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."

No Pippin

[Arab]

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?

Innovation

[tomalpha]

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 [businessweek.com] 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]

You have to take risks

[second_coming]

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.

Re:Actually ...

[mrbluze]

I don't see any product which shouldn't belong to this island ...

You're right, actually. Most of those products are reasonably good ideas, the main failing was blatant price-gouging. Most of them failed because the competition was already there. Apple relies on coming out with novel products at ridiculous but nonetheless irresistible prices as far ahead as possible from the competition. They have done it several times with spectacular success, but this is a weakness Apple has always had. They generally cannot make a product that is better and cheaper than the competition.

G4 Cube

[Anonymous Coward]

I was expecting the G4 cube to be there.

Re:2 Major Fails Missing

[mrpacmanjel]

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.

Generally it's a shit article - there are more interesting products they could have featured (as mentioned in other posts).

Hardly epic fails

[itsdapead]

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!)

Re:Hardly epic fails

[DingerX]

It's all backwards: they are all epic fails, except for the Rokr. The Rokr demonstrated that Apple could generate a ton of interest and press in the Cellphone space, that people wanted such a device, but that the existing operator/handset maker dynamic was so broken, it required a radical new approach. In effect, when Apple went to negotiate iPhone terms with the carriers, they could point to the ROKR, and say "we tried it your way".

Best of all, Apple got Motorola to license the tech from them.

Worst Apple product ever

[PACSFerret]

Worst Apple product ever is still 'on the market'. iTunes.