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Another Back to the Future-inspired technology is hitting the skids with Nike retiring its self-lacing Adapt basketball shoes.”We’ve had a long and successful run with our Adapt shoes and ushering in auto-lacing footwear tech,” Nike says. “However, we are no longer creating new versions of Adapt shoes.”Nike will remove the Adapt App from the App Store and Google Play on Aug. 6, though “your Adapt shoes will continue to work without the app,” the company says on its help page. The Adapt app allows users to adjust the laces’ fit, control the lights, and configure other settings on the Adapt BB basketball shoe.”If you already have the Adapt App installed, it should continue to function. You’ll still be able to enjoy changing lights, lacing your shoes, setting personalized fits, gesture detection, and smart commands,” Nike says. “However, you won’t be able to move the app to a new device, and future iOS updates may limit or end functionality, or may completely remove the app from your device.”Nike’s experiments with high-tech shoes date back to 2011, when it created a replica of the self-lacing shoes worn by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future II. Those shoes did not self-lace and were intended to raise money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. An eBay auction brought in $4.7 million, which was matched by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his now-ex wife, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, for a total of $9.4 million. Several years later, a version that did self-lace was auctioned off and raised another $6.75 million.
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In 2016, Nike then released the HyperAdapt sneaker, which used an underfoot mechanism to make the laces automatically conform to the shape of your foot. In 2019, Nike released the Adapt BB sneaker alongside the Adapt app, which allowed users to control the fit using a mobile app. Nike also incorporated this feature into a wider range of retro products, such as Auto Max and Air Jordan 11, which started at $350 and went up from there.
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