Sony eVilla

~ the last words ~

the sony evilla was a $499 internet appliance sony released in the united states on june 14, 2001. it had a vertical 15 inch crt monitor and a usb keyboard. the entire thing ran beia, an embedded version of beos from be inc., which by mid 2001 was already on its deathbed as a desktop operating system and was scraping for embedded contracts. evilla was the biggest design win beia ever got, and it was also the last.

the pitch was a kitchen browser. you would put the evilla on the counter and check your email and the weather without booting a real pc. the vertical crt would make web pages feel like a magazine page. that pitch had problems. the only email at launch was webmail through the sony portal, and the browser could not handle most flash sites of 2001. the device was a sealed appliance, so you could not install anything on it to fix any of this.

sales were poor enough by august 2001 that sony announced on august 30 it was discontinuing the product. by september 13 every unit had been recalled from retailers. customers were refunded both the device price and the monthly subscription fees, and the evilla disappeared from the catalog without a successor. sony spokesman john dolak put it about as plainly as a press relations person can: "the product did not meet our expectations. it did not operate as planned."

the evilla never reached turkey. the internet appliance category as a whole never reached turkey. in 2001 i was seventeen on a 56k modem with superonline at home in ankara, and the kitchen-computer pitch did not map to anything in turkish life. the household already had one computer, which was the family pc. turkish broadband would not arrive until ttnet adsl rolled out a few years later. an extra $499 kitchen device with a $22 monthly bill was a price point for a 2001 american suburb. it was not a price point for anywhere else on earth in 2001.

~ the record ~

~ the appliance category ~

the internet appliance was a 1999 to 2002 idea. 3com shipped audrey and netpliance shipped i-opener. both died inside the same eighteen month window as the evilla. the basic problem was math. a real pc by 2001 cost around $700 and did everything an appliance did plus everything else. the appliance saved you a couple hundred dollars and gave up most of the device. by 2002 the cheap-pc curve had crossed the appliance price and there was nothing left to sell.

~ what beos got out of it ~

beia, the embedded beos variant inside the evilla, was the last commercial product be inc. shipped. by november 2001, two months after sony killed the evilla, palm bought the beos intellectual property and shut be down as a going concern. beos itself survives as haiku, the open source rewrite, which by 2026 is still in alpha after twenty four years of community development. the evilla is one of the few consumer products you can point to and say: that ran beos in production.

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