There’s always a danger in over-complicating products. Simple is so often best. The apocryphal story of NASA spending millions crafting a space pen while Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil is often cited as a prime example, even if it’s actually not true. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Dyson has got into hot water trying to reinvent the electric toothbrush.
The Chinese invented the first bristle toothbrush during the Ming dynasty. That concept muddled along quite nicely until 1937, when Tomlinson Moseley filed a patent for the earliest electric toothbrush. After more than 400 years, the Motodent marked the beginning of an evolutionary shift from manual brushing to powered oral care.
Having had considerable success reimagining established product categories such as stick vacuums and premium hair dryers—though not so much air-purifying headphones—the company earlier this month, with great fanfare, unveiled the next leap forward for teeth: the $499 Dyson CameraJet with a tiny camera to aim streams of rinsing fluid into the gaps between your teeth.
Others, like the Waterpik Sonic-Fusion 2.0, have already been daring (or foolhardy) enough to combine brushing and water flossing. However, Dyson upped the ante further by adding a macro-lens camera, allowing its “Gap Optical Targeting system,” trained on 470,000 dental images, to identify within 100 milliseconds precisely where to squirt fluid from the 12.5 milliliters of mouth rinse stored in its on-board reservoir.
It’s taken Dyson six years, 38 patents, and an awful lot of money to make this camera-squirt-brush doohickey work. However, something has gone badly wrong with the CameraJet. So wrong that despite James Dyson globally launching the product at a Paris event mere weeks ago, you can no longer, as far as WIRED can ascertain, buy the CameraJet anywhere.
The CameraJet launched in US stores on September 8. Just a day later, reports began outlining the first user complaints of water in the battery compartment and failures within 30 seconds of use. Consumer Reports’ own review unit stopped working less than 24 hours after unboxing. On September 11, French outlet Numerama reported that the French Dyson site and stores had reportedly stopped selling the toothbrush. By September 15, stores in the US, UK, and Singapore, where Dyson’s headquarters now reside, had followed suit.