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Apple's First Flops
Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."
Where can i get one of those babes? I want to replace my 95 cause it's beginning to be insecure and unstable... ...deja vu ...
"The press declared the machine and its software revolutionary. In a matter of months, the Macintosh had revolutionized Apple and the computer business" - they revolutionized and other company rules the market ?
Siropel
I'd say two major flops are a pretty good hit/miss ratio compared to the number of products they've had out, 2:50 or so.
What about the Apple Pippin? Few people know about Apples ill-fated console release.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
major flops under its belt
It's ok Steve... it happens to every guy! Maybe you were just nervous!
Look at you now - with your impressive... eh... Mac Mini...
I don't know if there are some Mac addicts here who can remember it, but the "AV" machines back then (660 AV and 840AV iirc) with their AT&T 3210 DSP, GeoPort, etc... were nicknamed Mac III
:)
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:)
And of course were an horrible flop
It's funny because back then, the nickname "Mac III" made a lot of people associate it with Apple III, and there was, in the Mac hackers community, a bad feeling about it
Apple: Never again use "III" in a product name
Ben.
"... Apple began the eighties with..."
If this isn't old news.. I don't know what IS.
I think this is a Slashdot record... a dupe of a story that developed over 20 years ago!
All sarcasm aside, how is this news? Yes, they were flops. Again, 20 years ago. Some site is just putting up a history now, but that still doesn't make it news. It's just blatant flamebait. Come on, editors, take "stuff that matters" to heart!
Elmo knows where you live!
On top of that, Jobs' insistence that the machine have no fan made for a very hot board. After being used for a day or two, the mainboard would get so hot it would warp and unseat some of the chips. Apple refused to install a fan to fix the problem and instructed users to drop the machine on their desk to bang the chips back into place.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Yes, they are under 50 feet of E.T. Atari cartridges...
Why on earth would he object to putting a fan in it? Did he think it'd make too much noise?
Absolutely. In this day of multi-ghz processors and video cards requiring their own cooling, people forget what it's like to have a dead silent computer. Remember back then that many/most computers didn't even have hard disks, so unless you were accessing the floppy, there was no noise at all. Notice that he made the same edict when it came to the original Mac's.
What a concept! Usually when you drop things, they break. But when you drop an Apple, well, it just works (TM).
Actually this was a common problem with all computers of that era. Wasn't uncommon at all to have chips work their way loose, esp new computers. I'd get new units and the first thing I'd do is re-seat all the socketed chips, esp the memory dips as trouble shooting your computer locking up or randomly rebooting (ahhh, some things never change do they?) because one of your 36 64k dips was loose was not fun.
FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
Nowadays companies count in Teraflops.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fan, owner, and former employee (certainly not a high-level one, though).
That said, Apple screws up a lot, particularly in first versions of a new product. As the article says, the Lisa was a flop, but it led to the original Mac, which led to the real hit, the Mac II.
The Mac Portable was a terrible product--but it led to the Powerbook, which defined the laptop computer. The Cube was overpriced and didn't have a market, but it led to the Mini, which is kicking ass.
The iPod was a hit from the jump, but the Newton was dead from its announcement date (we knew it was in trouble when they started handing them out as employee awards).
From article:
By April 1984, Apple had managed to sell only 65,000 units, loosing money on the model.
Geez, Slashdot's power to make people misspell words is so powerful that it's leaking into linked articles!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Here's a nice list of real (ongoing?) flops: LEM Road Apples They include the G4 Cube which, along with the Apple /// and Lisa, I would argue the only failure was the unrealisticly high MSRP.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!
Apple had a sort of adolscent crisis when the compan y got to a stage when the hormones took over (this might look like a metaphor, but most companies have a childhood, youth and middle age like the people who run it). The business side started leaning on the creative side and sort of screwed each other. Apple had a bunch of cool people coding for them (I wish ... Amiga...). But the business was more concerned about sellability than the raw coolness of the app in mind (see Google right now, it's going through the same loss of innocence).
Here's my list of top apple flops :- Apple Pippin (nice name !!)
- OpenDoc
- Lisa
- copland (no, not the movie)
- eWorld (what ?)
- Dalmatian Imacs
- Mac Portable
Btw, if it hadn't been for iMac and it appearing EVERY other commercial - apple might have just gone down silently. Now Ipod is bringing back the original proprietary wizards (Apple > Sun > Microsoft in this attitudeQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
how do people get jobs writing anything when they don't even know the difference between 'loose' and 'lose' or 'to' and 'too' or that all sentences should end with some form of puncuation? Article's somewhat interesting as far as the information goes, but this guy can't write worth a damn.
The Lisa wasn't a commercial success but it certainly was a technological success, paving the way for the Mac. (If you haven't seen a picture of one, google around... they looked a bit like an original Mac (aka 'Mac Classic') rotated through 90 degrees. It had a revolutionary WIMP interface. I remember as an awestruck almost-teenager reading a breathless review in the UK's then only PC mag, "Personal Computer World" which said "the only bad thing we could find to say about it is that some of the icons look a little whimsical. How long could you look at a whimsical icon before it becomes irritating?" It was also over eight grand sterling, four times the price of the ugly, clunky CGA IBM PCs that were the competition...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Oh no that wasn't.
//s and did very well. It introduced a number of additions that eventually made their way into the Mac world, such as ADB input bus. It had 16-bit graphics when Macs were still black and white, 16-chanel sound chip (the Mac had a 4-way back then I believe).
That machine was the last of the Apple
That machine would have made Apple big, had they had not spent all their marketing efforts onto the Mac (whose hardware was inferior in many areas to the GS, but whose OS was superior).
Dan Bricklin's spreadsheet ran on the Apple first and was the sole reason folks went out and bought an Apple. For a period (think early 80's), Apple owned the desktop computer market, with many more business-oriented applications than creative/educational titles.
Only after they got crushed by IBM machines did they focus on thier current market. I don't think IBM did them in as much as the IBM clone market, which reduced the cost of the hardware to far below Apple's. With a lower price, more people purchased IBM-compatible machines and the demand for software followed.
The unwashed Windows using masses are too stupid to recognize snobbery, much less understand the experience that makes up the Apple experience. Their simple little conformist minds cannot grasp the complexity that is the Macintosh. They can't see the quality, style, and substance in front of their faces. Fools! You're a fool if you think otherwise.
I have no more time to attempt to enlighten you. I'm going to Starbucks.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It turns out according to the Apple sales database they sold exactly 65,535. :)
The Economics of Website Security
If the X86 hardware is faster, then why doesn't it outperform the Xserve clusters using Mac OS X and standard Apple hardware? Don't mistake bad benchmarking for good data. Don't believe me, go to the Super Computer web site (http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=1 1) where 5 of the top nine are PowerPC hardware. Number 7 on the list is built by using stock Xserves ordered directly from the on-line Apple Store and running Macintosh OS X. And, there are even faster Apple clusters in the wild that didn't even bother to try to compete for a ranking.
These are not marketing ploys. These are very expensive machines that are optimized to go as fast as they can to get the job done. No political bias...just go fast. The only X86 cluster in the list above a ranking of 9 has nearly twice the number of processors as the Virginia Tech cluster. Maybe you should spend a little less time pounding out Visual Basic programs and do some actual research before making statements like that.
Although PCs have the edge for power/price, hardware bang for buck is becoming less of a factor except for gamers. Chip speeds and memory sizes are starting to go past consumer requirements, even if you throw in HD video, so design and software are the key factors. This may be why we see Apple recapturing some market share.
There's enough of a market within homes, particularly digital homes, to drive Apple growth without business penetration. Apple is trying to be the new Sony and the hardware is a commodity; it's the software and design that are the real added values.
IMHO running OSX on "x86" doesn't necessarily imply generic beige boxes. For example, Apple could easily build its own x86 boxes and still maintain hardware control, or they could have someone else build boxes to a particular spec that would be OSX-x86 compatible. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are good examples of controlled x86 and PPC hardware from the "other guys".
What I think would be really cool would be a box that is designed specifically to run OSX-x86, but can also run XP and/or XP apps natively without emulation (dual boot, vmware, wine, ...).
BI've now seen several comments that the Lisa led to the Macintosh. That is a mischaracterization. The two machines were being developed at the same time! Check out Revolution In The Valley by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the members of the original Mac development team. It's a fun book, but it also will show you that the Lisa and Mac teams were in fact competing with each other and hardly communicated. Steve Jobs had a great deal to do with this. It's certain that some of the same basic ideas were inspiration for both groups, but it's not like the Lisa was developed, then Apple decided to develop the Mac based on it.