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

[u38cg]

Huh. My first computer was a recycled Apple III and I had a lot of fun with it. Never overheated once, although it wasn't until after several years I got curious and popped off the case, and discovered a second memory module which had been rattling around loose all the time I had owned it. And nothing says technology like a 5MB hard drive.

Re:The List

[EdZ]

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

Re:The List

[vlm]

No mention of the latest generation ipod shuffle? The one where they figured control buttons would "clutter up" the design, so instead you have to buy special, expensive apple earbuds/headphones that are all cluttered up with inline controls and only cost ten times the cost of normal headphones? So the shuffle plus a pair of "special" headphones costs more than a nano?

I'd buy a shuffle in an instant, if it had volume up / volume down / play-pause buttons on the device.

I know adapter cables are sold, and I guess I could duct tape / hot glue gun the adapter onto the shuffle, to make an almost usable "exercise ipod". But having to pay the "apple tax" and then whip out the duct tape and hot glue gun to make it usable is just going too far.

Note I'm not an apple hater, I enjoy by nano for exercise listening and my ipod touch for PDA and video use, but the shuffle is just a design disaster.

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

[aaaaaaargh!]

As someone who has been using Macs since around 1990 I disagree with quite a number of points on this list. First of all, the worst Apple product ever is without any doubt the Performa 5200, but not the whole performa line. I've owned several performas that were very good and compact machines. Regarding the 5200, it is true that just about everything about this machine was wrong: its weight, its design, the built-in monitor, the speed (Powermac, but slower than most 68k Macs). The next point: OS 9 was an absolutely great OS and IMHO only OS 6 was better at its time. At least, unlike OS X, OS 9 is able to remember window sizes and positions. As for the "honorable mention" color classic, this still is a great machine. I once had one and have always regretted that I had sold it. It was completely silent and with a few modifications would be quite suitable for text processing today.

Moreover, given that the author of this article claims that Power PC (especially the B/W Macs) were a failure, I doubt whether he has ever owned a Mac at all. I bought a b/w Power PC Mac just when it came out, it absolutely rocked, and was usable for around 10 years. Generally speaking, the built quality of Power PC Macs was much better (except for the Performa 5200) than today's Macs. (To be fair, the b/w Mac keyboard really sucked.) In fact, the built quality of Macs has declined constantly since the Mac Plus (I have one standing on my shelf, it still boots without problems) and is worse than ever now with the exception of that of the overprized Mac Pro.

To cut a long story short, some of the items in the list are fairly incomprehensible and I suspect the author of the article has never owned or used them.

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.

All of thier mice suck

[rimcrazy]

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.

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.

Hasn't been out long enough yet

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:What, no iPad?

[jo_ham]

"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.

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")

Re:how about all of them?

[david_thornley]

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.