Every end marks a new beginning, but in technology, endings mostly come with a cautionary tale. The year 2025 proved that no product, however iconic, and no innovation, however ambitious, can be totally immune to becoming obsolete. The past year has been quite the reminder of just how unforgiving the tech landscape can get in taking down household names that had defined eras and experimental devices that barely passed the launch stage.
To the industry eye and early adopter, these closures, discontinuations, and pivots are more than nostalgic footnotes-they are signals of shifting priorities, evolving user behaviors, and lessons in execution. Some exits were strategic, others were forced by market realities, and a few by regulatory pressures. Here’s a look back at ten notable farewells from 2025 and the stories they tell about where tech is headed next.
1. The Era of TiVo’s DVR Comes to an End
The once-most revolutionary way to skip through commercials and control TV viewing, the TiVo DVR boxes, have vanished from store shelves after October 2025. While the company as such survived since then as a software provider for European smart TVs, it is sans the physical hardware of DVR. The move just points toward the dominance of streaming platforms and integrated DVRs from cable providers, leaving standalone units with waning relevance. Now, over 25 years later, the resilience of TiVo underlines just how strong habit can delay obsolescence. But as on-demand became the rule rather than the exception, its core value proposition began to erode. The quiet removal from the TiVo website marks the end of a product that once symbolized consumer control over broadcast media.
2. Microsoft kills Password Managers for Passkeys
In what many may consider a definitive push toward modern authentication, Microsoft retired its password manager in favor of passkeys. A passkey forms by locally combining public and private cryptographic keys to authenticate without traditional passwords. As Mashable Tech Editor Timothy Werth put it best, Passkeys are only stored on your devices, not a Microsoft server, and they also eliminate the kind of user errors that result in weak passwords. This move aligns with industry trends described by security experts-passkeys are resistant to phishing and server breaches. Still, warns Trevor Hilligoss, even passwordless systems aren’t completely impervious to cookie hijacking. The move by Microsoft speaks to a confidence in passkeys but at the same time, an awareness of passwords being a liability in today’s threat landscape.
3. The Short-Lived Humane AI Pin Experiment
The no-screen, AI-heavy $699 Humane AI Pin was meant to replace smartphones and folded in less than a year. The device overheated, had unreliable gesture controls, and the AI was often wrong, in what felt like a platform not solving a real consumer problem. As Francisco Geronimo from IDC summed up: Consumers don’t adopt technology because it’s futuristic; they adopt it because it seamlessly improves their daily lives. HP bought Humane for the patent and talent, not the hardware. The AI Pin’s demise underlines how tough it is to dislodge smartphones without incorporating functions that have become indispensable from them-a lesson future AI devices will have to learn.
4. Skype’s Final Sign-Off
After 22 years of reshaping the way people communicate, Skype retired in May 2025, with Microsoft migrating the users to Teams. Competitor pressure from Zoom, Face Time, and integrated workplace tools left Skype increasingly irrelevant after pioneering free VoIP calls and mainstreaming video chat. For businesses, it translated to data portability and integration into Microsoft 365 workflows. The retirement of Skype serves as a symbol of how once-dominant platforms need to evolve-or be absorbed-when user needs change in the direction of unified collaboration ecosystems.
5. Pocket Closes Its Tabs
Mozilla’s Pocket, one of the original read-it-later apps, hung it up in July 2025 after 18 years. Citing changing web habits, Mozilla folded some of the features it popularized with Pocket into Firefox, including better bookmarks and content recommendations. It allowed users until October to export saved articles; many have migrated to alternatives like Instapaper or Raindrop. Pocket’s demise illustrates how productivity tools of a niche nature often flounder when the core functionality is absorbed into browsers.
6. Zelle to Drop its Standalone App
In April 2025, Zelle shut down its standalone mobile app, citing that only about 2% of transactions happen outside an integrated banking app. This will consolidate its position inside the platforms of financial institutions that are its partners, hence smoothing the way service delivery is carried out. For those watching fintech, this move speaks to the broader trend of embedding payment services directly into existing ecosystems: reducing redundancy but leveraging trusted user interfaces.
7. Meta Stops Independent Fact-Checking, Introduces Community Notes
In a politically charged turn, Meta axed its formal fact-checking program in March 2025 for an X-esque crowdsourced community notes system. Mark Zuckerberg framed the change as a reduction of bias, saying, It’s gone too far in shutting out differing viewpoints. But the pivot raises a set of questions, from the efficacy of moderation to the balance the platform strikes between inclusivity and misinformation control. To social media strategists, it’s a case study in how the governance of platforms can be reshaped by the political climate and leadership priorities.
8. TikTok Creator Marketplace Rebrands
TikTok shut down its Creator Marketplace and shifted it into TikTok One-a new, advertiser-facing platform replete with generative AI tools, including AI avatars to promote products. Though that may streamline brand campaigns with greater ease, it begs a lot of questions for the creators who relied on the marketplace prior. It underlines the tension between monetization strategies at the platforms and creator autonomy in particular, as AI-generated content starts to compete with human influencers.
9. Shutdown of Mr. Deepfakes
In May 2025, notorious Mr. Deepfakes website hosting nonconsensual deepfake pornography was forced offline when a service provider cut support. The shutdown came weeks after the Take It Down Act passed into law, making the posting of nonconsensual intimate imagery a federal crime. This is a regulatory milestone representative of increased legal and infrastructural pressure on exploitative platforms but also of the growing recognition of damage caused by AI-enabled abuse.
10. Google Retires Dark Web Intelligence
The Google Dark Web Report, launched in 2023, which would notify users when their personal data surfaced in illegal online markets, will retire in February 2026. Feedback that this tool does not offer actionable guidance appears to be the reason for this move by Google. Now attention and resources will be given to features like Security Checkup and Password Manager. For a number of users, it caused no heartache to get rid of those alerts prone to inducing anxiety. Other people welcomed the visibility the tool gave them. As Pieter Arntz explained, awareness of the exposure will help them take pre-emptive measures to avoid further escalation, even though the data cannot be removed.
That closure epitomized the trend towards proactive integrated security tools instead of mere stand-alone monitoring. Thus, what proved to be constant throughout various goodbyes in the tech world during 2025 was that relevance is transient, and survival depends on their alignment with shifting user needs, changing regulatory landscapes, and ecosystem integration. Such closures are not goodbyes for industry professionals but signals of where innovation needs to refocus. As 2026 gains momentum, lessons from these goodbyes will show up in the strategies of a new wave of products gunning for space in our connected lives.
