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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.'"
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
There is no -1 disagree
Sure, Apple's had some really bad products over time - but what do you expect from a company that big which survived that long?
And - how many open source projects died, never making it...
Apple, like any other company, doesn't always just launch brilliant products - but, at least, they're not afraid to try new things and see how they pan out...
Overall I think it's good that the DO dare making something entirely new; and more often than not fail with their products. Sometimes they even failed commercially, while still making a product people still care about (e.g. Newton).
For myself, I know many people are critical of the iPad, on the other hand, I think I will still buy one - it looks like a cool ebook reader - whether it has multi-tasking or not.
I don't think eWorld failed because of its now-ludicrous-sounding pricing model. At the time (early/mid-90s), it was the norm for online services to have monthly fees that gave only a few free hours per month, and then cost significant amounts per hour after that. In the early 90s, AOL gave 2 free hours for $7.95/month and $6/hour thereafter, and was wildly successful, so eWorld's $8.95/mo for 2 free hours and $5/hr day, $8/hr nights thereafter doesn't seem like it was so far out of line as to kill it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Love their products in general. MacPro and MacBook user myself but I hate their mice and their keyboards. They both have always sucked.
The Lisa sucked big time. As did Newton but ... they paved the way for future products some by Apple some not that were quite successful.
No guts no glory. They at least stick their neck out there and try things. Sometimes it does not always work.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
I made the switch to Apple about 2 years ago - iPhone, iMac and Mac Book Pro, and I've been very very pleased with almost every single aspect.
EXCEPT FOR MOBILE ME!
It's f***ing DOG-DIRT! Whether it's sync issues or the server dying, or e-mails vanishing into thin air; there's always SOMETHING going wrong with the goddamn thing.
And I keep holding on thinking, "well they're bound to get it right sooner or later", but it's later and later and later, and still no sign of it ever being fixed. Drives me batty.
It's strange that the early multi-coloured iMac laptops are not on the list. I still have nightmares of the semi-transparent coloured plastic fad those things 'inspired'. I think I might vote for those as the ugliest computer ever designed. It's especially strange given that the later laptops are some of the nicest looking machines around.
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.
And still posting their biggest profit while the economy is crumbling around us.
Seems like their marketing department is the best product they have... it's working fine indeed.
For the article itself not being a clickfest of 1 paragraph pages! I nominate it for best top 10 list article of 2010!!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
A product can only be bad if it doesn't sell. No matter how worthless the functionality is, if a product generates a lot of sales and thus a lot of profits, it is a success from a business point of view. The pet rock is a great example. No utility, whatsoever. It is just a rock with goggle eyes glued on it. However people loved the thing, tons were sold, lots of money was made. It was a success.
So, the iPad's status will be determined later. If it sells tons, then it'll be a success, even if the people who buy it just end up using it as an expensive cup holder. If it has few sales, it'll most likely be a failure since it doesn't seem to have anything that will generate any advances over all.
You have to remember that can also be a factor in success. Just because something doesn't make money doesn't mean it is a failure. An example would be the original Xbox. Overall, MS lost money on the venture. However it was a success. Why? Because it established them as a legit player in the console market, which is extremely difficult to break in to (many, many companies have tried and failed). Thus it was still a successful product in the long run.
So we can't say about the iPad till much later. Personally, I suspect it'll be a failure. I suspect it won't make much, if any, money (remember there's a lot of R&D to pay off) and it'll provide nothing to Apple overall in the long run. However, we won't be able to say for a couple years at least.
While the iPad seems pointless, it doesn't appear bad. The iPad predecessor the forgotten Newt would be more a much more likely candidate.
"No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame"
Yes, I really trust the slashdot elite to predict the success or failure of a product that *hasn't even been released yet*.
Putting it on a "worst apple products of all time" list is just ludicrously premature and speculative.
By "gone the way of the dinosaurs," they mean "turned into birds and are now all around us, constantly chirping."
The article is just trying to point out that along with great successes, they have great failures too. The press as of late has been rather over the top fanboyish with Apple, hailing everything they do as amazing and generally projecting them as a company that makes bold decisions that are never wrong. This article seemed like a counterpoint to that. Showing that along with their successes, that everyone has heard about, there are plenty of failures, which many people have not. That will be true for any company, but in particular for companies that try something new.
I think it is a good reminder over all, given the massive over-hype that surrounded the iPad launch. Much of the tech press had worked themselves in to a frenzy and had decided it was going to be the greatest thing ever, without knowing anything about it. This has then been followed by a good bit of letdown. They seemed to have the idea that everything Apple produces is an amazing winner of a product. I think it is a useful reminder to say that no, Apple has produced some real bombs in the past. They are a company composed of people like any other and people make mistakes. They WILL fuck up sometimes.
I could add a few more recent products to that list, the cube being one, and Apple TV looking like another.
eWorld and AOL never competed agains each other as the article would suggest. In fact AOL grew out of the remains of eWorld. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWorld Oh and the pricing wasn't really so bad compared to not being online or long distance dial up and membership fees for other BBS.
It all starts at 0
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")
It's funny to read this on an iMac.
The Lisa
* 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.
Nah. There are larger media players out there. They are even as much as $500 or more.
They just aren't marketed as the second coming.
It's not the device (so much). It's the mindless fanboy hype and lack of independent thought surrounding it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Okay, you don't like Apple products. That's cool.
You don't understand why people like them. That shows a certain lack of empathy, but still no problem.
You then attribute it to marketing, which apparently is some mysterious force you can neither understand nor control, and stupid consumers. At that point, you've essentially said that you don't have a clue how to be commercially successful, but resent those who are. That makes you a loser, dude. Either lose the bitter attitude or get a clue.
Apple products are generally easy to use, often do certain things extremely well, and are physically attractive. Moreover, the components don't have to be ordered separately and put together by the user, which lots of people don't want to do.
Apple's marketing department has pulled some real boners, but Steve Jobs' sense of style and feel for the market are vital to Apple.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So far the vast majority of the people claiming that the iPad is the second coming are the haters not the fanboys. I'd say most of the people doing Apple hype in general are the haters, just so they have something they can whinge about.
Except that your memories and mine differ. At that time, Intel processors weren't speed demons, and the PPC ran much faster. This was because Intel was seriously limited by backward compatibility, and the PPC was a new RISC chip. At that time, if you wanted raw CPU speed in a consumer desktop (which was less useful than lots of people seemed to think), the Mac was the correct choice.
Later on, Intel came up with ways to efficiently process a truly arcane instruction set, and CPU performance vs. memory bandwidth vs. increasing use of cache changed the balance of RISC vs. CISC desirability, and IBM and Motorola wouldn't continue to produce good PPC laptop chips, and Apple changed again.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.