Before the iPad, before the flood of sleek tablets we toss in our backpacks today, there was the CrunchPad—a bold, scrappy vision for the future of personal computing that never quite made it to market.

The CrunchPad was the brainchild of Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential tech blogs. In 2008, frustrated by the bloat and cost of laptops, Arrington had a radical idea: build a thin, affordable tablet designed purely for web browsing. No keyboard. No hard drive. No Microsoft Office. Just a screen, a browser, and a fast connection to the internet.

It was ambitious—and weirdly refreshing. In a world dominated by heavy Windows laptops and clunky netbooks, the CrunchPad promised simplicity. The target price? Just $200. Arrington wrote openly about its development on TechCrunch, inviting readers into the journey. Prototypes were built. Demo videos were posted. Hype grew.

And then… it all fell apart.

In late 2009, just as the CrunchPad was supposedly weeks away from launch, everything imploded. The startup working with TechCrunch on the hardware—Fusion Garage—cut ties and announced it would release the device without Arrington’s involvement. They renamed it the JooJoo (yes, really), and tried to spin it as their own creation.

Lawsuits followed. Accusations flew. Arrington blogged about the betrayal in a scathing post titled “The CrunchPad: The Launch That Never Was.” What had started as an open, idealistic tech experiment devolved into Silicon Valley drama.

To make matters worse, the JooJoo—Fusion Garage’s standalone product—flopped hard. At $499, it was way more expensive than the original vision. Its software was buggy, and a few months later, Apple unveiled the iPad, instantly resetting the bar for what a tablet should be. The JooJoo barely sold a few hundred units before fading into obscurity.

And yet, the CrunchPad mattered.

It didn’t succeed commercially, but it helped shift the conversation. It showed that people were ready for a web-centric, touch-based device. It proved that tech blogs weren’t just passive observers—they could shape the industry. And in a strange way, it preempted the iPad’s arrival, showing there was a market for a tablet-first world.

Today, the CrunchPad is mostly a footnote. A “what could’ve been” in the story of modern computing. But for a moment, it represented something beautiful: a crazy idea, built in public, driven not by profit, but by a genuine desire to push technology forward.

And in Silicon Valley, that counts for something.