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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."
This is a fairly good list of notable Apple flubs, but why include Microsoft Word 6? It sure was a dog, but that wasn't Apple's fault.
///. It was such a failure that perhaps the list's originator doesn't even know about it.
In it's place, I'd like to nominate the Apple
I think a recent blunder many remember but will soon be forgotten is the whole iMac G5 blunder.
Apple misjudged product availability and actually ran out of iMac G4's for two months before they released the iMac G5.
Yeah, the iMac G5 has relaly been making sales records at Apple, but how much of that is due to there being nothing in the iMac line for people to buy for two months?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Apple has always had significant trouble when Steve Jobs is not at the helm. Gil Amelio and his drive to gain business credibility really put a huge pain on the company.
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.
Any company that challenges the state of technology at any given time has to have flops. Hell, ANY business that strives to push the boundary has to have flops. Has MS had flops? Yep. Has GE? Yep. But the underlying strength of any company is how it deals with those flops, how it changes direction, how it survives, and how it kicks ass in the long run. However, the list would be interesting to see...though it's not loading for me.
A blog like any other.
I dunno, I honestly thought the cube "cracks" could take the place of something as lame as the asinine iMac colors.
For those who don't remember, the Cubes would occasionally develop these "cracks," for lack of a better term. IIRC, owners started to see hairline fissures slowly appear underneath the ploycarbonate surface. Apple played it off by saying it added to the "personality" of the cubes, since each set of cracks was unique.
Heck, I love the cubes and I'd probably put them in that blunder list; if Apple could've figured out a way to make them a bit more powerful or a bit cheaper, they may have been succesful. As it was, their exorbitant pricing simply reinforced the notion that "macs are too expensive."
What's amazing to me is the Apple ][ series lifespan was from 1977 to 1993. Unbelievable! That's 16 years from the original Apple ][ to the last gs EOL.
Still ... Apple was one of the early leaders, one who made some absolutely bone-headed mistakes that cost them the lead. Granted, Apple is one of the few survivors from the start of the personal computer revolution, a revolution littered with dead products and companies: the Commodore Pet, 64, Amiga, Ohio Scientific, Southwest Technical Products, Atari's 400 and 800, Franklin, the PC Jr., the various Radio Shack toys and many more ... all gone. But given the fact that Apple was there at the beginning (hell, the Apple ][ defined the PC revolution) they really should have come out on top, with Bill Gates relegated to the status of proud owner of a fifth-rate CPM clone. Bill Gates even told them how to do it! But between Jobs, Scully and Markkula, Apple failed to capitalize on their head start.
//e the way they did. About a year after the original Mac came out, I called up to order a replacement gate array for a //e motherboard. The person I spoke to wouldn't acknowledge that Apple Computer had ever manufactured an Apple Computer and instead recommended that I buy a Mac. They basically just dropped an entire product line and alienated a whole lot of users, many of whom promptly bought an IBM PC or compatible. So, yes, I think it is fair to slam Apple's decisions over the years. They're where they are now (a highly competent technically, but basically marginal player) because they blew it and left the market to Gates and the IBM-compatibles.
//c.
Frankly, I'm still pissed at Apple for abandoning the Apple
And don't even get me started on the Apple
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The Cube, of which I have one powering my plasma 42" as a "photowall" and DVD player, was more a marketing flop than a technological one.
Alone, or especially when combined with a still new and pricey LCD flat panel, it was perceived as very expensive for what it was - a miniaturized desktop with no slots.
Petite computers hadn't been around for long (I think Shuttle actually came after, maybe in fact inspired by the Cube) and in the US market, the Cube was a radical approach going against the "gas guzzling SUV paradigm," where most male computer buyers still equate bigger with better.
It also had a significant number of detractors in the press, who all gleefully reported the "cracks" (scratches on the lucite moulding for the first batch) as if the thing was going to split open like a lizard egg.
Still, they sold 100,000, created a loyal following of uber-elite modders, contributed R&D to the iMac G4 and Mac mini, and were responsible for the coolest (pun intended) press release signaling its termination: "Apple is putting the Cube on ice."
Not a total flop.
Why the heck isn't the Apple /// in there?
I heard it was such a flop that Apple became kind of superstitious about their naming conventions and refused to name any subsequent products beyond "][". They had the Apple I, Apple ][, and Apple ][+ before the Apple ///. After the Apple /// flopped, they went back to "][" and had the Apple //e, Apple //c, and Apple //gs. For the Macintosh line, they had the Mac //, Mac //x, Mac //cx, Mac //ci, Mac //si, Mac //fx, Mac //vi, and Mac //vx. They never used "///" again, or any roman numeral above it.
Even now, they have dumped numbering their product lines altogether, despite the constant upgrades in hardware configurations. The only exception is the processor suffix (G4 or G5), which doesn't really indicate the product generation anyway. This applies to iPods as well.
I'm no fan of apple (I do like them, just not all their fanbois... same thing as linux, and to a lesser degree, windows)
.. Athlon XP 2800+ probably cost me $1200... with monitor)
But my guess is three things... PRICE and PIRACY.
Apple boxes are way too high priced for what you get, IMHO and the opinions of ALOT of people... if I can do the same thing on a PC for half the price, I will). Even their high end systems, are not high end by my standards... I mean if I'm paying close to $3000 (CND money) for a machine, I expect it to have a better video card then a Radeon 9600 (currently i have a 9800 pro which cost me $400 CND.. the whole machine it's in
Geek factor.. even tho I hate the term geek, nerd is much better. I prefer to build my own machines, even tho it's not very exciting anymore as I've done it a billion times, I prefer to chose every piece that is going into it.
Piracy... who here knows someone (besides a company) that pays for all their software? Piracy is accepted by most people as a worthwhile risk. It's much harder to find "warez" for the macs then for pcs. Incidently, I believe this is also a contributing factor as why Windows has the monopoly... both pirating of their OS, and of the apps for it. Kinda funny how MS is trying to fight it now.
Also, I have never met anyone who bought a mac to throw Linux on... altho I know it is possible. Yet friends of mine, and myself included, have bought machines specifically for linux (or BSD)
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
If Apple is really the brains of the industry--if its products are so much better than Microsoft's or Dell's or IBM's or Hewlett-Packard's--then why is the company so damned small?
Does the size of a company determine the quality of it's product?
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
If you answer yes to either of those questions, you're out of your fucking mind.
I'd also like to point out that the year-old article you're linking to predicts that the iPod will be crushed by competitors such as the Dell DJ "selling for as little as $299", that the iTunes Music Store will be crushed by Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Sony, and that it will take "at least a year" for Apple to sell 100 million songs. None of these things are even remotely true.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
What, you were expecting one button mouse to be here?
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
OK, here's a REAL flop that is so obscure, I bet that 99.9% of Macheads never heard of it, even if they were Mac users at the time it shipped:
A/UX, the first Unix OS for Mac.
A/UX included special battery support for the Macintosh Portable (yeah, the first portable, the flop, the really heavy one that used lead-acid batteries) and also had sleep support, which was totally unheard of at that time.
I took a certification class in A/UX, and the Apple guys told me they didn't seriously expect to sell many units, the product only existed to fulfill requirements for government sales that specified a Unix OS must be available for any personal computer CPU being requisitioned. Nevermind that the users never intended to USE Unix, the bids were rigged against Macs by specifying Unix must be available, and it wasn't, so that meant Macs were disqualified from bids and only PCs would be considered. But Apple won back some major government business by meeting this petty requirement. Cost em a bundle though.
Problem was when they dropped it, a whole bunch of Apple customers got marooned. It would have been much smarter to get those schoolkids on the Macintosh platform from the very beginning.
Without a time machine that would have been impossible. The successful days of Apple in education were pre-Mac. They basically ruled the education market in the early to mid 1980's. Logically, if they had wanted to keep the market, they should have maintained the ][ series rather than launching an incompatible computer. There's no real reason why we couldn't have 3Ghz 32-bit descendants of the 6502 today.
I was on eWorld! I remember it being fairly empty, but the interface was very cool--much like what the Cleveland FreeNet was trying to do, but all GUIlicious. I also had my first experience with live chat, which was some 16-year-old kid who assumed my androgynous name was the opposite sex and wanted me to go into a private room.
I've pretty much hated chat ever since, and from what I can see of IRC and AIM spam, things haven't much improved.
It was eerie, though, how much it felt like AOL, which I was also on (being a refugee from the craptastic Prodigy).
The frightening thing is, I still have an AOL account. Never set your parents' sites up on a non-portable system.
A list of Apple's greatest mistakes must include the company wide product quality failure that occurred under Michael Spindler (*spit*).
Every major product shipped in late 95-early 96 under Spindler (*spit*) had a major flaw requiring recall or replacement.
System 7.5, the 6200 logic board, the plastics on the Powerbook 5300, flaming batteries on powerbooks, video cables on several all-in-one models, and many other flaws. I worked in Apple Tech support at the time and it was hell.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company. The "Great Quality Implosion", as veterans call it, would have killed any normal company. Only Apple's near fanatical consumer base saved the company.
The "government contract" angle might have had something to do with the birth of A/UX but I really doubt that was the only reason they built it. They continued to improve it for years - later versions were really quite nice. The documentation was also wonderful - probably the best set of printed manuals I've ever received with a UNIX distribution. Oh and running MacOS apps under it actually worked pretty well.
:-)
I definately think they tried to make a go of it. It just didn't work.
I think what killed it was the bang-for-the-buck problem. The serious UNIX users were running on RISC-based workstations far more powerful than a Mac. The cheapskates were running UNIX on PC's (SCO and its many competitors at the time). There just didn't seem to be a market for a UNIX box that was expensive and slow. Maybe if they had brought A/UX along when they moved to PowerPC it could have finally caught some traction.
Then there was Apple's 2nd foray into UNIX -- the Apple Network Server back in 1996. It was an Apple machine designed to run IBM's AIX. I think it was available for about 5 minutes before they cancelled the project - one of Apple's most impressive flops.
They also had mkLinux which was pretty cool (linux with, IIRC, a 1.3 kernel running under Mach on powermacs) I actually used this for quite awhile - I still have a 8100 that can boot it. The project never really went anywhere... I'm not sure if I can call it a "flop" since it was never an official product though.
Apple's fourth foray into UNIX seems to be working out better for them, though
Uh huh. I had one of those beige boxes, and that PC card. (It wasn't PCI, it was Processor Direct). Great card: I played Wing Commander III on it years before the Mac version shipped. It worked beautifully.
I liked Apple then. I like them better now. Go Steve Go.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Research people were just short-sighted. Obviously, Apple's existing products were not suitable for corporation, but nobody can say that they couldn't possibly develop any new product that would take off. And at that time, if you wanted to do the coolest stuff, you had to do it on expensive workstations first and then trickle down to consumer market as hardware became cheaper.
After Steve Jobs left Apple, he started NeXT which was obviously oriented towards both big and small business. In the meantime Apple stagnated and didn't revive until he came back and ported NeXTStep to Mac hardware.
If he wasn't kicked out from Apple, NeXT would no doubt have Mac application compatibility. Then Apple would be the only company with UNIX workstations that also run all popular personal computer apps. Sun and Microsoft would be in deep trouble. And by '95, Apple would run NextStep on consumer Macs and Microsoft wouldn't have any product with unique advantages to grab 90%+ market share.
The author is rather given to hyperbole. The remaining Lisa computers (rumored to be 2700, although there doesn't seem to be any evidence for the exact number) were gutted and buried in Utah's Logan Landfill - hardly a "field".
Nor do I believe that 16.7 pounds would be sufficient for the average aircraft tray table to "snap under the weight" - if they were, airlines would be regularly repairing them every time a passenger accidentally leaned their body weight against an extended tray table when avoiding the in-flight service cart.
Failed_Apple_initiatives
atleast they learn from their mistakes unlike other wellknown companies.
its pretty aptly titled.. could have made a better post than this one (which has anyway been slashdotted so i havent seen it yet).
btw how well does wikipedia take to slashdotting ?
vik
[all generalizations are untrue except this one]
I bought an Apple //e in 1983; four-digit serial number. So I watched events closely. I was tempted to get the motherboard replacement to upgrade the //e to a //GS, but I never decided the cost would be worth it.
//e was EOL'ed in 1993 and the IIGS was EOL'ed in 1992. So the claim that the Apple II series supported Mac R&D into the late 1990s is uninformed.
The mac turnaround came with the LaserWriter and the "Fat Mac" (Mac 512) in 1985. By Autumn of 1986, when the IIGS came out, the Mac was well-established as the graphics machine. MacDraw was incredible. The page layout programs (_Ready,_Set,_Go!_, 1-2-3, PageMaker) and the LaserWriter had already created a new industry. Yes, they were pricey.
By 1987, it was clear that the 65816 processor would never develop "legs". Apple, by itself, was too small to keep Western Design Center in business and making competitive processors. The IIGS was 2.8 MHz; the Macintosh was 8 MHz. And the 68000 wasn't just Apple's: Atari, Amiga, Apollo, and Sun were also using 68000s.
The Mac system architecture was clean, with plenty of room to grow. Only minor tweaks were needed to enable memory to grow past 8 Megabytes (the "32-bit clean" issue with Applications and firmware in ROMs) when a 1 MB machine was big, and PCs were still struggling to get past 640K. The IIGS couldn't grow like that. GS/OS was clearly porting Mac technologies back to the IIGS.
The Apple