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."

Comments

Microsoft Word 6?

[eweu]

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.

In it's place, I'd like to nominate the Apple ///. It was such a failure that perhaps the list's originator doesn't even know about it.

Most recent blunder

[amichalo]

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?

Flops at Apple are predictable

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:Flops at Apple are predictable

[ScrewMaster]

Apple has also had significant trouble with Jobs at the helm. It's hard to say whether they've been better off with, or without the man. Let's not forget that he was responsible for bringing Markkula and Sculley on board. That worked out real well, didn't it (rhetorical question.)

I started out in 1977 on a first-run Apple ][ Standard (Integer ROMs and casette tape.) I eventually upgraded to an Applesoft BASIC card, 4 Mhz. turbo card, Corvus hard drive, the works. I still have all that stuff, actually, except the Corvus which died long ago. I was one of the early crowd of Apple hackers: in 1978 I was selling a simple speech synthesizer that plugged into the game paddle port ... those were great times. It'll never be like that again, that's for sure.

Now, his decision to unceremoniously drop the Apple // series and the millions of loyal Apple // users may be be an example of Jobs' insight. But from my perspective, as a member of that once-loyal class, I will never trust that company ever again. I invested several years of my career developing software for those machines, only to be told, in the end, "We recommend you buy a MacIntosh." Screw you, Jobs, and the horse you rode in on.

Cube "Cracks"

[UserChrisCanter4]

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."

Re:Apple ///, anyone?

[mveloso]

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.

Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Frankly, I'm still pissed at Apple for abandoning the Apple //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.

And don't even get me started on the Apple //c.

Re:Apple ///, anyone?

[Anonymous Writer]

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.

Re:Limits of Innovation

[dr.badass]

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.

My Top...err, Bottom Ten List.

[ktakki]

The osviews.com site is a smoking hole in the ground, so I have no idea what Thomas Hormby's list looks like. But I have my own list. It's been twenty years since I bought my first Mac (512K), and I'm probably going to order a Mac Mini this week; in between I've owned over a dozen different models. I love Apple, but I'd be the first to admit that they haven't been without problems over the years. So, here's my list of fuckups that came out of 1 Infinte Loop, Cupertino, CA:

1. 128K in the original Mac - Even in a world where an operating system, a couple of applications, and all of your documents could fit on a 400K floppy, 128KB of RAM was still not enough. Fortunately, the Mac shipped with 512KB less than a year after its introduction.
2. Service problems in the early '90s - Quality problems, particularly with LaserWriters, were endemic for a while, and Apple's support during this period was less than stellar. It took years before Apple even began to shake off its reputation for poor customer service.
3. LCII - I didn't really want to single out one model, but the LCII was the only Mac I absolutely hated. It barely had enough power to run the Finder.
4. System 7.6 - A System that stayed around long past its sell-by date. All the dithering about Copeland as a potential replacement didn't help things much, and its replacement (System 8) was little more than a stop-gap measure (like Windows ME).
5. Holding on to ADB/NuBus too long - I never really saw what advantage ADB had over the PS/2 mouse/keyboard interface other than vendor lock-in (I think only one other peripheral - a modem - used this interface). NuBus did have advantages over ISA, but the move to PCI could have happened a year or two earlier.
6. Some outrageous prices during the '90s - This was where the Mac got its "overpriced" reputation. I recall that the list price for a Quadra 950 was close to $10,000. It wasn't always like this: I bought my first Mac 512K because it was nearly $1,000 less than the equivalent PC/XT clone (and the peripheral I needed, a MIDI interface, was less than $100, less than half what an MPU-401 for a PC cost).
7. Begun the Clone Wars Have. - Now you see 'em, now you don't. The conventional wisdom was that Apple wanted the clonemakers to stake out the low end of the market, leaving the high-margin high end market to Apple. But Radius and Power Computing had other ideas.
8. John Scully - 'nuff said.
9. Mutant Macs (Cube, 20th Anniversary Mac, Color Classic, Portable) - Not everything that emerges from 1 Infinite Loop is to die for. Well, some are to die for (Cube) but stink up the marketplace. I think every manufacturer is allowed to make an Edsel now and again.
10. Copeland - All that work for what?

What, you were expecting one button mouse to be here?

k.

A special flop the Slashdot crowd will appreciate:

[sakusha]

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.

Re:II GS

[Jonathan]

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.

Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up

[Moofie]

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.

Re:II GS

[iamacat]

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.