The Top April Fools Tech Jokes Episode

make me upset too. So instead I thought I would try something else. And I debated about recording a show about some sort of fake technology, like I don't know, perpetual motion device or something. But instead of all that, I decided, let's just look back on some of the best and worst April Fools Joe in the tech sector. Now, this is not the first time tech Stuff has looked

at April Fools. There are episodes from two thousand nine with Chris Pallette and two thousand thirteen with Lauren Vogelbaum that covers some of the famous stories, so you should check out those episodes to learn of earlier examples of tech Tomfoolery. I'll be focusing on more recent jokes, hoaxes, and scams, and sometimes outright lies for today's episode. If you follow tech news, you're probably aware that many tech journalists detest April Fools Day with a passion that burns

brighter than a thousand exploding suns. Part of the reason is that it can sometimes be difficult to separate the fact from the fiction, as lots of tech companies love to indulge in some silly antics on that day. Part of the problem is that not everyone knows how to tell a joke, and sometimes the jokes aren't particularly funny. Reporting on unfunny jokes or what you suspect to be

a joke can be a real pain. So I'm sure a few of those journalists maybe sour pusses who don't find any humor and fake product announcements or press releases that are just elaborate hoaxes. Personally, I still find a good April Fool's joke to be really entertaining, but then I don't have to report on the news. With all that in mind, it's time to dive right in. Here are some of the big jokes from the past couple of years, starting with That's the year when Apple announced

a new gaming console called the I Play. Johnny I've himself introduced it in a video. Apple explained that the elegant design and simple form factor made the device a beauty. It connects seamlessly to television systems, and it plays the only video game that really matters, Angry Birds. That's all it plays, according to Apple, is the only game you need, and so the I Play would only feature Angry Birds. Now. I love this joke because it poked fun at something

we had all noticed. Angry Birds was everywhere. You could play it on your smartphone, on your tablet, video game consoles, even set top boxes like the Roku allowed you to play Angry Birds. So of course Apple would make a game console product, and of course you could only play Angry Birds on it. And of course, Apple, the company that people like me criticized for telling us what we

really want, would state that this was enough. My favorite line from the video reveal was when I first told you about the I Play, I was excited, and nothing has changed. They also mentioned that you could get the new I Play, the I Play for S, and the I Play five g all at launch, So it was fun seeing Apple reflect on their cultural image and make some jokes about it. Google always does a few things

for April Fool's Day. In two thousand thirteen, the company announced that Google was going to shut down YouTube because the winning video had finally been found In a video posted on YouTube, The company revealed that YouTube wasn't actually a video hosting site, It was a contest for the best video. The joke claimed that YouTube would shut down at midnight and a team of judges consisting of movie critics, YouTube celebrities, and people who left lots of comments would

gather together and debate which video was best. Then the service would come back online in twenty three after having watched all of videos ever submit YouTube and feature the winning video and nothing else. I thought this was also a pretty funny joke, something no one would really take seriously, and something that just folkes fun at the cultural phenomenon that YouTube had become. But some people did take it seriously and we're worried that all their videos were going

to be a race forever. Of course, that didn't happen. Google has a lot of divisions besides YouTube, and a lot of them will get involved in April Fool's Day. So Another one in two thousand thirteen was Google Maps, which introduced treasure mode. Now. In this prank, Google claims that it had uncovered treasure maps from Captain Kidd himself that included codes and riddles that would lead to treasure.

Google claimed it had scanned most of the maps and that using your smartphone or tablet along with other devices, you could uncover clues. Now, some clues would require you to hold your phone up to sunlight so that the camera could detect the light and then you would see where X marks the spot. Others would require you to get together with groups of people and you'd all put your phones and tablets together like a puzzle, and then

the X would be revealed that way. In reality, you could view Google Maps as if it were an antique map from the eighteenth century, which by itself was pretty cool. Sadly, however, there was no booty to be found. Believe me, I looked. Gmail joke was Gmail Blue, which was a jab at Microsoft for Windows Blue, which was meant to create small updates to Windows eight Gmails. Blue update asked the question, how do we redesign and create something while keeping it

exactly the same. It did, however, turn Gmail blue for a day, So there's that. Now, this is an example of one company taking a pot shot at another using the April Wouls Day explanation as sort of a shield. And it's not the only example I have in this list, so we'll come up to some other ones a little bit later. And of course the main branch of Google had to introduce something new as well. In this case

it was Google Knows. It claimed to introduce aromas to your computing experience with more than fifteen million scent to bytes of nasal information. Now you could explore the web and indulge your sense of smell along with your other information and the search results. So if you were searching for flowers, your computer would emit the lovely smells of roses,

for example. Now Google said it could use the photons from light sources and the computer itself to organize molecules properly to stimulate the smell, and of course the entire project was in beta. You could also use your smartphone to find out what that weird smell you were detecting actually was. Clearly all of this is science fiction. You couldn't really do that. Right now, But who knows, Maybe we'll get our sense of smell in the future and

be able to search very, very carefully. Meanwhile, Twitter announced it was going to start charging for vowels. If you compose messages without vowels, you could use Twitter t W T t R and that would remain free. Vowels would come at a premium service at five dollars a month. Why, however, would remain free of charge since it's only a sometimes vowel.

Then you have Tashiba, which announced a three and a half giga Hurts twelve or processor gaming device with four gigabyte RAM graphics processing card and infrared sensors as a competitor to the Connect. They didn't name it in their press release, but that was essentially the message. Now. According to the specs page on this fake device, it could scan your room fifty seven thousand, six d forty two times per second to make sure your gaming experience was

as accurate as possible. It was called the Sheba Sphere. Now I would let families play games together like Contract Negotiation, where you pretend to sit at a table and argue over contractual clauses, or the Travel Simulator, which required you to take off your shoes and belt as if you were going through airport security. Mostly the video existed to make fun of motion control systems like the Connect and suggesting that perhaps it wasn't as compelling an experience as

the companies would want you to believe. But if you ever wanted to pretend like you were having contractual meeting with your loved ones, I guess that would be the way to go. All right, this one might be my favorite. From two thousand thirteen, Netflix created a special category for

the day. That category was movies featuring an epic Nicolas Cage meltdown, which, to be fair, it's pretty much every Nicholas Cage movie ever made, and fortunately Netflix had a lot of them saved up so that you can actually watch them. The service also offered other joke categories, like movies that are in English but still requires subtitles, an

example being trained Spotting. Since then, Netflix has experimented with playful categories, particularly those involving characters from Netflix original series. One of my favorites is watched by Buster Bluth, character from Arrested Development, which includes choices like hands of orlock hook and Freaks and Geeks, which makes a lot of sense if you've ever watched the show and you know

the character or a bust blue. Meanwhile, Hulu advertised fake shows that were featured within other television series, such as Rural Juror, which was a fake TV series featured in the show thirty Rock, or You Heard with Pard, which was featured in Parks and Recreation. Video, on its hand, acknowledged that the power of cat videos was overwhelming, and so had become vimeow for the day instead of vimo.

All your cat videos would now belong in one place, without the distractions of other videos that feature different life forms or subject material. I'm actually kind of amazed they didn't stick with that strategy. Skypes, April Fool's joke was introducing a new feature called Skype in space. You see, we had become used to the idea of making Skype calls from across the world, but what about when we

happen to be across the galaxy from each other? So Skypes new program would allow people to beam conversations across vast reaches of space, and it would have useful features like an auto rotate function, so that as you float around in microgravity, the screen would always stay right side up from your perspective. The biggest challenge, according to Skype, was that the speed of light was still a limiting factor, meaning that if you're really far away from the other person,

there's gonna be some delays in your conversation. Virgin Airlines announced that it was going to introduce a glass bottomed plane for April Fools. Now, that way you could actually watch the world pass beneath you as you saw at thirty thousand feet. Got a feeling that would have had a negative effect on folks who already find air travel stressful. And another company, a big one that routinely makes great

April Fools jokes, is Thinking. In two thousand thirteen, one of those jokes was the play Dough three D printer. It supposed they could connect to an iPad and that's where you would create your three D too signed before sending it to be printed in play Do. It even featured three extruders for the play do giving you up to three colors to build with simultaneously, which is pretty impressive compared to actual three D printers on the market,

many of which are limited to a single color per printing. Now. Sadly this never became a real product, unlike some of the jokes that have come out of Think Geek in the past. The other Think Geek fakes in included the Bain Mask walkie talkies, which would change your voice to sound like the Batman villain, or the Eye of Salon desk lamp, which I actually want for myself, though the price tag was pretty hefty on that fake product, so if they ever make a real one and it's not

ridiculously expensive, I'll buy it. Also in two thousand thirteen, Star Trek alumnus and Internet superstar George t Kay got into the by announcing he had been cast as a Jedi Master in the upcoming Star Wars film. That's a shame that we won't get to see Sulu wield a lightsaber the same way he handled a foil in the

iconic Star Trek original series episode The Naked Time. That's the one where he ends up getting affected by this stuff that makes an act of crazy and he believes himself to be a musketeer and then he buckles everyone's swashes. It would have been interesting to see the Jedi version of this character, and of course having a crossover uh Star Trek and Star Wars character or actor at any rate would have been a lot of fun. But it

was just a joke. Now, perhaps the award for least funny joke in two thousand thirteen, at least for folks who live in the United States, goes to the National Turk Online newspaper. The news site reported that an eight point seven magnitude earthquake had hit Washington, d C. And that many famous landmarks were destroyed or were burning, and that President Obama had been evacuated to Norad. I should probably do a full episode on Norad sometime. That would

be a pretty cool topic. At any rate, this entire story was reported in a very straightforward way, including a bit about a tsunami affecting Halifax, Nova Scotia, And at the very end of the article, which had no indication that it was actually a joke, there was this sentence and it's this is verbatim the way it was written on the site. You can actually go and read it right now, and it's written the same way. This is

a April fool. Thank you for your understanding exclamation point. Now, maybe the whole thing is much funnier in Turkish, but on the face of it, this sounds more of what I'd like to call a fib than a joke, and it reminds me of some sites that do the stuff all the time, every single day. But that's another podcast. I could do a full episode just talking about fake news sites that claim to be satire but in fact just report fake news in a way that doesn't indicate

that it's a joke. Uh, something that I find really irritating. Kind of curious what you guys think. All right, Well, that brings us up to two thousand and fourteen. Let's talk about some of the jokes that came out that year. There were some big themes in There were a lot of things about wearable technology. There were a lot of things about video games, and obviously I just picked picked in a few from the various sources there were so many.

And that's part of the reason I think a lot of people are getting sick of April Fool's Day in the tech world is that everyone tries to get in on this, and not everyone does a great job of it. So Microsoft made me both wins and smile simultaneously April Fool's Day, and that kind of hurt and away. If you logged into office dot com and opened up a new document or a new spreadsheet, you were greeted by

an old friend. That's right, Clippy, the helpful paper clip that nobody liked, pops up and tries to ruin your day by suggesting what to do next. It was amusing to see, but still just as irritating as ever. Google Chrome's big joke was that it would now have an automatic emoji translation service so that you could use it when viewing websites. Now why you didn't have to worry about what a site is actually trying to say or

how it was trying to say it. You didn't have to worry about misinterpreting it because you could get the whole gist of it just from a winky face or a shy snowman or some other emoji. The whole concept was explained in a video demonstrating how the team was able to boil down complex concepts into a series of simple images. They showed how everything from videos, subtitles to medical journals could be emogified. This is another one of those that I think is is pretty cute. It's worth watching.

Not necessarily laugh out loud funny, but you know, I'm sure you'll crack a smile. Maybe YouTube's big joke was claiming that it was responsible for all those viral videos you know and love or hate or are indifferent to anyway. A video explained how YouTube writers meticulously crafted every viral video from jankat to skateboard fails to GANDAM style and everything in between. So everything was supposedly orchestrated from scratch and created by YouTube as opposed to submitted to YouTube

and then just went viral. And they even gave us a sneak peek at trends that were supposed to become big in that included clocking, which was the next generation of crazy physical activities like planking. Now in this case, clocking is when you go to a location and hold your arms up like you're an analog clock, and then you move your arms so that they are in line with the correct time, and you keep correct time for as long as you can. According to the video, the

longer you do it, the funnier it is. Other trends that they said were in store for us included cake bumping, which is just casually knocking cakes off of tables, uh Wolf mask t ball, the Harlem Shake again, and geology another amusing video. I think check that one out to All of these that I mentioned are still up, so you can actually go back and find them if you miss them the first time. Now, Google Maps had something that I ended up playing with pretty much on and

off all day on April Fools Day last year. It was a new feature that allowed you to explore cities while tracking down and capture ring Pokemon monsters, or as Bernie Burns of Rooster Teeth refers to them, pokemons, which I think is my preferred way of designating them. But as you discovered the little critters, you could click on them and then add them to your Poka decks, which

I guess is your index of pokemons. You didn't have the ability to actually hold spontaneous Pokemon battles with nearby folks, unfortunately. It was really just kind of looking around to see which Pokemon monsters you were missing from your Poka decks and capturing them. Uh, Larger cities had a lot more of them than smaller cities. Tokyo had a ton of them. As I recall, I never collected all of them, so

I did not catch them all. Very sad. Now, to wrap up the Google extravaganza for the Google Plus social network added an Auto Awesome photo Bomb feature. So Google Plus has this Auto Awesome feature that will automatically enhance pictures for you. Then you can choose whether or not

they get posted to your account. So, for example, I took a picture in a snowy field one day when it was snowing overhead, and the Auto Awesome feature created an animated layer of snowflakes falling down my actual picture, which was kind of cool. In this case, it was an Auto Awesome photo bomb feature which would insert an image of Baywatch and Night Riders star David David Hasselhoff into the photo, so you get David hassel Off photo bombing you. I had a friend who had this show

up and it looked hilarious. Never got any of my pictures to do this, though, so I was a little left out. Uh So, David, if you're listening, um, maybe we can get a photo together sometime. Canadian airline west Jet announced it was converting to metric time with a video. Metric time, according to WestJet, includes million minutes and keylow minutes, and they and included a simple conversion formulas that you can be as accurate as possible, which involved multiplying by

a certain number, subtracting another number, converting it over. It was ridiculous, and you know, I'm using Perhaps this might have been my favorite video. The apparel company Bnobo's entered a new line of shirts with Internet connectivity through what they called Wi Fiber, which already was cute, but the video really made me chuckle a couple of times. It's supposedly linked your clothing to an artificially intelligent personal assistance, so sort of like Siri or Cortana or the Google

Voice assistant, and I guess that one doesn't have a name. Anyway, this particular personal assistant would get a little crazy or do things that you didn't necessarily wanted to do. It could do some useful stuff like alert you to the temperature outside and even suggest if you need to put on extra layers of clothings that you stay warm, but it could do crazy things too. In the demo they show, the shirt ends up sending a Facebook message to the guy.

The guy who's wearing the shirt, it sends it to his ex girlfriend, which he then says, why would you do that? And then it likes the message on Facebook and he just totally loses it and it's pretty amusing. It's actually a really funny video. I recommend checking out the Benobo's video on tech. It's called tech style, as in tech and style put together as instead of textile. You gotta see the whole joke. And I actually own the same shirt that's in the video, which I thought

was kind of funny. Um. It does not, however, talk to me or do crazy things. Highly recommend checking that one out. It was one of the funnier ones of the year, and wearable tech, like I said, was not surprisingly a huge topic in jokes. Fourteen Toeshiba, HTC and Samsung all announced smart gloves complete with different gesture user interface aces. Some of them had screens. Uh. Very predictable

considering how popular wearable technology was getting in tween. In fact, I'll be shocked if the day you're listening to this, if we don't have at least three or four examples of silly wearables as jokes, I'll be completely shocked. Probably augmented reality too. I'm gonna go ahead and take a wild stab at that. With things like the hollow lens and uh magic Leap coming out, I'm i imagine we're going to see some really crazy augmented reality jokes. Back in though, I g n ran a video that got

some gamers hopes up. They claimed that the video game titan Fall, in which you compete in uh in military style games with other players who all of whom are playing as pilots who can control enormous mex so you run around in these games. You can either play as your pilot who can jump really far and shoots guns and stuff, or you can get into a mech whenever the max land whenever you can call one in and

now you're a giant robot that can shoot stuff. You're still the pilot in sight, so you can actually eject from the robot. It's pretty cool concept, and it was really popular before it finally kind of died down. But they said that they were introducing new downloadable content that inserted Optimist Prime from the Transformers series into video gameplay,

which would have been incredible. The idea of getting someone as iconic a figure as iconic is Optimist Prime incorporated into a an independent video game like that would have been a lot of fun. But if you clicked on the headline and you watched the video that was supposedly footage of this. It was purposefully an amateurish representation of Optimist Prime in the video game, which pretty much revealed

it was a joke. If you paid close attention and saw that the link at the end was to I g N, then you would know it was a joke. But uh yeah, it was not a very um accurate representation of what Optimist Prime looks like, and his truck form also looked pretty rough. However, it was a really cool idea that got a lot of people's hopes up when they first saw the headline. Now, I'm not sure if the next video game, April Fool's Joke I want to talk about is really a joke or more of

a taunt. So there's this guy named Phil Fish, and gamers know who I'm talking about. He's famous or infamous, depending upon your point of view, and he's the developer behind the independent video game Fez, which is a really innovative, fun video game, and he had all but vanished after announcing that Fez two, which was long in development, had been canceled. He kind of had a pretty famous the

debate argument meltdown. All depends upon whom you ask in uh In in two thousand and fourteen and kind of disappeared, so he had shut down his Twitter account, made it private so people couldn't read it unless they were already on his list. But then he in on April first, two thousand fourteen, he turned it public again. He went on Twitter and he said that he was back and Fez two was back in development. Not long after that he disappeared again, went back to private. So it was

clearly a joke. He did not actually mean it, and a lot of video gamers were very sad. Another video game joke that might have gone out with without full approval was a message that came from e A's Frostbite three engine Twitter feed. So this is specifically a video

game engine developed by e A called Frostbite three. It has its own Twitter handle to tweet out news about it, and on that day, on April one, the tweet went out that the company had decided to bring the engine to the Wii U console because it was actually the most powerful console among the current game systems. So the actual tweet read Frostbite now runs on the hashtag we you since it is the most powerful gin for platform.

Our renderer is now optimized for Mario and Zelda. So essentially this was a little backhanded comment meant to poke fun at Nintendo and say, ha ha ha, look how underpowered their console is. And even if they could use us, what would they use us for these little kiddie games like Mario and Zelda. That seemed to be the implication from that message, and a lot of people called attention to it and said it was mean spirited and misplaced,

and apparently e A ended up agreeing. They deleted that tweet, and the c o oh, the chief operating officer of e A, Peter Moore, actually went online and apologized for that tweet. So sometimes jokes don't go the way you thought they would. Also, in the Right for a House of Cards, bo Willman leaked a page of script from the House of Cards third season, which had not come

out yet. In the leaked page revealed that Kevin Spacey's character Francis Frank is addressing the citizens of the United States on the fourth of July when aliens attack, and very slowly that transforms frank speech into a copy of the one from Independence Day. If only uh, that would have been a lot of fun. Also really weird, but I mean, we're watching Frank play various games like a like a The Monument game on his uh mobile device, so maybe we would see something more ridiculous like that

pop up. Probably not. Netflix ended up releasing videos of reverse footage of food that was cooking. I remember showing this to Matt Frederick here at the office and he actually had it on in the background for way longer than any human being should ever have. One of these videos, so you can actually watch food uncooked because they shot footage of bacon cooking in one and I think of

rotisserie chicken cooking in another. Then they reversed the footage and it lasted a really long time, like forty minutes or more, and you could watch as the food would uncook over time and become raw meat. It's just as enticing as it sounds now. Going back over to Think Geek, we had the Mr Beard Beard Machine, which supposedly could bond hair to your face, giving you the beard or mustache you always wanted. With the touch of a button.

You would just pick the style you would want and insert the appropriate B cup, which I imagine had DRM on it, similar to curing cups, and you're all set Each cup had the picture of whatever hairstyle you wanted for your face. They also introduced the Nerf Nuke, which was a NERF weapon that could launch up to eighty NERF darts simultaneously in all directions. It was the last resort weapon. Other joke products included a Rosetta stone kit for Klingon and a dark mage l ed spell casting staff.

Those were equally bogus, but a few joke products found their way into Think Geek's actual store in two and this does happen on occasion where I think Geek will use April Fool's Day, not just to post jokes, but the kind of test out ideas that maybe they're not entirely sure there's an audience for. In this case, it included the Flux Capacitor charging station that you could plug into a car's twelve vault power adapter. It would look like the Flex capacitor from Back to the Future and

then you would plug in USB cords there. Or how about the dos ken in Stein, which would convert boring old beer cans into beer stein's temporarily at any rate. You would slide them into this handle that would look like a steinhandle complete with ornate stein cap that became a real thing too. Or how about the magical Unicorn Drinking Horn, a drinking vessel made to look like a unicorn horn. All of those were presented as jokes, but the response was positive enough for Think Geek to make

real versions. Still waiting for Mr Beard, however, and perhaps the cruelest joke of two thousand fourteen, This one actually has some stiff competition. Here's a couple of different jokes that I think might have hit the audience particularly hard. One of them came from TV Addict, which published a story claiming Netflix was reviving the short lived but beloved

science fiction series Firefly. Brown Coats across the Internet briefly rejoiced as they heard that Captain Mal and his crew would return to their ship the Serenity, before finding out it was all a joke, or if you prefer a lie. Of course, gamers might argue that Game Games Radars fake review for Half Life three should make that list because Halfway three has been highly anticipated for years with no

sign of it on the horizon. Or how about Game rants fake announcement that BioWare had just announced Knights of the Old Republic three in all of these cases, these are properties people are very much aware of. They want another version of it, they want another chapter in these stories, they want the ability to tell the story the way it was intended in the case of Firefly, which got

canceled before it could really go anywhere. And so sometimes these jokes just seemed to be a little maybe mean spirited, where you're just saying something that's not true, which I would argue is different from a joke, But maybe that's just me. And you know, after doing this episode, I think I see why some of my favorite tech journalists get tired of April Fool's Day. For every truly amusing idea that comes out, there's at least two or three clunkers.

Some might barely climb above the level of mildly amusing, and only if you ever reach the point of being actually funny enough to coax out a chuckle. But I still look forward to the day each year just to see which companies get creative and indulge in some silly behavior. So I'm curious what you think about April Fool's Day, dear listeners. Do you enjoy it, do you hate it? Do you regret ever having an April Fool's Day because of all the stuff that pops up on Twitter and Facebook,

or do you actually think it's kind of a fun day. Um. I guess it all depends on how much you pay attention to. I want to hear what you think was the best April Fool's joke or the worst April Fool's joke. You should write me and let me know that email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook, Twitter or Tumbler at all three I use the handle text stuff hs W. You can even go back and see my own little

uh contribution to April Fool's Day. This was from way back in two thousand nine where I talked about rechargeable gum. It's called chew on this rechargeable gum is on the tech the tech stuff blog way back when, and I talked about this magical type device, the Rebubble device, which was a company that was creating a gadget that would reinvigorate gum with flavor and textures so that you could keep chewing the same piece of gum over and over. In this case, they would put it into what was

called a rechew. The Nation Chamber. Did you get it anyway? You would plug that into either an adapter in the wall or through USB, although the USB version took much longer to recharge. And uh it talks about you know, exactly how the stuff supposedly works, and of course it's all made up. I had a great time just putting in a fake news story and uh, I really enjoyed the opportunity to make something truly ridiculous and posted it

on April Fool's Day. I haven't done that in a very long time, so I need to do that again now. I'll also say this, if you're a fan of Forward Thinking, the podcast where we talk about the optimistic view of the future, you should check out today's episode of Forward Thinking,

both the video and the audio. There might be some surprises there, or there might not, because I'm recording this episode of Tech Stuff before I do those Forward Thinking episodes, so we'll find out if my impish sense of humor has made it through on those other shows. As always,

thank you very much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode and this look back on some of the jokes from Remember you can listen to those previous episode of Tech stuff to hear, the older ones where Chris and I talk about some classic jokes and Lauren and I talked about more recent jokes at least between I think two thousand and ten, and maybe you should check

those out. And I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because at house stop works dot com