Inventory Apple’s 7 biggest failed hardware products in history
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Today, Apple is associated with iPods, iPhones, iPads, MacBooks – game-changing products so successful that they change the way we live. But even the most valuable company in the world has had its fair share of marketing blunders and hardware blunders.
Apple wasn’t always as profitable as it is today, and the failure of some of its early products doomed the history of most other tech companies. Here, we take a look back at some of Apple’s most notorious hardware failures. See if you agree, and let us know in the comments of any other dubious Apple devices you think deserve to be named and shamed.
1 Apple III
The Apple III was the result of a project started in 1978 after Apple feared that the popularity of the Apple II, introduced in 1977, would eventually wane. Originally designed for hobbyists, the Apple II was surprisingly popular with small businesses, but Apple’s realization that IBM was developing a PC aimed specifically at business users only made Apple more eager to consolidate its hold on the market. Therefore, the Apple III had to be the complete system—everything for all users—and a cost-effective addition to any office or home.
A committee of engineers was assigned to the Apple III project, making it the first Apple computer not designed by Steve Wozniak. As it turns out, everyone has their own idea of what features the Apple III should have, and it’s all included. The project was supposed to be completed in 10 months, but ended up taking two years.
In November 1980, the Apple III was finally launched, with a starting price of $3,495, twice the performance of the Apple II, and twice the memory of the Apple II (128KB of memory). It was the first Apple computer to have a built-in floppy disk drive, and ran a new operating system called Apple SOS, with an advanced memory management system and a hierarchical file system.
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Unfortunately, none of these innovations could save the Apple III from its flawed chassis design, and Apple was forced to recall the first 14,000 machines produced due to severe overheating problems, in part because Steve Jobs Stick to not including fans in the case. The problem is so severe that thermal expansion often causes chips to pop out of place. Apple even told customers to lift their machine a few inches above the table, then lower it to reposition it. A revised model called the Apple III Plus was finally released in 1983, addressing widespread failures, but the damage to the computer’s reputation was already done.
The Apple III was discontinued in April 1984, and its successor was dropped from Apple’s lineup in September 1985. The company sold an estimated 65,000-75,000 Apple III computers, with the Apple III Plus totaling about 120,000. Jobs later said the company lost “infinite, immeasurable” money on the Apple III, whose poor reception led thousands of American businesses to buy the IBM PC.
2 Apple Lisa
Released in 1983, Lisa officially stands for “Local Integrated Software Architecture,” but is actually an antonym invented later to accommodate the name of Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa. Apple positioned it as a replacement for business computers and the Apple II. While previous computers relied on text-based interfaces and keyboard input, the Lisa was the first personal computer to feature a graphical UI and mouse functionality, an interface innovation Jobs first saw while visiting Xerox Parc’s research lab in Silicon Valley .
Still, with a starting price of just under ten grandes (about $29,905 by today’s standards), the Lisa was prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest families, and the computer failed. By 1986, Apple had only sold about 100,000 units, and the entire Lisa platform was discontinued. Apple was even forced to dispose of about 2,700 Lisas in Utah landfills. It is believed that fewer than 100 Lisa computers exist today.
Looking back, Jobs felt that Apple lost its way. “First of all, it’s too expensive—about ten,” he accepted in 1985
Said in an interview with Playboy. “We got the Fortune 500 and tried to sell to those big companies, whereas our roots were selling to people. Jobs was actually kicked out of the Lisa project in September 1980 because of his volatile temperament, but as fate would have it, He then joined the team that eventually developed the first Macintosh.
3 Apple Newtons
In May 1992, Apple CEO John Sculley introduced the Newton MessagePad to a frenzied CES audience. He calls the sleek black handheld a personal digital assistant (PDA), and it’s about the size of a VHS tape. The Newton PDA is a whole new category of device, he said. It comes with a stylus that can be used to take notes, store contacts and manage calendars – features that are standard on any modern smartphone, but were revolutionary in 1993. Users could take it out, send a fax, and put it back in their pocket without ever getting near their desktop computer.
However, the real killer feature is its handwriting recognition. Or at least, that’s Apple’s original plan. Unbeknownst to viewers, it barely worked. Fourteen months later, Apple introduced the first Newton MessagePad for $900, but by then other companies had brought competing PDAs to market, and the Newton still had major problems translating handwritten notes into text.After negative reviews, it was widely mocked in the press—the comic Dounesbury spent a week satirizing its handwriting recognition problems, and the device even became
A laughing stock on The Simpsons.
The Doonesbury cartoon satirizes Newton (Image: Global News Syndicate)
Apple worked hard to make successive versions of Newton a success, and with the release of Newton OS 2.0 in March 1996, handwriting recognition was significantly improved. But it was too little, too late. The brand couldn’t shake its poor debut performance. Worse, Steve Jobs hated it for two reasons: It came with a stylus (“God gave us ten stylus,” Jobs would say, “and let’s not invent another one.” 1997 After returning to Apple in 1999, Jobs pushed the product line to be killed. It was discontinued a year later.
The Newton went through eight versions of the hardware, and Apple spent $100 million on its development. Only an estimated 200,000 were sold. But it’s not all waste. The same ideas behind the PDA would eventually bring us the iPhone.
4 Macintosh TV
In an era where watching streaming video on your phone or PC isn’t even noticeable, Apple’s original computer-TV hybrid now seems like the solution to the problem. But when it launched in 1993, the idea of watching TV on a Mac was way ahead of its time.
The black chassis of the Macintosh TV was essentially an LC 520 fused with a 14-inch Sony Trinitron CRT. It came with a CD-ROM drive and remote control, while a built-in tuner card with connecting coax allowed broadcasts to be displayed in 16-bit color. Unfortunately, users have to choose between watching TV or using their Mac. It couldn’t display a TV in a window (picture-in-picture hadn’t been invented yet), and it couldn’t capture video, though users could save still frames of the broadcast as PICT files.
On paper, the Macintosh TV offered faster performance than the standalone LC 520, thanks to the 32MHz Motorola 68030 processor. Actually though it is bottlenecked by the 16MHz bus. In addition, 5MB of RAM can only be upgraded to 8MB, while the maximum capacity of the LC 520 is 36MB. At $2,099 at launch, Apple’s TV-Mac mashup wasn’t cheap, and it failed to catch on. It was discontinued in 1995, two years after its release, when Apple shipped just 10,000 units.
5 Pippin
Launched in 1996 with the help of Japanese game company Bandai, the Pippin was Apple’s infamous sting on CD-ROM-based consoles, but it was poorly marketed, poorly supported, and overpriced. The Pippin arrived at the height of the console wars, before home computers became commonplace. Apple’s ill-fated plan was to change the market dynamics with a hybrid computing/gaming device.
On paper, the Pippin is just that, with some unique features that all other console competitors lack. Based on the Macintosh architecture of the early to mid-90s, the Pippin runs a stripped-down version of Mac OS 7, making it faster than other consoles. It also comes with a veritable selection of ports, not only supporting modem and printer connections, but also giving users the ability to connect external peripherals like keyboards and mice.
Unfortunately, Apple’s intention to give Pippin users a computer-like experience in a console form factor was part of its downfall. At $650, the Pippin is about $400 more expensive than key competitors like the PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Despite the Pippin’s fast performance, competing consoles have an advantage in software, many game catalogs are extensive, and due to poor third-party developer support from Bandai, the Pippin has only released 25 games is a relatively unknown name in the community.
Rather than releasing Pippin itself, Apple intends to make the platform an open standard by licensing the technology to third parties, similar to the licensed Mac cloning programs of the late 90s. However, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he blocked the company’s cloning efforts and subsequently shut down development of the Pippin, causing Bandai to discontinue all models of the Pippin in mid-1997. Production. Apple had hoped to ship half a million consoles a year, but only sold about 42,000 in total over the device’s short lifespan.
6 20th Anniversary Macintosh
Released in March 1997 to commemorate Apple’s 20th anniversary, not the Mac’s, the “20th Anniversary Macintosh,” or TAM as it was known, may seem odd by today’s standards, but it’s a Mac in its own right. A unique machine.
Its slim, upright “all-in-one” design includes several novel features, including a built-in 12.1-inch LCD flat-panel display, vertically mounted CD-ROM and floppy drives, and an integrated TV/FM tuner. The TAM runs a modified version of Mac OS 7.6.1 to control these functions, while a 250MHz PowerPC 603e CPU and 64MB of RAM ensure performance. It even has a custom Bose sound system with two included speakers and a subwoofer built into the external power supply.
Delivered to customers via direct door-to-door service from a tuxedo concierge, the TAM was marketed as an executive machine, but at $7,500, executive pricing proved too poor to sell well. In its final weeks on the market, Apple slashed the price of the TAM to $2,000, but that only pissed off those who had already paid full price, and Apple was forced to pay off early adopters with new PowerBooks.
Only 12,000 TAMs were produced, many of which were never sold. The system lasted just 12 months in Apple’s lineup and was discontinued a year later in March 1998, shortly before the launch of the iMac G3, which offered similar specs but with a larger screen and cost just $1,000. $299.
7 Power Mac G4 Cube
Unveiled on July 19, 2000, the Power Mac G4 Cube is a marvel of engineering and a statement piece of Apple’s industrial design. Less than a quarter the size of most PCs of the time, the fanless machine represented a whole new class of computers, featuring a powerful G4 PowerPC processor, a discrete Nvidia video card, an AirPort card for Wi-Fi and DVD recorder, all neatly packaged in an elegant eight-inch cube suspended in a clear molded acrylic case. Steve Jobs called it “the coolest computer ever built,” and from first impressions, it’s hard to disagree.
But the Cube was doomed almost from the start. Upgradability is limited – a handle on the bottom of the Cube allows the user to pull the interior out of the case, providing access to three RAM slots and space to insert an AirPort card, but no PCI slots, and proprietary video cards shrunk to fit Tightly enclosed spaces. Even by Apple standards, it’s expensive. The lowest-priced model costs $1,799, which is $200 more than the upgradeable Power Mac G4.
Apple sold less than 150,000 units in 349 days, and on July 3, 2001, Apple announced an indefinite suspension of Cube production. “Cube owners loved their cubes,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of product marketing at the time. “But most customers decided to buy our mighty Power Mac G4 mini-tower. Apple CEO Tim Cook later described the G4 Cube as “a spectacular failure.”
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