With the arrival of the Pixel Tablet with a charging speaker dock at Google I/O this week, Google did what it does best: killed a product. Only this time, it didn’t just kill its product; it foreshadowed the death of the entire smart display category. Ah well. They had a good run, but folks, it’s the end of the line. The precise time of death was when Google exec Rose Yao described the new Pixel Tablet on its dock like this: “It feels like a smart display, but it has one huge advantage … Android apps.” 

When one of really only two companies that make smart displays proudly proclaims that its shiny new smart home control device is not a smart display, the game is up. Yao also correctly pointed out one of two major problems with smart displays: their software is frustratingly limited. The other problem? Their hardware is bad, too. That’s a powerful double blow.

So, where did it all go wrong? 

The original idea of the smart display was a smart speaker with a screen to display additional information. In The Verge’s review of the first Echo Show, Dieter Bohn praised the device for not trying to be a tablet. “Its strength is in its simplicity,” he wrote.

Six years later, smart displays are anything but simple. Today’s smart displays attempt to do too much with too little and largely fail at everything. 

Is it a smart home control interface? Is it a household calendar? Is it a tiny TV? Is it a smart speaker? Is it a video-calling device? Is it an alarm clock? Is it a digital photo frame? Yes. Does it do any of those things really well? No. (Well, maybe a digital photo frame — I’ll give them that.)

To be clear, I am specifically ragging on smart displays here. Smart speakers are excellent devices. They’re better for playing music than smart displays (no giant screen to mess up the acoustics) and better at responding to voice commands (for the same reason) and, therefore, at controlling your smart home. In fact, the only thing a smart display really adds to a smart speaker is problems. My original Echo speaker from 2014 is still going strong, but I’ve had multiple smart displays bite the dust.

The two companies that make most smart displays — Amazon and Google — have made them largely closed ecosystems that run poorly designed software on underpowered hardware. The one benefit of this is that they’re cheap — especially compared to a device that can actually do all of the above. The entry-level Echo Show 5 costs $85, and the , and both are frequently available for much less thanks to aggressive discounting. An iPad, a Google Pixel Tablet, or this very cool-looking shared family tablet from Hearth start at around $300 and go up to $700.

Amazon, with its four smart displays, and Google, with its two Nest hubs, have tried and failed to find compelling use cases in our homes for their increasingly multitasking gadgets. From sticking a creepy rotating screen on one and turning another into a sleep tracker to making nearly all of them security cameras (something no one was asking for), a lot has been thrown at the smart display, and very little has stuck. 

Obviously, Amazon is going to continue selling these things. Google might, too. But it’s clear we’ve reached an inflection point, and the industry has realized it’s time to move on. If the smart home is going to work, we need control devices that work, too.