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Friday, March 31, 2006 8:54 AM PT Posted by Andrew Brandt
A Brief History of Apple's Failed, But Innovative, Products
This morning, Forbes.com published an article they're calling Apple's Biggest Duds, which compiles seven of the company's failures. While the ill-fated products Lisa, Newton, and Macintosh Portable are obvious chioces for dud products, the story also includes in its dud list several non-product Apple-related items: Apple's previous CEOs John Sculley and Gil Amelio, and the lawsuit between Apple and archrival Microsoft over the user interface of their competing operating systems.As a guy who grew up using Apple computers in school and at friends' homes, and who owned his first Macintosh at age 15, I was a bit surprised that the list of duds only included five products in total, one of which was the vaporware Taligent operating system, which never saw the light of day. I know of several more Apple products that didn't go over very well in the marketplace when they were first released, mainly because they were so ahead of the curve. How about a short list of these Apple "duds" which inspired future successes?
The 20th Anniversary Macintosh: How many people remember this $7500 boondoggle? Engineers at Apple in 1997 designed and introduced a truly revolutionary product -- a system with its own, built in flat panel display, something many PC makers emulated over the next decade -- but the somewhat underpowered all-in-one computer, with limited expansion options and unacceptably slow data ports, was priced out of the reach of most potential customers. Only 12,000 were built, according to LowEndMac.com. Hey, it was a great idea though: Look at the modern iMac, with its 20-inch widescreen LCD display, to see the 20th Anniversary Mac's futuristic (and decidedly whiter) descendant.
- The A/UX Operating System: Apple in 1988 released what was considered, at the time, to have been the easiest to install and use implementation of Unix on the planet, based in part on the AT&T and BSD Unix distributions. A/UX ran side by side with the standard Macintosh System 6, and later System 7 operating systems. Its command-line commands mirrored those used by Unix, and later Linux, and some A/UX applications could run under either operating system. Sound familar? It was no surprise that Apple killed the project in 1995, the same year that Microsoft launched its Windows 95 operating system: Apple was hurting more than ever, and needed to refocus its efforts to compete. But A/UX did have a future: MacOS X introduced its own Unix-like shell system to Mac users. By many accounts, the melding of Unix-like commands into the Mac OS in the 2001 release of OS X was a tremendous leap forward in operating system design. It's a shame it took so many years to do it, but you can't argue with the results.
Apple's "Hockey Puck" USB Mouse: What happens when you over-design a product that literally all users of your product will hold in their hands? Few will argue that the original Apple USB Mouse, which shipped with the first iMac computers, was a revolutionary design. But many will argue that it was possibly the worst-designed mouse, as far as ergonomics go, ever to see the light of day (though some people simply loved it). It was, for me anyway, literally painful to use for extended periods. It's no small wonder that the hockey puck mouse quickly fell out of favor with a majority of iMac users---and almost instantly generated a market for better-designed third-party input devices that worked with the iMac. When you consider the latest mouse innovation to come out of Apple's engineering department is a mouse that lets folks use (gasp!) two buttons (though they're not literally buttons, but touch-sensitive areas), you have to wonder just who's running the show over there. Contextual mouse clicks are a done deal, folks. Just admit defeat on the one-button mouse front, and move on.
The Mac Cube: Apple released the fanless, convection-cooled, 7.7-inch-square Power Mac G4 Cube in the summer of 2000. It was a remarkable engineering feat, compressing so many heat-generating components into such a small space. Unfortunately, the convection cooling didn't work all that well, and many Mac Cube users complained that the hot box crashed or hung repeatedly, or simply shut off without warning, as a result of overheating. But many other system vendors took note of its high-end graphics capabilities and -- more importantly -- the fact that the computer was quiet --- really quiet. It set the stage for fanless cooling in PCs large and small, and showed the world a future where computers would leave our office desks and move to the living room, to become part of the entertainment center.
By all means, Forbes' list of Apple duds isn't complete. For a more comprehensive look at other failed Apple products, check out Insanely Great's 10 Worst Macs Ever Built and LowEndMac's Road Apples. But in the end, a history of high-profile failures does not mean that Apple is on the road to ruin. To the contrary, the high number of failures indicates a willingness to take big risks---and reap, on occasion, huge rewards.
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When you consider the latest mouse innovation to come out of Apple's engineering department is a mouse that lets folks use (gasp!) two buttons (though they're not literally buttons, but touch-sensitive areas), you have to wonder just who's running the show over there. Contextual mouse clicks are a done deal, folks. Just admit defeat on the one-button mouse front, and move o
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HAHAHAHA.. Contextual Menus have been on Macs for SOOO LONG..
get a clue. The built in context menu has made Windows a disorienting mess.. as devs RELY on context menu.. slippery slope...
you forgot the 'apple pippin'... ever heard of it? It was apple's attempt at a game machine released before the nintendo 64 and allowed users to surf the web (before *cough* dreamcast *cough* dreamcast)...
It was innovative but was released at a really bad time (before the 64 when the PSONE was flourishing) made worse by the fact that apple had no decent games.
I would bet... if you ask Thomas Edison if he had more than three inventions fail, he'd laugh at you.
Silly.
Mac's suck and Apple is a money-grubbing scumbag company. go buy another Ipud ($400 walkman) morons!
I really miss the apple monitor: i.e. not the display but the part of ROM Woz programmed in assembler with a user accessible hex register.
If you like peripherals, how bout the ProDrive, an insanely external hard drive, the first of its kind for a desktop pc, the Lisa-1. And hackers, in those days a subtle and admiring moniker for programmers with daring, marveled at Lisa's purported 1 million lines of code comprising the OS. Hey, my doctor's office still has the transcriptionist type in a Clipper app that boots into 618 KB-RAM; gotta watchout for that 640K barrier.
Wanna wierd floppy drive? how bout a variable speed drive designed based on planetary theory and polar coordinate vectors like Lisa-1 sported.
Like writing code in binary based vectors, then doing your own translation to hex? Try Apple //e shape tables; you could design them on standard quadrille paper with a pencil before beginning to write your binary. Say, What's SGI up to these days? those folks adored vector thruput.
Like user accessible surfacemount chip technology? Compare Mac-1's requisite 22" custom ceramic screwdriver for accessing the nonuserserviceable MB.
Want a good laser printer? Heck, hP had to emulate Apple who was years in advance.
Want a company with a feedback loop to management? How about the DEC hosted live BBS session geared to save the Lisa from XT's market surge, though for standardization sake you had to have a new Hayes 500 kbps modem.
Say, what ever happened to the nice man who sold sugarwater for a living, then opted for the powerPC chip development inlieu of the magical 6s on the early ApplesMacs.
And like NeXT, CloudNine music productions morphed into, well, RFID; take it to the vet. Hard to figure why people do that to domestic animals.
Wierd that Apple became like IBM, all proprietary, even though with Reagan's help IBM for years fought "graymarket" PC copies from Asia; gotto thank MS for keeping MSDOS in the quasi public sector so a wide developerbase could produce standardized modular hardware and apps
Macs and PCs are identical except for the Macs extremely inefficient and poorly designed OS. I don't know any computer professionals who prefer Mac. Mac is the ultimate example of form over function - for twice the price.
how about this, Brentt, take a good hard look at educational institutions ie colleges, and tell me which classes/programs use macs. more over i am a "computer professional" and although i was raised a windows man. i have, years ago, switched to the apple platform. lets see your pc run 3 OS's each on a seperate network adapter as well as a full set server on three different displays all at once. and then to add more have it run without fail or crash for more than 3 months straight. when you manage to do that let me and the rest of the mac community know.
bullzeye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ERROR REVISION: make that modem 0.5 kbps.
It was in the years before BBS software existed, though there were information services online already. One chapter in a musty old book we are glad to close.
macs are definitely overpriced, but maybe that will change soon.
MACS are the greatest computers ever... stop the suffering! ----- Get a MAC!
everybody knows that linux is the best OS for computers. If Apple have invested on Linux systems and its programs earlier they could be more successful.
The problem is that people is so silly that they believe in what TV says in any situation...
life's life...
I happened by this thread and couldn't believe my eyes.
Scott said "I would bet... if you ask Thomas Edison if he had more than three inventions fail, he'd laugh at you."
Well, I would bet...if you ask T.E. if he had more than three inventions fail, and he answers you, you're either dead yourself, or you "see dead people." LOL!
I'm not picking on you Scott, your's just happens to be the funny example among a host of sentences gone awry. Gentlemen, take time to mind your grammer. Has writing code erased your ability to write in proper English?
Hey genius, it's "grammar"....
loooooserssss your're argueing about computers. pc's are crying because they are only used by old balding men. (and sometimes women...) mac's are mad because they are used by little rich teens. now get out of your moms basement...
English Nazi, your post has so many grammatical (and spelling) errors I don't know where to begin. The fact that you are accusing others of not having the ability to write in proper English is ironic and hilarious.