Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 Apple Flops
Kelly McNeill writes "Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history."
I suppose it's inevitable that (with the current flurry of Apple success stories) someone would come up with a list of things they got wrong. Wonder if he's an Apple fan, or if their current success is eating at his liver...
Show me a single computer company (hell, any company) that's been around for 25 years or so and hasn't made any mistakes. To succeed, you have to play the game, and playing is a risk.
So they screwed up a few times. So what ? I'd actually be defending MS on the same charge, even though I despise their OS. Linux has screwed up badly now and then as well - brown bag releases aren't unknown after all...
I just think it's a bit sad to concentrate on someone's failures. It seems such an
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I wonder why the cube isn't on the list. Seems like it should be.
I'm very responsible, when ever something goes wrong they always say I'm responsible.
At least one of the flops isn't the OS the entire company is based on. Just sayin'.
I know nothing
3 words: HOCKEY PUCK MOUSE
(For every Cube Apple produces, Microsoft is happy to come back with a Windows ME or MS Passport. At least with Apple, the flagship OS doesn't kick you in the jewels every time you sit down to use it. ^_^)
Because the only way you can innovate and try and make better is by getting out there and trying risky things and learning from your mistakes. I applaud any company willing go out and try these things.
What do you know I wrote a novel
Apple starve the market of "old tech" just before releasing "new tech", thus creating massive demand and huge sales figures, and you describe this as a blunder? I'll have two of whatever you're having!
was really the whole Performa line of computers. At the time the Performa's were aimed at the home user and overall they were a decent computer. But the flop part was the fact that there were something like 8,000 different versions! (Of course, I am exaggerating, but only by a little bit.)
I remember going to OfficeDepot and looking at the Performas and they along had like six different models with six different model numbers. Something like 6510, 6511, 6512, 6514, 6515, etc. (I know the actual numbers were different. These are to illustrate my point.) There were just very subtle differences between the models but for whatever reason, it warranted a different number. Basically it was a nightmare trying to remember what was the difference between any two numbers. That whole scheme of trying to provide a range of configurations was a flop. Fortunately, Steve undid that and cut down the product line into four basic models. I, for one, welcomed that.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
Actually, the Apple /// was a fairly successful small business computer in the early 80s. Visicalc sold a lot of machines for Apple -- including Apple ///'s.
/// -- that was the problem.
Now, Apple SOS (Sophisticated Operating System) for the Apple
-Mark, who's having SOS coding flashbacks now, thankyouverymuch
Clearly, by your logic, Ferrari is a failed car brand, because there are not nearly as many Ferraris sold as Hondas, or Toyotas, or Fords.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Virginia Tech did.
"It has always been about Steve Jobs. The man has insight and what could almost be considered clairvoyance when it comes to building things that people crave. God knows that I'm one of those at his feet, weeping and bathing him in frankincense."
Unfortunately, this also represents a huge problem for Apple down the road. As much as Jobs has dictated that which is desirable, genius tends to have a shelf life. A time will come when he just can't produce the same way- I hope to hell that he is grooming some manner of successor.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
don't even get me started on the Apple //c.
Don't forget the II GS. That was a killer machine with sound processing to die for. When it was released it made the available Macs look a bit weak (I think all there was available was the 128/512K models, the Mac Plus, and the Lisa/MacXL). All monochrome, very dull, totally unexpandable. Very pricey!
People who say that Apple's rot began when Jobs was fired miss the point. Jobs had managed to convince the execs (both regulars and the people who replaced him) that the II line was dead as a dodo and they should focus on the Mac. So Apple did, basically letting their mindshare evaporate within the personal and education markets. Apple had an extremely strong position but managed the transition to Mac very badly, or in fact failed to manage it at all. The II died from neglect.
One reason lots of other companies that emerged as PC makers in the 80s went on to massively outgrow Apple (think, Compaq...) is that they managed their transition from the 8/16 bit IBM PC through lots of architecture and CPU generations without suddenly dropping support for their existing customer base or alientating them completely. That kind of demonstrated lack of commitment to preserve existing relationships is why so many companies and purchasers found and find it hard to trust Apple, or to believe that its direction or strategy will endure past a few quarters.
Apple has always had problems as a company splitting its focus between different product lines. Witness the prolonged dullness and fading away of the Mac line the past few years as the iPod has obsessed the one-track-mind of Jobs.
The best thing for Apple the *computer* company right now might be to spin off or float iPod as a separate division, much as 3Com spun off Palm. use the massive cash raised to do something exciting for the computer line like, I don't know, buy Sun or something! Apple would then be selling both low-end, mid-range, and high-end Unix products!
Or given undercurrent of US regulatory resistance to Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, why not buy that? An Apple-IBM PC combination would easily pass regulatory hurdles, and uniting two premium brands might work quite well. And of course, the ironic denoument would be priceless.
Da Blog
Over the years I spent a goodly bit on my //e's system. Transwarp, 10 MEG HD, 1 MEG of RAM on my 80 col card. Now even though the base //gs system had a lot of things built into it such that some of my hardware would be obsolete the handwriting was already on the wall for the // series.
//e around for some time and it did ok but I eventually had to turn to the PC. It had the feel of a real hackers box rather than the handholding you got with a Mac and didn't cost an arm and a leg to boot.
I kept my
Well that's all water under the bridge at this point and I'm happy to see Apple doing well but now they are up against Linux/BSD for the hackers market and of course MS will not go quietly.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
In terms of changing the world with the Apple II, then the Mac, putting style into computers, creating the iPod, launching iTunes... well, yes you can (correctly) point out that they weren't exactly first with these things. The Altair was the first home computer, Xerox did a lot of the GUI innovation, Apple wasn't the first to make a high-capacity MP3 player. But Apple has been revolutionary in doing more to take these technologies mainstream than anyone else. In those terms, they're a success. Apple is a success at making incredible products that people feel very emotional about (love AND hate, speaking as someone who got into computers through the Apple IIe). Microsoft is an insanely great money-making machine, Apple has a legacy of creating insanely great (sometimes just insane) machines and software.
So who would you rather be? Gates, with enough money to buy Bolivia? Or Jobs, who has less money (still more than you could ever use) and a legacy of cool innovation?
The Newton was a Palm Pilot before there was a Palm Pilot, and it was supposed to have handwriting recognition, but it didn't live up to expectations. The breakthrough of the Palm was that you had to relearn your handwriting in this gestures thing the computer could understand.
I'm a Plastic Engineer. Those cracks are not so easy to eliminate. On a molded 2 cm thick piece of PolyCarbonate, it is very difficult eliminate internal stresses. It can be done, but the cycle times on the molding process probably would be measured in hours instead of minutes or seconds. If they had introduced a heavily "cracked" model of the Cube they probably could have gotten away with saying it was "character marks". All that they would have to do is spead up the cycle time and build in some more internal stresses. Pop a piping hot piece of plastic into a tank of ice water and then build a computer in it! I think that it would have looked cool.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
I did. I dare you to show me a thin-and-light laptop that's a better value than the 12" iBook.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is the genius of Apple's marketing. Not only do they make their products desired, they make you believe you HAVE to get one right away. Look at what they did with the Mini - denied its existence for months, released it and blew everyone's mind. THEN comes the really smart part, they let all the rabid fans snatch one up for a week, then change their pricing scheme to sweeten the deal a bit for the people who are still on the fence. Some people claim Apple were a bunch of idiots for setting the prices too high to start. I say they are sly as a fox, earning those extra margins for the gotta-have-it-now crowd, THEN bringing even MORE people in with the "oh its such a great deal I definitely gotta get one now!" effect. Blunder my ass, Apple has an ability to manipulate its customers that any marketroid would drool over.
The scary thing is, I've always been a PC Linux guy, but after my advisor bought us a round of ibooks to do our coding (computational physics) I think I'm on the path to turning into a mac zealot. Chalk up another win for Apple.
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product?
no one in their right mind would say yes to this.
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
Well, the quality of a company's products should contribute to its growth, and thus size.
On to TFA. I think that a company without a history of great failures will never have great innovations. The history of a willingness to accept the risk of failure is a sure sign that they are interested in innovation. I think Apple's problem has been less their products and more a misunderstanding of the market.
The Newton was pretty cool and innovative for the time. The market just wasn't ready at the time, and their marketing left a lot to be desired. Palm came in a few years later (with a less functional product) with some kick butt marketing and succeeded.
Now to argue against myself: Success in business comes from knowing the market, the product is secondary. For example, McDonalds sells the absolutely worst hamburger of any fast food chain. They also sell more than all the other chains combined.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
The Dell comes pretty close, I'll admit, but it's missing a CD burner and wi-fi, and the extra RAM isn't enough to make up for that. Plus, it's got a 14.1" screen, so it's too big. Oh, and the biggie -- it's batter lasts about half as long as the iBook's.
So it's already not as good a value, even before you start getting into "intangibles" like OS X. Sorry.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I will never trust that company ever again. I invested several years of my career developing software for those machines
Probably about time to let go, methinks. Jobs didn't kill the Apple ][ -- the IBM PC killed the Apple ][.
The original Mac ran on a 68000. A slow 16/32-bit processor with no MMU or support for VM. It also had limited memory.
There is nothing wrong with assembly language or cooperative scheduling, if you are willing to take the time to do it well and in a disciplined manner.
The Mac team did their best with what was available at a reasonable cost. I'm not going to blame them for decisions that were suboptimal on processors that would not exist for many years.
If you wanted a Xerox workstation, they were available, at stratospheric prices.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So is BMW. Not all business models are alike.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money. Apple makes money. Apple is a successful company. Just because Microsoft makes even more money doesn't mean that Apple (or any other successful company) is a failure.
Averatec 3200 series. http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/3200series.htm
My dad got one for $999 with DVD burner, 80gb HD, etc.
Not only is this laptop sub-1000$, it specs closely to the Mac and is a much better deal than the 12" iBook. In fact, I bought one myself when I was shopping for a laptop and even w/ the Apple education discount, the Averatec was a better deal.
This manipulates the supply side, not the demand side, as was implied. They're not "creating demand" they're "preventing a supply spike" caused by old and new models overlapping. You can't "create demand" by manipulating supply, you create demand by e.g. doing more marketing. Most shoppers aren't after a particular model, they just want a X or a Y, and could go either way while shopping depending on how they feel that day, which means X and Y effectively compete. By clearing stock of X before introducing Y you lower the supply and variety of choice.
Of course, by clearing stock totally before introducing a new product, and leaving a gap inbetween, with the hopes that those shopping during the gap will then wait until Y because they can't buy an X, is unwise because that shopper is more likely to just use that gap to switch to a competitor's product Z .. this is especially true in the PC market, where there is mostly competition amongst component manufacturers, e.g. ATI vs NVIDIA, Seagate vs Western Digital, and so on. For an Apple user it might mean buying a PC.
I didn't say the Athlon 64 is 99% faster. I said that probably 99% _of_ the performance gain _between_ 32 bit programs and 64 bit programs, on an A64, is because of the extra registers. And yes, the performance difference between 32 bit and 64 bit is there, and proven by a ton of benchmarks already.
So I'll say the opposite: I keep hearing the "old, tired rant" that performance doesn't matter, architecture doesn't matter, even developper or code quality doesn't matter. Let's just make a turd and let the compiler handle it.
Nope, sorry. Just isn't true. The performance difference in the A64's case _is_ there. That's what 64 bit vs 32 bit benchmarks measure there: the speed with and without the extra registers.
You may notice how for any other CPU, 64 bit mode is actually _slower_. E.g., the UltraSparc comes to mind. In case you wondered why most applications on a shiny new UltraSparc machine are still 32 bit. On it a 32 bit program actually runs measurably faster than the same program compiled as a 64 bit program.
Because when you have the exact same instructions, and the exact same number of the registers, transferring more data slows you down.
But not the A64. There 64 bit mode is actually faster. What's different? Twice the registers, that's what's different.
Compilers have come a long way, yes. They can do much better with a bad ISA than 10 years ago, yes. Indeed. And you can even take the tired old argument that "bah, for Word and Internet explorer they don't need a faster CPU anyway."
But completely polish a turd into a gold nugget, no, they can't. They can bring it sorta close enough, but no more.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sometimes, as with the iPod, they come up with the right product at the right time and win big. However, sometimes they get there too early: the Newton was ahead of it's time and much better than the other first generation PDAs, but people just weren't ready to buy them yet.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?