AIBO

~ the obituary ~

In 1999 I was fifteen years old and on a modem in Turkey. A robot dog at two hundred and fifty thousand yen was not a product that existed in my world in any usable sense. It was something you read about in a magazine, in the pages where Japan does the thing nobody else has thought of trying yet, priced for people whose relationship with new hardware was nothing like mine.

Sony released it on 11 May 1999. The first Japanese run was three thousand units and it sold out online in twenty minutes at around two and a half thousand dollars. Another two thousand went to the United States. It walked, it recognized faces after a fashion, and it had what the marketing called a personality that developed differently depending on how it was handled.

The later models sold properly. The ERS-210 passed sixty five thousand units and the ERS-7 line did somewhere around forty five thousand. That is a small number for consumer electronics and an enormous one for a robot, and it is more than enough people for a culture to form around the thing.

What makes AIBO worth a grave is not the hardware. It is what the owners did once Sony had finished with it.

~ the case file ~

~ the cancellation ~

On 26 January 2006 Sony announced it was ending AIBO, and production stopped that March. The decision had nothing to do with the dog. Howard Stringer had taken over a company that was losing money and was closing anything that looked like a research indulgence, and an entertainment robot division selling tens of thousands of units at that price qualified on both counts.

Owners were told the line was over. They were also told that repairs would continue, and Sony meant it, which is more than most companies manage on the way out of a category.

~ the clinic ~

Sony kept the AIBO Clinic running for eight years after production ended. A unit that stopped working could be sent in and would come back walking. Support for the last model, the ERS-7M3, ran out in March 2013, and the clinic itself closed in March 2014, and from that point there were no official parts anywhere.

A machine with moving joints, a battery with a finite number of cycles, and no source of replacements has exactly one ending available to it. The dogs started failing. Legs seized, batteries would not hold, and the answer from Tokyo was that there was no answer.

~ the funerals ~

The repairs did not stop, they went private. Nobuyuki Norimatsu, an engineer who had worked at Sony, set up a company called A Fun that fixed dead AIBOs using parts taken out of other dead AIBOs. Sit with that for a second: to keep one alive you had to take another one apart, so every successful repair had a donor behind it.

The owners understood exactly what that meant, and from January 2015 a temple in Isumi in Chiba Prefecture began holding Buddhist funeral services for the ones going to be stripped. A priest chants sutras over rows of switched-off robot dogs before the parts are removed. Somewhere around eight hundred have been through it. Sony brought the name back in January 2018 on a new cloud-connected model at about three thousand dollars, and it is a different animal entirely. The one people held funerals for was the one that could not be fixed.

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