effective Feb. 28, however, it was removed for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers, so the company could “invest in new areas that will better align to customer needs.” A few months later, BulletVPN abruptly shut down, canceling the lifetime subscriptions it had once sold to customers. MARCH
Nest Smoke Detector and Yale Smart Lock: The Nest Protect smoke detector debuted over a decade ago, while the Nest x Yale smart lock launched in 2018. That’s a long time in the tech world, so Google (which acquired Nest in 2014), discontinued both devices in March. It then announced a partnership with home safety firm First Alert to launch a smoke and carbon monoxide alarm that integrates with existing Nest Protect devices and is accessible from the Google Home app. The Nest x Yale lock was replaced by the Yale Smart Lock with Matter.
My Nintendo Gold Points: This loyalty program started in 2018 and allowed customers to earn points by buying Switch games—5% of the amount they paid for a digital copy or 1% for physical ones. Nintendo stopped awarding Gold Points on March 24.APRILOpenAI’s GPT-4
ChatGPT and other chatbots are only as good as the models they run, and in 2025, OpenAI retired GPT-4, one of its most well-known models, to make room for GPT-4o and GPT-5. Effective April 30, GPT-4 was removed from the drop-down menu known as the “model picker” for ChatGPT Plus users, though it remained an option in the API. “GPT‑4 marked a pivotal moment in ChatGPT’s evolution,” OpenAI said earlier this year. “We’re grateful for the breakthroughs it enabled and for the feedback that helped shape its successor.”
Standalone Zelle App: Zelle debuted in 2017 with a few dozen banking partners. But that number soon topped 2,200, with most people conducting transactions inside their own banking apps via the integrated Zelle functionality. “We now see just ~2% of transactions on the standalone app,” Zelle said last year. As a result, Zelle shut down the standalone app on April 1, and encouraged people to use its service through their banking apps.
igin: Electronic Arts’ PC games storefront launched in 2011 and tried unsuccessfully to do battle with Steam. By 2020, it retired the Origin moniker in favor of the “EA app,” and as of April 17, Origin is gone forever.MAYSkype
The rise of Zoom and Google Meet was bad news for Microsoft’s pioneering video-conferencing service this year. In early May, Skype completed its final video call, a move Microsoft said was intended to “streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs.
