This Discontinued USB Gadget From The 2000s Did Absolutely Nothing, But People Still Loved It
This Discontinued USB Gadget From The 2000s Did Absolutely Nothing, But People Still Loved It
Retro gadgets rock. In the case of ThinkGeek’s USB laptop buddy, that’s quite literal. The USB Pet Rock was an April Fool’s Day prank from 2009 that went a little too well. ThinkGeek shared their Pet Rock on YouTube, and much to the joy of geologists and the geographically curious everywhere, ThinkGeek actually sold the weird little gizmo on its site.
Touted as the perfect desktop companion, the pet rock came complete with a cardboard carrier and straw bedding for your new pet’s comfort. The copy on the sales page was almost as fun as the companion itself, promising that your new pet would never talk back to you or chew up your couch, but that it would love you forever in its own, rocky way. You could pick up your new stony chum for $7.99 (which is around $12 today).
Despite the 18″ USB cable connecting your pebble pal to the computer, you don’t need to worry about it being too resource-intensive or needing any kind of grounding. Much like the rock itself, the cable doesn’t do anything. At least, nothing that requires a power supply. In fact, ThinkGeek described the proclaimed ‘laptop buddy’ as the greenest USB device ever, as it doesn’t use any power at all. It is just a rock, after all.
ThinkGeek’s Pet Rock wasn’t the first of its kind
The desk pet stunt was a reference to another April Fool’s gag from 34 years prior. Back in 1975, copywriter Gary Dahl turned an in-joke into a trend by selling stones as pets alongside an instruction manual. According to the LA Times, more than one million of Dahl’s Pet Rocks were sold. At $4 a pop (or nearly $25 when accounting for inflation), the Pet Rock was a stroke of money-making brilliance wrapped up in humorous advertising.
Dahl created the Pet Rock during a period of unemployment. He had been working in advertising, producing and editing written copy to help sell products. His work on the Pet Rock started off as a training and care manual for the Pet Rock, based on his friends’ experiences with troublesome pups and naughty felines.
ThinkGeek’s original sales page is only available today via The Internet Archive (the original ThinkGeek website shut down in 2019 after being purchased by GameStop), but the copy does have nods to Dahl’s original Pet Rocks. The page jokes that they wanted to recreate Dahl’s experiment to see if they achieved the same results: to become rich and make customers happy. If the YouTube comments on the original announcement for the Pet Rock’s almost-digital successor are anything to go by, then it certainly seems like they managed to make a few new happy rock owners. The video advertising the weird USB gadget has over 200 comments and more than half a million hits, casting a lot of eyes on one small rock.
