Apple has been riding high for a while now and days ago reported their best quarter ever.
But…things haven’t always been so positive for the boys and girls in Cupertino.
Wired has put together a story about some of Apple’s most notorious flops. Here, for your enjoyment, are these flops combined with a little extra research from Wikipedia:
The Newton:
Some consider the Newton the biggest flop of all for Apple. Released in 1993, the Newton was to re-invent the personal computer. It didn’t do that, but it did live in retail for 6-years.
Way longer than Steve Jobs would have allowed if he was at Apple during that period (the Newton was released while Steve was not with the company).
In fact, one of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was to sack the Newton Systems Group at Apple and kill the Newton product.
The Pippin:
In 1996 Apple entered the video game market.
Does anyone remember that?
The Pipped was co-marketed by Apple and toy maker Bandai who had been looking to enter the computer video game market. The goal of the Pippen was to be an inexpensive video game system that could also be a network computer.
By the time the Pippin was released, the big players in the video game market had already began dominating (the Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation and soon the Nintendo 64) and the Pippin didn’t really have a chance…not that it otherwise wold have.
Production of the Pippin was so limited that more keyboard and modem accessories were produced than actual systems.
In May 2006, the Pippen was named by PC World Magazine as one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.
In 1997 the Pippin was killed off.
The TAM (Twentieth Anniversary Mac):
The TAM, released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Apple (not of the Macintosh), was…unique. The TAM debuted in March of 1997, but was overpriced and underpowered.
Cool: It featured a 12-inch active matrix LCD display.
Crappy: It could only handle a video resolution of 800 x 600 with 16-bit colors depth and was not compatible with any version of the Mac OS released after 9.1.
The TAM was initially marketed as an elite system, but before long the price was reduced and the product was finally killed off roughly one year after its initial release.
Macintosh TV:
Introduced in late 1993, the Macintosh TV was Apple’s first attempt at combining a computer and a television, fusing an Apple Performa 520 computer with a Sony Trinitron television.
Its biggest problem? You couldn’t watch television in a window…on something called the Macintosh TV. Oops.
Only roughly 10,000 were ever produced and it was killed off in 1994.
G4 Cube:
What’s 8 x 8 x 8 and suspended in 10-inches of Lucite? The Apple Power Mac G4 Cube, of course.
Still sought after today by some as a collectors item, the G4 Cube was released in 2000 and featured a vertical slot-loading DVD-ROM or CD-RW drive and used a silent, fanless, convection-based cooling system.
Despite its award-winning design (by Jonathan Ive), the Cube was overpriced and sales were slow. Early Cube’s suffered from a design flaw that resulted in faint lines appearing in the clear plastic case.
In an attempt to increase sales, Apple dropped the price and bumped the specs but those moves didn’t help enough and the product was killed in 2001.
Apple IIc:
The initial Apple II was a giant, beige monster with lots of empty space inside.
Released in 1984, the Apple IIc was Apple’s fourth model in the Apple II series and technically was an Apple IIe in a smaller case. Much smaller, actually.
Weighing in at 7.5 pounds, the Apple IIc was considered a closed system as it lacked any internal expansions slots and direct motherboard access, but this fit the target audience for this machine–first-time users with little or no technical knowledge.
The Apple IIc “featured” one of the worst displays around, barely readable in low light, let alone bright light.
The Apple IIc was killed in 1988.
The ‘Hockey Puck’ Mouse:
Perhaps the worst mouse design ever, the ‘hockey puck’ mouse shipped with iMac G3 computers in May 1998.
The ‘hockey puck’ mouse was a USB mouse that featured a 2-foot cord that was just long enough to plug into the USB port on the iMac G3’s USB keyboard.
Not just ugly but also very uncomfortable to use, iMac G3 users with the ‘hockey puck’ mouse sometimes found themselves holding it upside down, a position where it was not so effective. Apple introduced the Apple Pro Mouse in 2000 and the ‘hockey puck’ mouse was killed shortly after.
Apple Lisa:
A follow-up to the Apple II, the Apple Lisa began life in 1978 as the Lisa project with the long-term goal being to create a powerful personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) targeted at business users.
The Apple Lisa was an ambitious system and in many ways was more advanced than the Macintosh, but featured a complex operating system and slow processor, resulting in it feeling sluggish.
Released in January 1983, the Lisa was one of the first commercial computers that used a GUI and mouse, but it was priced at nearly $10,000 (just over $20,000 in 2007 dollars).
Business users balked at the Lisa’s high price and instead opted to use IBM PC’s, already on its way to dominating business desktop computing.
The Macintosh was released in 1984 and received a big marketing push. Two more models of the Lisa appeared (the Lisa 2 and the Macintosh XL, which wasn’t in fact a Macintosh but a Lisa), but it was killed off in 1985.
[Via Wired]
Filed under: tech | Tagged: apple, flops, history, mac, tech
