If you're anything like me, you get a kick out of gadgets that manage to change the world. There are so many interesting devices that disrupted the status quo or simply made our lives easier. What I find even more interesting now and what I want this channel to be about are the products that didn't just change the world but the ones that managed to live past their moment in history to endure and become more than they were intended to be. Take the Pebble Smartwatch for instance. In a lot of ways it's a sad tale of defeat but also with luck, triumph. In November of 2016, Pebble unceremoniously closed their doors after being one of the most successful crowdfunding projects of all time. When compared to the landscape of smartwatches still on the market, the original Pebble is still pretty compelling. A simple e-paper display, hardware buttons, 7-day battery life, no glitzy flash, no pomp and circumstance and no obvious corporate agenda. But today's video is not just about the panel. Our subject does bear much resemblance to it though. It too was a darling of the tech blogs after it's released by the legendary Andrew Bunny Huang. I guess you could say it was a simple desktop clock with a twist or maybe more like a squish. It was cute, it was weird, yet was chumby. The original chumby's unusual leather enclosure conceals a relatively speedy for its time, 350 MHz arm processor. It runs arclinics from its 64 Migs of flash rom and has 64 Migs of SD RAM. The interface of the chumby centers around a resistive touchscreen and contains an accelerometer and force sensor to respond to movement and being squeezed. On the back there's dual USB with TRS audio and stereo speakers. The chumby may at first seem to be a pretty innocuous desktop alarm clock, but its internal anatomy is bizarrely slapped-as in some places. This Wi-Fi daughterboard for example. Look at this, it's a USB Wi-Fi adapter plugged into its own PCB breakout, we can then attach it to the mainboard with this male to male USB jumper. Now I'm sure they had a good reason. The mainboard includes a very neighborly serial interface and has this little message to anyone digging through the internals. Altogether it's a lovely little device that really seems to encourage user intervention. That attitude persists in software too. Like here this hidden preference panel enables all sorts of goodies, SSH for instance. How many alarm clocks do you know that can change songs or set an alarm over a shell session? Probably a lot these days, but in 2007 this was pretty neat. Thanks to attacker friendly design users took the opportunity to integrate chumbies into all kinds of weird and wonderful projects. But what dates the chumbie as well as makes it really remarkable is that the chumbie at the hardware level was designed to run tiny, lightweight apps as clock faces. Apps that were all written in flash. Yeah, you remember flash? There weren't all just your usual flash games either. The catalog of clock faces is wide and diverse. Even my space updates. I'm not going to make the mistake of calling it the first, but I think it's notable that the chumbie app catalog predated the Android and iPhone app store revolution. This humble little squish clock hinted at a future that had yet to be fully realized and one that would come with consequences for consumers. But as with all things, the good times eventually stopped rolling. Despite a dedicated community and continued media interest, sales were poor and in 2012, Chumbie were forced to end manufacturing. With no money to maintain it, the chumbie service went dark. Consumers who were unwilling or unable to use offline firmware were left with the chumbie capable of displaying only one clock face. It wasn't until an engineer involved with the original project revived the services of paid subscription in 2014 that the chumbie was brought back to life again. Today, $3 a month gets you access to the entire catalog of flash apps for the device, accessible through the original chumbie interface online. Sure, it's a workable solution, but hardly ideal. In the three years, the chumbie service was dark, the internet changed considerably. Flash is no longer the popular medium of internet content it once was, and many of the old API's existing apps used are now deprecated. With no developers left to craft new flash apps, or fix the existing ones, there's little hope of a chumbie renaissance. The pebble began life much the same as the chumbie did. A small-scale geek gadget, it was created by Eric Michikovsky with help from Y-combinator, a startup incubator. The pebble kickstarted the era of the smartwatch with its week-long battery life and a wide variety of third-party watch faces and apps. A free and accessible developer community meant that anyone could try their hands at making software for the pebble, and the pebble software library quickly exploded. For a time, the pebble managed to gain real traction in the marketplace, amongst a sea of much better funded and marketed alternatives. But the profits simply weren't there. Pebble managed to ship several versions of the smartwatch before becoming insolvent in 2016, and transferring intellectual property and engineering staff to its competitor, Fitbit. Fitbit has agreed to support the existing Pebble consumer base into 2017, and recent upgrades to the Pebble app have removed the device's reliance on existing Pebble cloud services. Packers have already begun working towards a custom firmware for the Pebble, but who knows when or if that will materialize. The Pebble's future, as an obsolete device, is somewhat uncertain. Today, we use a wide range of devices requiring a centralized authority to provide software binaries and support. When this authority disappears, it can be impossible to get any use out of the product you paid good money for. For things like the pebble or the chumbi, the philosophy of user-directed control means even the oldest devices can still find new life with the help of the hacking community, but this is far from the norm. The original iPhone, for example, can still function as a phone or as a very slow web communicator, but it's an uphill battle to install software and continue to use the device thanks to Apple ending support for it. Comparatively, this HTC Dream, one of the very first Android phones, is still able to install apps via side-loving. As product functionality becomes more and more centralized and dependent on the servers of their producers, we start to blur the line between products being sold as self-contained experiences and just gateways to software as a service. Sure, the lifetime of something like a smartphone may be practically measured in months, whether by necessity or designed obsolescence, but what about products like home automation systems or simple appliances that have lifetimes that should be measured in decades? When those devices depend on the servers of their manufacturers, we enter a very strange place. The Revolt Hub, for example, was a home automation system, sold for the purpose of unifying disparate internet of things devices within the home. Users loved the ease of use and intuitive functionality of the system, and for a time, things were great. But it wasn't long after home automation giant Nest bought the company that they ended support for the device, leaving existing users out in the cold. With no revolved servers to hook into, the device was a $300 cylindrical paperweight. Things like this should give us pause any time we see a physical device that requires an app store or proprietary servers. Today, the Chumby as a product is no longer available, but there are still servers running to support it. Sony recently ended service for all of their products that used the Chumby system, and that lone standing Chumby engineer Dwayne is picking up the slack for them too. The final verse in the ballot of the Chumby appears to have been sung, but the beat goes on. Amazon has announced they will release the Echo Spot. It would appear that Amazon feels the time is right to revisit this odd format for an internet kiosk. It sure is reminiscent of the Chumby, with some important differences. Gone is the cute method of squeezing or tapping the top. These UI elements have been replaced by voice control and advanced touch features. But even though this device is not the same kind of product as the Chumby, we should remember the lessons the Chumby taught us. For products that are locked into an ecosystem or limit third party software distribution, we should think about who really decides what we can do with the device. Whether it adds value to our lives beyond the facilitation of e-commerce, and what happens when the service goes dark. The Echo Spot may have a long life ahead of it with Amazon's backing, without a way for users to stay in control of how the device is used, or add functionality at their whim, it can never hope to be useful beyond its officially supported lifespan. And it will never have a place in the hearts of its users like the Chumby or the Pebble. So long.