22 Tech Products From The 2000s Pulled Off Every Shelf In AMERICA

There was a charger hanging out of every outlet in the house. A flat television on the wall for the first time. A laptop bag by the front door, a drawer of unlabeled discs, and the quiet certainty that the future had finally shipped. And it had. Nobody mentioned that a fair amount of it shipped with a fault serious enough to bring it straight back to the factory. This is the list of 22 real products from the 2000s that got recalled, taken off the shelves, or forbidden outright. Not flops. Not things that simply went out of fashion. Every single entry here has a date and a paper trail behind it: a Consumer Product Safety Commission notice, a voluntary recall by the maker, or a federal court order telling a company to stop selling. Some of it you will remember straight away. The grey business laptop that millions of people carried, until the batteries inside it turned into the largest recall the electronics industry had seen and three airlines started refusing them at the gate by name. The two-wheeled machine that was going to rebuild our cities, until every single unit ever sold was called back in one announcement. The music player so thin that people assumed the first one they saw was an empty display model, carrying a recall notice that has still never been closed. And a lot of it you have almost certainly forgotten. A 27-inch tube television that could catch fire because a child pushed a crayon through a broken power button. A projector toy that threw clay pigeons across your living room wall and melted while you held it. A radio-control flying saucer sold off a shopping channel, with a charger cord that could set itself alight overnight on a kitchen counter. A children's DVD player in cartoon colours whose battery packs could burst while charging on a bedside table. A thumb drive small enough to lose in a pocket, recalled because it could burn the fingers holding it. Then there are the ones nobody confiscated for being dangerous at all. A DVD player that became the hottest box in Circuit City because of a hidden menu, and got wiped off eBay for exactly the same reason. A little grey picture-improving box that a federal judge ordered off the market. A games console that a court formally forbade its maker from selling, while millions of them sat happily under televisions across the country. An email gadget so addictive that half of Washington was carrying one, two years into a court case that could have switched the entire network off. What makes the 2000s different is that this was the decade when the paperwork caught up. Lithium-ion batteries went into everything we owned before anybody fully understood them. Store brands put flat screens into bedrooms at prices the big names would not touch. Patents turned into injunctions aimed at products already sitting in people's homes. Every corner was being cut by somebody, and nobody had worked out yet which corners mattered. We counted down from 22. Number one is the one that got both: recalled by the million, then banned by name. If one of these was in your house, say which one in the comments, and tell us whether the notice ever actually reached you. A like helps more people find the list, and subscribe if you want the rest of this decade dug up.