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The Island of Lost Apple Products
concealment writes "most of Apple's products are so popular that it seems everything the company does is destined to succeed. But it doesn't take much digging to find a trail of failures and false starts. Even in recent years, there are examples of products that seemed great but never resonated with consumers, and some that seemed so destined for failure it's hard to imagine why any company would have brought them to market. Here are some examples of Apple veering a bit off course."
I bought a Smart Case and returned it 2 minutes after I started using it because it was extremely uncomfortable to hold. I never expected something so crappy from them.
I don't see any product which shouldn't belong to this island ...
Not entirely Apple's work, but primarily so. It was an exciting concept (at the time) and I was sorry to see it fall apart.
Not once again!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The Pippin should surely be on this list. Also some of those are still being sold by Apple today. If you are going to list Apple products that are crap and still in use how can you not list the Half Assed Game Centre?
Still better than MS BOB
This is "News for Nerds".
Not "News for smug, smarmy metrosexual-wannabes"
Why are the Apple III and the Apple Lisa not on the list? Granted, the Lisa was somewhat the predecessor of the Mac, but it itself was still a failure.
This space unintentionally left blank.
This isn't a bad thing. Good companies (not just apple) take risks and try out new things. It only takes one in ten to be a good product, and one in twenty to be a great product to keep the company going. The trick is to make sure they're not *too* ludicrous before you launch them, and if they don't work out, make sure you realise this quickly and fail fast If you don't keep moving and innovate, some other bugger out there will and you'll get left behind. I'm looking at you Microsoft. [standard imnotafanbois disclaimer; believe what you will; ymmv]
if you want to come up with game changing designs/products.
Apple have always been good at seeing how the market is moving and many times coming out with a product before the technology is good enough or the public were ready for it.
Jobs was also prepared to take the kind of risks most big companies aren't.
I can't believe an entire platform of mobile computing was omitted from this, and yet ... texas holdem? Really?
I demand a recount!
metrosexual-wannabes"
Hmm, considering that metrosexual men are people who use make-up to look better and non-metrosexual men are people who don't use make-up... what are metrosexual-wannabes? Men who kind-of and so-so apply face lotion, hoping to look good while not looking obviously metrosexual?
I was expecting the G4 cube to be there.
"Gallery of Apple pocket tat from the last decade, half of which is still in production"
I'm no apple fanboi, but this strange idea that the company burst into life with the launch of the iPod and has been on the up ever since is paying the company a disservice.
... the island of lost accessories. Everything in this product was an accessory designed for core Apple products. A lot of those accessories aren't even notable, so why would Apple invest much in their success?
You don't launch a multimillion dollar ad campaign over iPod socks or iPod/iPhone trinket apps after all.
Newton was a product that technology hadn't managed to catch up with.
Leonardo DaVinci had several heavier-than-air prototype flying machines. He couldn't find the tech to power it, though.
And another guy basically invented the plane (how to built the entire freaking aircraft, including the tension wheel which was as strong as a solid metal one but much much lighter, basically the wheel was repurposed for use on bicycles), but the internal combustion engine was still 30 years away, and without that his plane which would have beaten the Wright brothers by a good few decades couldn't get off the ground.
The marketplace is the only place where success or failure will be defined so release something there and iterate.
Companies in China do it a lot whereas in the West we try and get something perfect before release. Magazines are the exception as it is often cheaper to launch than to do the research to see if it would succeed or not.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
It's more of a post Jobs return list, hence the omission of the Newton*, Lisa and Apple 3.
*I know the Newton was killed post Jobs return but it came about after he left Apple.
The only major failures I see there are Ping and the Rokr.
The rest seem like toes in the water that were probably worth a punt at the time.
The QuickTake camera was one of the first "affordable" digital cameras on the market. What was important to Apple was that people used Macs for digital photography and the QuickTake helped them play a role in creating that market. By the time it was dropped, big names in photography were producing consumer digicams - it was probably sensible for Apple not to go head to head with names like Nikon, Olympus and Fuji, or even Sony (who already had a name in video).
Bet you 50 Internets that the Poker app was withdrawn because they started getting negative publicity from the anti-gambling lobby. Meanwhile, i'm sure the news that iPod socks failed to set the world on fire will bring Apple's share price crashing (NB: they [i]were[/i] meant to protect iPods - TFA makes it sound like Apple was trying to break into the hosiery market!)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Why ding Apple for products they tried and failed with, when the format iPod Nano has changed on the last 3 or 4 versions. Tall and thin => Different tall and thin => square => tall and thin again. I don't think that Apple knows where it is going with this one.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"What are metrosexual-wannabes?"
Male Apple users.
nothing wrong with them whatsoever especially for the cold winter days ahead.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
um. so did the apple camera - and he killed that too. what's the difference?
I didn't know they existed before reading this article, but I still miss them. :(
It is normal to have some failures on the way to success. That's what evolution is all about. Developing products is evolutionary. That's reality. For those who complain about failures it just makes me think they have never tried.
metrosexual-wannabes"
Hmm, considering that metrosexual men are people who use make-up to look better and non-metrosexual men are people who don't use make-up... what are metrosexual-wannabes?
Men who use makeup in a way that doesn't make them look better, such as rodeo clowns, Bob Costas, Juggalos and the like.
Worst Apple product ever is still 'on the market'. iTunes.
I hope they are only being paid the standard blogger rate of $10. Because you get what you pay for.
Dude;
Apple III
Mac II FX
eWorld
Newton
ANYTHING under Spindler
The Cube
Taco's review of the iPod
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
eMate
eWorld
Geoport
Quadra 840av/ Centris 660 Av (ever try and use that 'av' part?)
MacTV
Anything from the Performa line
Anything from the LC line
All mini tower cases from the Quadra 800 to the PowerMac 9500
QT3 (the dawn of apple removing functionality from their products)
ADC
'Universal' iPod dock (anything but)
I'm sure I could go on but that's what occurs to me off the top of my head.
Any company that is trying to expand its product line will have false starts from time to time. What separates the good companies from the bad is at what point they realize they've got a loser and drop it, or know it's going to be a winner and pile all their resources behind a big push.
Apple made a digital camera years ahead of its time, but almost no one has heard of it. The idea we know now was obviously a good one that would be a big hit with the consumer, but the technology just wasn't good enough, so they dropped it. They didn't sink a boatload of money into marketing and pump out millions of units. (they also made a moderately successful laser printer very early on, as well as many other things that, if brought new to market today, would be a huge success, but the stars just weren't aligned yet)
But then you have recent flops like the zune and playbook, products that we must assume had some market research done on them that was turd-polished and presented to the decision makers as "the next huge hit". So they plowed money and resources into it and it went over like a lead balloon. It costs the company not just money, but also resources like engineering teams' time and also damages your brand. I have to wonder when I see that, is it a case of a project manager ignoring reality and pushing real hard, or knowing it's going to flop and pushing ahead anyway, bad analysis, or just plain lack of quality market research, that leads to these sorts of flops?
Making mistakes isn't all that big of a deal. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying. Backing your mistakes and belligerently trying to pump cash into them to create success, that's a problem. "Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em."
Of course there's another option. With something like the Zune it may have been a case of "we figure this has only a 30% chance of gaining traction, but we NEED a response to the ipod, and this is the best thing we've got". In cases like that, even bad odds must be played, eve if a little bit out of desperation. They had the money to spare, it wasn't a "if we go BIG and this flops, it could put us out of business", so it was a valid option, even if it doesn't appear to make sense.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Sounds a little like "wannabe hipsters." They do stuff when it gets popular to do so.
... in Microsoft's corner: Win95, Bob, Zune, Vista, big serious backed-by-the-bosses stuff.
what are metrosexual-wannabes?
Men who apply make-up and don't end up looking better.
I liked the Newton, but it was too expensive for me at the time. Fortunately, I had a friend who had one, so I got to play with it. I really liked the "graffiti" writing-to-text feature. Palm also had a similar writing-to-text feature. I still have an old Palm T3, that I used for many years. I'd still be using it except the only way to exchange data between it and anything else is with SD cards (well, it does have IR communications, but nothing else I use does.) I am mostly happy with the Android tablet I now have, but I really miss the writing-to-text feature that worked so very well for me on the T3 and the Newton.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Of course you can. You just have to ask for a "Mac mini", and then you can plug in a few Xbox 360 controllers and play Steam games on it.
The camera was, in the end, rebranded Fuji product. They were good but not exceptional, in a growing market made up of people that had photography and not computing as a business. The rest of the items were trash on the fringe with nothing to make them worth keeping, they seemed like a good idea at the time. The article is a filler with none of the real Apple product dumps, like OpenDoc and Pippin, showing up.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Well, one difference is that Apple made Newtons. Quicktakes were just re-branded Fuji digital cameras.
I suppose this isn't really germane to this conversation, but I wanted to point it out somewhere...
+1 Disagree