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Killed by the Smartphone

Technology · Arcade · ~47 seconds

The gadgets the phone replaced — camera, camcorder, MP3 player, GPS, calculator — shot down Space-Invaders style as their sales collapse, year by year.

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The story

For about a decade, the smartphone quietly ate an entire shelf of gadgets. The standalone camera, the camcorder, the MP3 player, the handheld GPS, the pocket calculator — one by one, a single device made each of them redundant. This chart stages that as a game of Space Invaders: each gadget descends in formation and gets shot down in the year its sales collapsed.

As each device dies, its combined-sales score is tallied and it drops onto a kill-list at the bottom of the screen. The earliest casualties fall first; by the end, the smartphone has cleared the board — a playful arcade retelling of one of the fastest waves of creative destruction in consumer technology.

Sources: Industry shipment figures by device category (CIPA for cameras; IDC and industry estimates for the rest). Each "death year" marks the peak-to-collapse of that category's sales.