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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 kid clearly did not suffer through the mid-90s, when the Internet was gaining popularity and the great shoal of idiots stormed computer stores to get a Mac "because I heard it was easy to use" and load up one of those ubiquitous copies of "American Online".
I sold Macs the--along with their peripherals--for an awful (and now out of business) New England-based reseller. Along with inept and shifty-eyed management, we sales drones needed to suffer the Apple product line concocted in part by that former sugar-water selling guy and Gil Amelio. Herewith, a short list of the Apple products that always guaranteed heartburn:
- the Apple Centris series. IIRC, had some bizarre 'multimedia' chip that disliked a large number of MIDI software apps of the day.
- those horrible 6xxx series PowerMacs. When Apple made the slightest production change, they incremented the model number by ONE, quickly ending up with a mish-mosh of sluggish pizzaboxes that puzzled we salespeople almost as much as prospective customers. It turned explaining the product line into alphabet soup.
- that horrible 'answering machine' contraption that Apple sold. Difficult for most customers to make work properly, and ate hard disk space.
- eWorld. I think that was in the article. No need to floss a dead horse.
- the stupid hockey puck mouse that was sold with the first wave of iMacs. Annoying beyond belief. How that thing made it out of the Apple ergonomics department is beyond me.