Spring break travel and staffing shortages at the Transportation Security Administration have hit US airports with a devastating one-two punch this week, particularly at the security checkpoints. Personal accounts on social media have reported wait times of eight hours or more.

Understaffed airports across the US are now being assisted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The White House deployed ICE agents on Monday to help ease the staffing shortages caused by TSA officers who have quit or stopped showing up for work. TSA employees have already missed a full paycheck as a result of the partial government shutdown, and now they could miss a second.

Don’t be surprised if you get to the airport and see the security line trailing out into the parking lot. It’s easy to check security wait lines before you leave for the airport, so you know how long it will take to get from check-in to your gate. If you have spring break or other planned air travel coming soon, learn how you can check security line wait times so you can better plan your trip to the airport.

Check the official TSA app

The TSA maintains an app for mobile devices called MyTSA (iOS and Android) that lists security line wait times for airports around the US. The app is fairly basic and now includes a warning that “this website is not actively managed” due to the pause in federal funding, but it does include plenty of official TSA information about airline travel.

To check the wait times for specific US airports, tap the My Airports tab at the bottom of the app, then tap “Search Airports.” You can scroll through the alphabetical list of airports or type in an airport name or code in the search bar at the top.

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Tap through to the airport of your choice, and you’ll see the estimated security wait time at the top of the screen.

When I checked some of the major US airports Tuesday afternoon — Los Angeles (LAX), Chicago O’Hare (ORD), Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta (ATL), JFK in New York (JFK) and Ronald Reagan in DC (DCA) — most had relatively low wait times of 0 to 15 or 15 to 30 minutes. Only JFK had an estimate of 30 to 45 minutes.

Those estimates are a far cry from the two to four hours that airports are advising travelers to allow, but the times on the MyTSA app mostly matched the times listed on airport websites (see below). The exception was Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, which showed an estimate of 0-15 minutes on the MyTSA app, but slightly longer times on the airport website.

The MyTSA app also includes historical averages for each airport’s security line wait times by time of day.

Check the airport website

When I tested the TSA app, it didn’t list specific terminals at any airports. It only listed a time range for “All Terminals.” If you want that sort of detailed information, your best bet is to use the official airport websites. Most major ones now offer estimated security wait times. Some airports put those estimated times front and center on their websites; others require a little more exploration.

Most airport websites will break out the times for specific terminals. At some bigger airports, there’s often quite a disparity between the terminals. Here are the web pages for estimated security wait lines for some of the most frequently traveled airports in the US:

I wasn’t able to find security line wait times on the websites for two of the busiest airports: O’Hare (ORD) in Chicago and Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas. For those, you’ll need to use the TSA app.

Save your spot in the security line

Numerous airports now allow travelers to reserve a specific time in the security line. At SeaTac Airport in Seattle, you make a Spot Saver reservation and go to a specially marked entrance to the security checkpoint listed on your reservation. An employee scans the barcode you were emailed, and you’re ushered to the front. At SeaTac, you can be up to 15 minutes before or after your Spot Saver reservation, since airport timing is tough to estimate.

Here’s a list of some of those reservation sites. You can search for your airport name and “reserve security line spot” or something similar to see if your airport also has a program.

• Denver International Airport (DEN): DEN Reserve
• Orlando International Airport (MCO): MCO Reserve
• Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA): Spot Saver
• Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX): PHX Reserve
• Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP): MSP Reserve

There was a time when subscriptions felt like a novelty. Those were times of (digital) peace. A seamless payment feature on cool new apps that brought unlimited access (for the month). You paid for Netflix, and maybe Spotify, and that was usually about it.

Now, it’s streaming, cloud storage, fitness apps, editing apps, AI chatbots, random free trials you forgot to kill three weeks ago, and so much more. The subscription economy didn’t just grow — it exploded, with the blast radius covering nearly every corner of the digital space.

It has become so pervasive that there’s a real subscription fatigue, which feels even worse in 2026. People thought they weren’t spending a lot, but many clearly are. The system with recurring payments has become small (in price), automatic, and easy to forget.

People have begun treating $5.99 or $10.00 charges as harmless when, in reality, the charges are piling up into something uglier over time. Subscription hell isn’t just about greed or convenience. It is also about invisibility.

Why subscription fatigue feels worse than normal spending

You often think twice before making a big purchase, and sometimes that one-off payment can sting a little. But this feeling dissipates over time. Subscriptions do the opposite. You won’t notice as they are hidden, sitting quietly in a corner, billing you for small amounts that you’ll barely notice. So they end up feeling like a bigger drain than a single large purchase. While the pain is less dramatic, it’s always around.

While clearer cancellation rules can reduce the subscription traps, reports point out that behavioral habits like inertia and auto-renewal still keep people paying for services long after they’ve stopped caring. Visibility can help; people don’t need more guilt or another sermon about “being better with money.”

Making them all visible

Want to know how you can make your life easier? The answer is rather simple: round them all up. It’s like gathering your bills, but it’s more convenient with a smartphone. Once all your subscriptions live in one place, they stop feeling abstract and start looking like real financial patterns.

We’ve seen apps that track your bill payments and overall spending, but there are even dedicated apps to track all your subscriptions. These break down the walls that they hide behind, arranging them neatly for you to scrutinize.

And, you may not like what you see.

Apple offers a similar function on a basic level, allowing users to cancel any Apple Store subscriptions directly. But many of these recurring payments live outside of the App Store. So if you’re trying to clean house, you may need some professional help.

The best subscription apps are not the flashiest ones

Most people would turn away from bloated finance dashboards, so there is a real demand for simple, focused, and low-friction tools. So with that in mind, here are a few names that often pop up when talking about good subscription managers:

• Subpli first got our attention for being a free app, which is also ad-free. It is available without the mandatory sign-up. It offers renewal reminders, category filters, monthly and yearly totals, and even a guest mode.
• Bobby has been around for a while now and is easily one of the better-known options for iPhones. Its App Store listing highlights hundreds of built-in subscription templates, due-date notifications, and a clearer overview of fixed monthly costs.
• Rocket Money, on the other hand, takes a more aggressive, finance-first approach than the simpler tracker apps. But it pitches itself as a service that will identify subscriptions for you. So you won’t need to manually log recurring payments, while also giving you a concierge-style flow to help cancel some unwanted expenses. That makes it more appealing for people who want a broader money-management tool.
• Subby is another solid app if you want an Android-specific option. It is pretty straightforward, focusing on what matters, like tracking subscriptions and recurring bills in one dashboard, sending cancellation reminders before renewals, and supporting multiple currencies. There are even some extras like widgets and Google Drive backup for Pro users.

It’s even becoming a policy problem

The subscription fatigue isn’t just a personal finance issue anymore. In the UK, the government has already proposed tougher rules aimed at “subscription traps,” including clearer information before signing up, renewal reminders, a 14-day cooling-off period after free trials, and easier cancellation processes. The government says unwanted subscription costs UK consumers about £1.6 billion a year through nearly 10 million of the country’s 155 million active subscriptions that are deemed unwanted.

The consumer data paints a similarly familiar picture. Surveys backed by multiple other findings suggest that US adults spend about $91 a month on subscriptions, while nearly half have forgotten to cancel a free trial. Younger users are also more likely to fall into that trap.

Subscription hell isn’t going away, but it’s time to step up

Companies love the recurring-revenue model, and with consumers still hooked to the convenience, this model is here to stay. But the real question is whether users can claw back some control.

The answer is yes, and it’s only by making it harder on yourself. Taking small steps like checking Apple’s built-in subscription page, searching your inbox for renewal emails, and using a tracker app brings more power to you. Basic visibility is what subscription culture and modern apps are engineered to take away. So seeing the damage clearly might be the only real counter to it.

Photo credit: Red Bull Racing, Zero-G BTS stills by Denis Klero
By the end of the 2019 season, Red Bull Racing set numerous world records for fastest pit stops. However, as expected, the team was still eager to push itself to new heights, literally. They decided to put their skills to the test in a completely new setting, or more specifically, changing an F1 car’s four tires while floating around in the center of an aircraft.

They chose the 2005 RB1 chassis as their test car. Its narrower form and lightweight construction made it an ideal fit for the Ilyushin Il-76 MDK, a jet that typically conducts cosmonaut training and was receiving assistance from the Russian space program. The team arrived at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center just outside Star City, where the flight plans had been finalized and they were ready to go. The pilots would climb the plane at a sharp angle to around 33,000 feet before cutting power just as they reached the crest of the arc, allowing the jet to glide downward in freefall. Inside the airplane cabin, those moments spent in freefall provided the team with a whooping 22 seconds of weightlessness, a brief wonderful period in which everyone drifted around freely. To acquire as much quality time in as possible, the crew squeezed in 7 flights and around 80 of these freefall arcs over the course of many days.

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You have to remember that time was of the essence here; weightlessness lasts only a little while, so every second counts. Once the team was in place and the equipment was ready to begin, the usable window of time was reduced to roughly 15 or 20 seconds. To make matters even more difficult, a mock-up of the complete apparatus was constructed on the ground so that everyone could acquire a feel for the movements before flying to the skies. Consider how much harder it will be if you are not tethered to the floor.

As expected, things did not go smoothly from the start. Finally, it came down to basic physics. On the ground, the mechanics would press against the floor to offset the twisting force of the wheel cannons, but in mid-air, the anchor was removed, causing the mechanics to spin around rather than turn the nut. Add in the possibility that stray tools or wheels would float away and disrupt the following phase, and you have a formula for disaster.

Photo credit: Denis Klero
It didn’t take long for the team to realize that the only way to make this work was to divide their crew and have half of them work on the car from underneath while the other half worked from what seemed like the ceiling. The car would be inverted relative to half of the group, resulting in a balance of pushes and pulls. The only thing holding them down were their footstraps, so the mechanics had to flex their ankles to stay in place.

Photo credit: Denis Klero
The execution was completed in a relatively short period of time, with 16 crew members moving into predetermined places near the car, all of which were connected to a bespoke frame built to endure the severe ascent forces and float phases. They’d operate in a planned sequence, loosening the old nuts with the wheel guns before pulling the tires off and slipping the new ones in. To avoid spinning anyone out of control, the final tightening had to be steady and gentle. Every motion stayed choreographed or something would float out of reach.

Photo credit: Denis Klero
In the end, they did it, completing a full tire change in about 20 seconds, a real world record in the middle of the air, and, as if you needed to be reminded, the timing was all spot on, with the sequence matching the exact order of a track pit stop, the only difference being the constant adjustments required due to the lack of weight.
[Source]

• Two researchers have produced a clear nail polish that turns your nail into a stylus
• It should help solve issues with ‘zombie fingers’ and for folks with long nails
• It’s not yet ready for store shelves right now

If you love looking your best with long fingernails or have calloused fingertips from years of working as a musician or carpenter, you know how awkward touchscreens can be to use — and so might want to hear about this new nail polish that turns your nail into a stylus.

This coating was developed at Centenary College of Louisiana by student Manasi Desai and her research supervisor Joshua Lawrence (via LiveScience).

As Desai explained in a statement, “Our final, clear polish could be put over any manicure or even bare nails, which could help people with calluses on their fingertips too.” This means you can still enjoy your preferred nail art and use touchscreens, or if you don’t paint your nails normally, you can coat them in this polish without it being obvious.

Article continues below

Modern touch screens rely on a thin, imperceptible grid of wires carrying a subtle electrical charge. Because skin can slightly conduct electricity — unlike the glass of your phone screen — the electrical charge at the point your finger touches the screen sticks around on your fingertip.

When Jensen Huang told 30,000 attendees at GTC last week that the future data centre is a “token factory,” he was describing a world that a small Israeli startup has been quietly building toward for months. NeuReality, the Caesarea-based company behind the NR-NEXUS inference operating system, has appointed Shalini Agarwal, a product management director at Google Labs, as a strategic adviser charged with shaping how NR-NEXUS reaches enterprise buyers, according to a press release distributed on Monday.

The hire signals a shift in ambition for a company that began life designing custom silicon for AI inference and has since pivoted toward software that promises to turn fragmented GPU clusters into production-grade inference engines.

Agarwal brings roughly two decades of experience in product strategy across major technology companies. At Google Labs, she has directed product management for AI-focused initiatives. Before that, she spent nearly a decade at eBay, according to publicly available professional records, and holds a degree in computer science, electrical engineering, and management science from MIT. Her appointment is advisory rather than operational, but it places a recognisable Silicon Valley name alongside NeuReality’s existing leadership: co-founder and CEO Moshe Tanach and president Hiren Majmudar, a former GlobalFoundries and Intel Capital executive who joined in September 2024.

The timing is deliberate. On 12 March, NeuReality unveiled NR-NEXUS, describing it as a hardware-agnostic operating system for what the company calls AI factories. The platform disaggregates prefill and decode tasks across heterogeneous hardware, including GPUs, CPUs, and network interface cards, aiming to squeeze more useful work out of expensive accelerators that often sit partially idle. Beta customers are already running the software, according to the company, though NeuReality has not disclosed which organisations are in the programme.

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The product arrives at a moment when inference economics have become one of the most closely watched metrics in enterprise AI. Deloitte estimates that inference workloads accounted for half of all AI compute in 2025 and will reach two-thirds this year. Hyperscalers are responding with enormous capital expenditure, with Amazon projecting $200 billion in 2026 spending and Google budgeting between $175 billion and $185 billion, according to recent earnings disclosures. Yet much of that investment flows through a small number of vertically integrated stacks, leaving enterprises that want to run inference across mixed hardware with limited options.

That gap is where NeuReality is placing its bet. NR-NEXUS is designed to work across any CPU, GPU, or NIC, including NVIDIA’s forthcoming Vera Rubin architecture, and targets three buyer categories: neocloud providers, enterprises building their own inference capacity, and semiconductor vendors looking to offer a complete software layer atop their chips.

The company has raised approximately $70 million to date. A $35 million Series A in late 2022, led by Samsung Ventures with participation from OurCrowd and SK Hynix among others, was followed by a $20 million round in March 2024 anchored by the European Innovation Council Fund and existing investors. That EU backing positioned NeuReality as part of a broader European push to develop sovereign AI infrastructure, though the company’s engineering centre remains in Israel.

Agarwal’s advisory role appears focused on go-to-market strategy rather than product engineering, a recognition that building an inference operating system is only half the challenge. The other half is persuading infrastructure buyers, many of whom have deep relationships with NVIDIA’s own software ecosystem, that a startup’s orchestration layer is worth the integration effort.

Whether NR-NEXUS can gain traction will depend on execution in a market that is attracting well-funded competition. Modal Labs is raising at a reported $2.5 billion valuation. Baseten announced a $300 million round at $5 billion. Fireworks AI secured $250 million. Each approaches inference optimisation from a slightly different angle, but all are chasing the same fundamental opportunity: as AI moves from training to deployment, whoever controls the inference layer controls a growing share of the value chain.

For NeuReality, the appointment of an adviser with Google-grade product instincts may be a modest move on paper. In practice, it is a bet that the next phase of AI infrastructure will reward companies that can bridge the gap between silicon and the enterprises that need to run models at scale, efficiently, and across hardware they already own.

The BGIS 2026 Grand Finals will be the final stage of India’s biggest BGMI esports tournament happening this year. As the ultimate stage of the tournament, the Grand Finals events determine this year’s ultimate champion. The Grand Finals match will be held between March 27 and March 29, 2026, at the Chennai Trade Centre, making it a must-watch event for esports fans. It is a LAN event. That means all participating teams will play the game live on stage before an audience.

BGIS 2026 Grand Finals Format

The format of the BGIS 2026 Grand Finals is 16 teams, 18 matches over 3 days. 6 matches per day means that every match is critical. Therefore, consistency throughout the event will determine the champion.

Furthermore, the BGIS 2026 will feature 16 teams. 8 teams qualified through the Semi-Finals (March 12–15), and the other 8 teams made it through the Survival Stage (March 16–17). These teams will face each other in the finals scheduled from March 27 to 29, 2026.

Qualified Teams List

• Team Soul
• Orangutan
• Genesis Esports
• Learn From Past (LEFP)
• Reckoning Esports
• Revenant XSpark
• Victores Sumus
• Meta Ninza
• GodLike Esports
• Welt Esports
• Nebula Esports
• Myth Official
• Wyld Fangs
• K9 Esports
• Team Tamilas
• Vasista Esports

Prize Pool Breakdown

BGIS 2026 has a record-breaking ₹4 Crore prize pool, making it the biggest BGMI event so far. The champions will receive ₹1 Crore, while other teams will also earn significant rewards.

How to Watch BGIS 2026 Grand Finals Live

You can watch all BGIS 2026 Grand Finals matches live on the official Krafton India Esports YouTube channel starting at 2:30 PM IST. In addition, if you want to attend the event in person, tickets are available through Swiggy Scenes. BGIS 2026 was played across different stages before reaching the final round.

• The tournament started with the Grind from January 17 to February 1, 2026.
• After that, teams competed in the Semi-Finals from March 12 to 15 in Hyderabad, where the top teams secured their spots.
• Next, teams played the Survival Stage on March 16 and 17 in Hyderabad to earn the remaining slots.
• Finally, the top teams will compete in the Grand Finals from March 27 to 29 in Chennai to decide the champion.

The YC Fall 2025 startup, founded by a former Agicap GM and a former Apple Pay engineer, converts screen recordings of finance workflows directly into computer agents, no API integration required. 14 Peaks led the round, with Cohen Circle and 20VC participating.

The CFO’s software stack is both the problem and the constraint. Enterprise finance teams typically run on a combination of ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets, email, and banking platforms that were built at different times, by different vendors, for different purposes.

APIs between these systems are often incomplete or absent, which means finance teams absorb the integration gap themselves, manually downloading, reformatting, uploading, and reconciling data across systems to complete tasks that should be automated.

Zalos, a San Francisco and London-based startup that emerged from Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch, has raised $3.6 million on the thesis that the fix is not a new ERP but a new kind of agent that operates the existing stack the way a human analyst would.

The round is led by 14 Peaks, the Swiss venture capital firm, with participation from Cohen Circle and 20VC. The angel list is notable for its domain specificity: Mike Lenz, CFO of FedEx; Ian Sutherland, CFO of UK business bank Tide; Paul Forster, founder of Indeed; and others with backgrounds in finance software, accounts payable, and enterprise infrastructure. 

The technical approach is unusually direct. Rather than requiring API integrations or custom connectors, Zalos trains agents from screen recordings of the actual workflows finance teams run inside their existing tools.

A billing cycle recorded in NetSuite, a reconciliation process in SAP S/4HANA, or a month-end close in Sage becomes the training input. The agent then replicates that sequence, logging in with a username and password, navigating screens, entering data, handling two-factor authentication, without any modification to the underlying system.

Every action is captured in an auditable log, and the platform holds SOC 2 Part II certification. The avoidance of API dependency is the commercial insight: most enterprise automation efforts in finance stall because the APIs don’t exist, don’t expose the right data, or require months of integration work before anything runs.

The two founders arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. William Fairbairn, CEO, spent years as UK General Manager at Agicap, a CFO-focused software company valued at around $800 million, where he had hundreds of conversations with finance leaders whose consistent frustration was ERP implementation: projects that take more than a year, deliver modest upside when successful, and carry real career consequences when they go wrong.

Hung Hoang, CTO, spent five years at Apple, working on Apple Pay’s Buy Now Pay Later product and other AI initiatives, and became focused on computer agents partly through work at Twin, a lab focused specifically on the technology. The two met at Y Combinator and began building Zalos in October 2025.

The market positioning is clear but contested. OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s computer use capabilities both operate at the general-purpose layer, agents that can perform tasks across any interface.

Zalos is making a different bet: that finance operations require accuracy levels, audit trails, and domain-specific skills (Excel manipulation, ERP navigation, categorisation logic) that general-purpose agents cannot reliably provide. The company’s current customers are in midmarket and enterprise finance teams; it plans to expand into additional enterprise ERPs and on-premise systems with the new capital.

If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartridge, was as much a fixture of the era as beige tower cases and CRT monitors. Iomega, the company behind it, went from an obscure Utah outfit to a multi-billion-dollar darling of Wall Street in the span of about two years. And then, almost as quickly, it all fell apart.

The story of Iomega is one of genuine engineering innovation and the fickle nature of consumer technology. As with so many other juggernauts of its era, Iomega was eventually brought down by a new technology that simply wasn’t practical to counter.

The House That Bernoulli Built

Iomega was founded in Utah, in 1980, by Jerome Paul Johnson, David Bailey, and David Norton. The company soon developed a novel approach to removable magnetic storage based on the Bernoulli effect. The Bernoulli Box arrived in 1982, which was a drive relying on PET film disks spun at 1500 RPM inside a rigid, removable cartridge. The airflow generated by the spinning disk pulled the media down toward the read/write head thanks to the eponymous Bernoulli effect. While spinning, the disk would float a mere micron above the head surface on a cushion of air. If the power cut out or the drive otherwise failed, the disk simply floated away from the head rather than crashing into it—a boon over contemporary hard drives for which head crashes were a real risk. The Bernoulli Box made them essentially impossible.

Early Bernoulli Box drives offered 10 MB and 20 MB of removable storage at a time when a fixed hard drive might hold 30 MB. Bernoulli Boxes were never really aimed at the home market, but found a devoted following among power users—publishers, CAD users, and anyone who needed to move serious amounts of data between machines. Sales were strong, and by 1983, Iomega hit the stock market running with an initial public offering raising $21.7 million.

As hard drive prices continued to dive over time due to economies of scale, though, the expensive Bernoulli Box became a less attractive proposition even despite its portability and greater storage. By 1986, Iomega had sold over 70,000 units and more than a million cartridges, but sales had peaked. The company had racked up serious debt and slow sales left the company saddled with undesirable inventory that wouldn’t move. Upgrades came thick and fast as Iomega pushed to keep up with the rapidly-changing storage market, which was enough to keep Iomega relevant if not flourishing. By 1993, the largest Bernoulli carts could hold 230 MB if you had a suitable model drive to read them, though the expensive drives mostly remained the domain of large corporate and government users.

Zipping To The Top

The next phase for Iomega saw the company reach its greatest peak. The Zip drive launched in March 1995, and aimed to be a more affordable solution to high-capacity removable storage. It hit the market with 100 MB cartridges priced at $19.95 each, in an era when the standard 3.5” floppy could only hold 1.44 MB. For anyone regularly shuffling large files between home and office, or backing up a hard drive that might only hold a few hundred megabytes, it was a great leap forward. The iconic external model became popular in businesses, universities, and homes, and before long, OEMs like Apple, Dell, and Gateway started offering internal Zip drives as factory options. It became as close to a defacto standard for removable storage as a proprietary storage solution could ever be.

When the Zip drive hit, the sales numbers were staggering. Iomega’s revenue leapt from $362 million in 1995 to $1.2 billion in 1996. At its peak, Iomega was valued at nearly $7 billion. The company’s stock became a darling of investors addicted to massive gains. For a time, they appeared to be an unstoppable tech juggernaut, hanging on to a sizable chunk of the removable storage market without any obvious competitors on the horizon.

Iomega chased the success of the Zip drive with the even higher-capacity Jaz drive, which could store 1 GB in early models on hefty cartridges that contained rigid drive platters not dissimilar from those in contemporary hard disks. They were a great solution for power users moving what was then considered a lot of data, but their higher price meant they were never a consumer-grade darling like the cheaper Zip drive itself. The later “Clik” or “PocketZip” drive came along later in 1999, with a diminutive form factor and 40 MB disks. It too failed to gain the foothold of Zip, however, with a low install base limiting the usefulness of the removable format.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. A serious blow to Iomega’s reputation came from its own engineering. Some Zip drives developed a fault that came to be known as the “Click of Death.” The term referred to a clicking sound of the drive heads bouncing off their end stops when they became misaligned. In extreme cases, misaligned heads in a bad drive could damage disks, which would then damage the next drive they were used in. It was a mark against the technology that was supposed to be robust enough to be used as mobile storage. A class action lawsuit was filed in September 1998 and eventually settled in 2001, but the reputational damage remained.

Downfall

It wasn’t the Click of Death debacle that doomed Iomega, though. It was merely the march of competing technologies that made its storage solutions less attractive over time. CD-R drives, which had been expensive curiosities in the mid-1990s, became dirt cheap just a few years later. By 2000, blank CD-Rs were retailing for as little as fifty cents each, and they held 650 MB a pop— more than six times the capacity of a Zip disk, on media that cost a fraction of the price and didn’t require proprietary hardware. They were so cheap, the write-once nature almost failed to matter. It was far more attractive to many customers to just burn another cheap CD that anyone could read than to go out and buy a Zip drive, an expensive 100 MB disk, and hope that whoever you were sending the disk to also had a drive that could read it. The CD-RW followed soon enough after, and writable DVDs would then take storage capacities well into the multi-gigabyte range. Zip drives jumped to 250 MB and then 750 MB, while the Jaz line was upgraded to 2 GB, but by and large, consumers were choosing writable optical discs over Iomega’s proprietary solutions.

USB flash drives would then prove to be the final nail in the coffin. They were compact and cheap, and required no special hardware whatsoever. You could just plug them into any USB port on any computer and your files were right there. They too would become cheap enough to be disposable, in a way that Iomega’s bespoke drives and mechanically-complicated cartridges would never be.

By 2002, the Jaz drive was dead, and the Zip drive followed soon after in 2003. It was CD burners that did the most damage, with the leap to DVD and the rising prominence of the USB drive that promised there would be no way back for removable magnetic cartridge media. These solutions were far less mechanically complex and a lot cheaper in terms of cost per megabyte.

Iomega was, at this point, a lumbering corporation with hundreds of employees, a dying product line, and a bleak future ahead. The company pivoted to other storage solutions, like selling rebranded optical disc drives, external hard drives, and network-attached storage devices. However, none of these products were particularly unique or competitive, as Iomega went from dominating a specific niche to fighting in a market segment where it had no particular competitive advantage. They became a small, sickly fish in a big pond, competing against dozens of other established storage brands that were far more renowned in their fields.

The end came in April 2008, when EMC Corporation announced plans to acquire Iomega for $213 million — a tiny fraction of the company’s peak valuation. EMC saw lingering value in Iomega’s small office and home office customer base, and kept the brand alive for a few years, slapping the Iomega name on NAS boxes and media adapters. These weren’t iconic products unique to the brand, so much as middle-of-the-road options that had no technical edge or promise to speak of. In 2013, EMC formed a joint venture with Lenovo called LenovoEMC. Iomega’s remaining products were rebadged accordingly, and the brand effectively ceased to exist. There was no reason to continue Iomega, because what it was built to do was simply no longer relevant in the modern marketplace.

The Iomega story is, in many ways, the archetypal cautionary tale of the consumer technology industry. In the 1990s, the company identified a genuine need—affordable, portable, high-capacity removable storage. It nailed this brief with the Zip drive, which propelled the company’s fortunes into the stratosphere. However, the entire business hinged on a product category that had a shelf life measured in years. Iomega simply couldn’t hold on to its edge in removable storage against so many competitors that were both cheaper and more practical. It’s the same death that Blockbuster died—fail to see the future, and you will inevitably succumb to it.