The Worst Apple Products of All Time

An anonymous reader writes "While Apple is frequently referred to as a leader in consumer electronic product design, the history of the company is filled with examples of poor design and questionable product strategies. This list of Apple's worst ever products includes some interesting trivia, including Apple's overpriced eWorld Internet service, their painfully bad attempt at a 'value' computer (the Performa), the much-loathed 'hockey puck' mouse, and the Apple Pippin gaming platform. The article also includes the infamous Apple III, which overheated so badly that it prompted one of the strangest repair techniques ever: 'Users were advised to pick the computer up a few inches off the ground and then drop it, hopefully jostling the chips back into position.'"

Comments

The List

[c0mpliant]

10 QuickTake
9 Pippin
8 iPod Hi-Fi
7 Power PC
6 Mac OS9
5 eWorld
4 Performa line
3 "Hockey Puck" mouse
2 20th Anniversary Mac
1 Apple III

Honourable Mentions: Color Classic and the Mac Portable

Re:The List

[tehcyder]

No Quicktime Player? It's a turd of a program on either OS, but the windows version definitely stand out as a major PITA.

Beaten only by iTunes, also strangely not on the list.
I don't care how cool iPods are, or how well the iTunes store works, the software is horrible on Windows.

Re:The List

[joeyblades]

The author's main complaint on the PowerPC was that it was not the ubiquitous Intel... I hardly think that makes it a mistake by Apple. The change to the Intel architecture does seem to have been a good one, but that doesn't make the long time support of the PowerPC was a bad one.

In fact, if Apple would have switched from the 68K architecture to an available Intel architecture at the time, it would have been crippling. There would not have been enough horsepower to support classic emulation. Until the MMX, the Intel architecture's pipelining was just not efficient enough and even then it was marginal. So in terms of performance, the PowerPC architecture was several years ahead of the Intel architecture.

The author's comment about the PowerPC power consumption is mystifying. Compared to the Intel offereings at the time, it was best in class.

Re:The List

[Coopjust]

It is large and sometimes sluggish

An understatement, to say the least. iTunes feature creep has made it a massive piece of bloatware- Bonjour, QuickTime, Mobile Device Service, iPodhelper, etc... not to mention the main applicaiton.

The number of ways in which iTunes can break, just giving a cryptic error code is pretty pathetic.

The UI is a little awkward but can be learned.

Good UI shouldn't be awkward. Granted, for the amount shoved into iTunes, very few functions are completely broken interface-wise.

It gets the job of searching, navigating, and organizing my large library done well enough.

There are much better alternatives, trust me.

Overall, it is functional and provides integration with the two entities you admit could have merit: iPod (iPhone) and iTunes store.

I know you were talking to the OP, but I can't give you the latter. Foobar2k and numerous other players have full iPod support, are much less bloated, and actually write tags back to music instead of a database (so you can switch audio applications easily). I would have to give you the latter since Apple's move to lossless DRM free music.

Geomodem

[slashqwerty]

Unlike other modems the GeoModem did not moulate and demodulate. Instead it used the modem hidden inside your CPU! By purchasing an adapter that cost as much as a real modem you could use the processor inside your computer to handle all the modulating and demodulating. On an OS that used shared multitasking this was not very reliable. Its one and only advantage is that you could upgrade the software. It went from 14.4kbps to 33.6kbps over night.

Not all the items listed were failures..

[kangsterizer]

Disclaimer:
- i did RTFA (it happens!)
- i know Apple history
- i'm not Apple fan and don't own any Apple product (anymore) actually

Anyways..

PowerPC:

PowerPC was not a failure. PowerPC's were sold by IBM in their POWER architectures and had quite a bit of success there as well. They were quick, worked well, and they allowed the transition for Apple. If apple went x86 back then, there might have been no apple today. The only "failure" would have been the G5, or in fact, the lack of G6.
Undelivered promises of updates, for 2 years, and Apple had to switch to Intel.

MacOS 9:
TFA is confusing MacOS 8 with Copland (MacOS 8 original codename).
Copland was from-scratch operating system, with true preemptive multitasking and most of the things we're used to today.
It took ages and never got completed (in fact, the failure here, was Copland).
Apple released instead MacOS 8 and subsequent updates with partial features of Copland, but no rewrite. MacOS 9 was the last of the serie, nothing more, nothing less (MacOS 9.2.2). On top of that, it is the only MacOS that could run natively inside OSX. MacOS classic pionnered todays GUI.

20th anniversary Mac:
exclusive, high priced item, for collectors.. that the author has mistaken for a consumer level product. don't really need to say more. (actually ill quote: "the issue here is not the product but that it was released during a financial crisis" then "i know the financial crisis was not related to the 20th mac".. yeah well keep on contradicting yourself just to add 1 product to the list")

Irrelevant quote

[mdwh2]

* Where does this often-quoted phrase make claims that the Ipod would fail or succeed in the market? It doesn't. As an opinion of the product, it's valid no matter how successful it is (or are you saying that criticisms of Windows are stupid, because Windows is the most used OS?)

* "Slashdot" is not a single entity. There is no reason to judge squiggleslash, by a quote made by a different person, many years ago.

* Just because Apple have one successful product doesn't mean the Istale will be, and that is no argument to dismiss his opinion.

Putting it on a "worst apple products of all time" list is just ludicrously premature and speculative.

I entirely agree - just as every blimmin story we get about it is ludicrously premature and speculative. Let's get back to covering story about actually released products, not speculation about vaporware.

Re:No they have a good point about PPC

[Graymalkin]

This is complete bullshit. While the Pentiums were introduced in 1993 they weren't actually available in volume until early 1994 which was about the same time the PowerMacs were released and available. PowerPC native applications (especially media/graphics ones) had a real-world advantage over their Windows/DOS counterparts since they could make use of the FPU on the PowerPC chips where on PCs couldn't rely on an FP coprocessor being available. It was a while after the Pentium came out that people shipping applications that depended on its FPU. PowerPC machines were actually available to customers and often performed at least a little better than Pentium based machines of the time. The PowerMac 8100 was a beast of a machine that shipped before a 100MHz Pentium part was ever available to people.

The 68k emulation had nothing to do with "porting their OS properly" but everything to do with allocation of resources. The fast 68k emulation allowed Apple to use large amounts of code that was already written and working rather than throw it all out. Reimplementing a significant portion of the OS would have been extremely expensive and time consuming. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that the emulated code could run as fast or faster than it did on 68k chips. It also allowed customers to have a viable upgrade path. You could buy a new PowerMac and your old 68k applications would continue to work.

PowerPC didn't start to have problems until the G4/G5 era when performance gains were relatively small with each iteration and Intel was locked in a performance battle with AMD. The first G3s were extremely fast and handily beat the Pentium IIs of the time in a number of areas. Once AMD bought the IP for the Alpha and started work on the Athlons Intel wasn't really pushing performance boundaries. Motorola easily kept pace with Intel and the two kept leap-frogging one another in performance. The Athlon changed that dynamic and Intel went ape shit with clock speeds and performance and largely left Motorola in the dust.

To suggest the PowerPC was a failure because Intel eventually made chips that were way faster is to ignore or simply be ignorant of a lot of history. The Pentium line suffered a good deal from Intel's hubris while Motorola and IBM were very interested in making high performance chips.