The Island of Lost Apple Products 105
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."
Smart Case (Score:1)
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.
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I like the smart case, given it's really expensive for a bit of plastic/leather and some magnets but it's functional.
The only reason I stopped using it was because I got a Logitec keyboard case.
OpenDoc (Score:2)
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.
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Yeah, everything they seem to have listed is all relatively new.
Pippin, MacTV, Copland, Cube, eWorld [wikipedia.org], What ever happened to ClarusWorks after it got spun off?
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And most things listed seemed to be described with a voice of "Look at how awesome this could've been if those idiot consumers would've only realized it!".
I see no evidence of that attitude. Here's a summary from the article's actual content:
1. QuickTake Camera: Panned because it was so low res.
2. Cards App: No fawning, just noting that it's an odd and unpopular service.
3. FaceTime: Critical of Apple for not opening it like they said they would.
4. iPod Hi-Fi: They say it's real nice, but way overpriced (and bulky).
5. Texas Hold-Em: "Solid Poker App" that Apple stopped updating and removed.
6. iPod Socks: Completely baffling.
7. Bluetooth Headset: "sounded 'lik
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ClarisWorks became AppleWorks, which was sort of like Apple's Microsoft Works and stagnated for years, especially after Pages and Keynote came out. The Intel switch was the final nail in the coffin for it. It definitely had some loyalists, though; many seemed to be K-12 educators.
I think many of the iWork people came from Gobe Productive, which in turn was comprised of many ClarisWorks exiles. I guess the whole thing has come full circle in some ways. AppleWorks was such a kludge of legacy code that ope
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Claris Works became Apple Works became iWorks which became Pages/Numbers/Keynote/Bento.
Nooo! (Score:2)
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I thought it was another gallery filled with Lisa [wikipedia.org],
I apologize to all my devoted and beloved readers!
Re:Nooo! (Score:5, Funny)
On behalf of both of them, your apology is accepted.
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No Pippin (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Pippin took a new name: Mac mini (Score:2)
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try playing Letterpress sometime. Totally makes gamecenter worth it.
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The real fail era is missing:
Macintosh TV
AU/X
CyberDog
eWorld
Lisa
etc.
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I like Game Center, especially the worldwide rankings.
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"Always look on the bright side of life"
2 Major Fails Missing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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or newton.. or puck mouse. or a whole bunch of other real fails.
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Not to mention the Newton and the Pippin.
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So instead they prioritised "Lost Apple Products" that still exist!
Re:2 Major Fails Missing (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
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Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now to "making sure the idea isn't too ludicrous". That's where making Metro the UI for Windows 8 comes in...
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What's your point? I could shit in a box and call it innovation; look at Surface.
Does your sh!t in a box have an optional keyboard?
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What's your point? I could shit in a box and call it innovation; look at Surface.
Does your sh!t in a box have an optional keyboard?
Now you're talking innovation.
You have to take risks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mentions boring iPhone apps, but no apple newton? (Score:4, Informative)
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Newton was too much too soon.
At least some of DaVinci's flying machines wouldn't have worked.
That other guy didn't invent the plane, because he didn't have an engine. He invented the glider.
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"Newton was a product that technology hadn't managed to catch up with."
That is the epitome of what Jobs was interested in. Wait until the tech and the price are at the right spot for mass consumption, then polish and sell it at a premium. As cool as the Newton was it wasn't any of those things. Too expensive, not enough muscle and not enough polish.
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I suppose this isn't really germane to this conversation, but I wanted to point it out somewhere...
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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 n
G4 Cube (Score:2, Insightful)
I was expecting the G4 cube to be there.
Re:G4 Cube (Score:5, Funny)
It had a feature that I've yet to see on another computer, that's how advanced it was.
Surely I'm not the only one who wants to fry an egg for breakfast while checking my morning e-mail and feeds.
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I also liked the G4 Cube. And I still get a laugh out of one reviewer's comment on how fast it was compared to other PCs at the time: "Where's the drama?"
Title correction (Score:1)
"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.
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Actually the development of iPod/iTunes is where life starts. We could have aborted AAPL anywhere before that and Jobs would have just wound up teaming up with Woz to start a brand new company, launch the iPod and iTunes, and it would have turned out just the same. Companies don't burst into life at inception; they have to gestate first.
It would be more accurate to call it ... (Score:3)
... 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.
Its called commercial innovation (Score:2)
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.
Hardly epic fails (Score:5, Insightful)
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!)
Hey, I like my iPod Socks (Score:2)
nothing wrong with them whatsoever especially for the cold winter days ahead.
Re:Hardly epic fails (Score:4, Insightful)
Best of all, Apple got Motorola to license the tech from them.
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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".
I think that one fails Hanlon's Razor. More likely, Apple were terrified that the availability of music players on mobile phones would trash sales of the iPod and tried to do something about it in a hurry. Also. maybe they got something useful out of Motorola in return.
Anyway, if you make an Epic Fail on purpose does that really make it a Huge Success? Risking the iTunes brand like that was a pretty stupid thing to do, and last time I looked Apple were still shifting useful numbers of iPods despite every
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Anyway, if you make an Epic Fail on purpose does that really make it a Huge Success?
It does if it works. If it works, it's a good plan.
Risking the iTunes brand like that was a pretty stupid thing to do
Like what? Most people never heard of the ROKR.
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itsdapead [slashdot.org] wrote:
Don't you mean Hanlon's RAZR? (or, maybe, Hanlon's ROKR?)
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From memory they were a Kodak DCS100 in a compact shell. (The Kodak DCS family were originally a Nikon DSL camera body with a digital back, the Quicktake used the DCS chipset.).
iPod Nano (Score:2)
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.
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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.
But they know what they are doing. If someone has a tall and thin iPod Nano then you can buy a different tall and thin as a birthday or Christmas present. And then you can buy a square one as a birthday present. And then a tall and thin one again. Lots of iPods are sold that way.
The iPod Classic, on the other hand, is something that you buy for yourself because it is exactly what you want (or you don't buy it), it's not something you buy as a present. So there is no need to change it, because if you are
I miss iPod Socks (Score:2)
It is normal (Score:3)
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.
Worst Apple product ever (Score:1, Insightful)
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Worse by what measure?
Installations? no.
Users? no
integration? no
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Have you ever enjoyed using it? Nope, it is about as fun as Sony's old NetMD software and about as fast, stable and non-intrusive.
Would you recommend that others use it if they didn't have to use it with their iDevice? Nope. There is better software out there for playing and managing your audio. Apple knows this, but they don't really care, because it is first and foremost a device management platform. Screw everything else.
Who gets to write these crappy article? (Score:3)
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
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I have a Quadra 8100AV for a while, second hand, I used the 'AV' to run dual displays.
My boyfriend at the time (now husband) came home one day to tell me how Windows 95 supported dual displays and it was awesome and I said - oh, my Mac does that now with System 7.5.x, grabbed a second monitor from my Centris 610 and showed him. He's been a mac convert ever since (and the Centris pretty much never got it's monitor back).
makes sense (Score:2)
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
And, For Something Different ... (Score:2)
An article in need of a pay check (Score:2)
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.
Re:Actually ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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First iPhone, First iPod.
Both those devices where better over all then the competitor.
the iPhone, while a Prada copy, almost no one had heard of the Prada, and the iPhone was smaller and better integrated.
The iPod, once it cane to windows, was far superior to other devices becasue ti was so easy to organize your music with iTunes and simply get it onto the device in a logical way.
Of course, it was the best GUI based computer, and they had the first PC.
And the first successful tablet.
I don't even own an Appl
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Of course, it was the best GUI based computer, and they had the first PC.
If by "first PC" you're referring to the Apple II (the Apple I was only a kit) then Commodore beat them by 6 months with the PET. If you're referring to the Macintosh then the IBM PC and Commodore 64 beat them by a few years.
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Even when the first iAnything came out, there were other products that did more, had better resolution, had more space, and supported formats other than aac & mp3.
It seems your your iPhone argument hinges on the fact that they had a touchscreen. Other phones were already running user initiated applications going way back to Palm and Windows devices. I just have to ask, exactly what was better about the iPhone? What is better about the iPhone now? The only thing you'll be able to say is that, subject
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Apple relies on coming out with novel products at ridiculous but nonetheless irresistible prices as far ahead as possible from the competition
What?
So the iPhone came before other smartphones?
The iPad was the first tablet?
The iPod was the first MP3 player?
The last thing that Apple did first was the original Mac. They got that technology for Xerox.
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"as far ahead as possible from the competition" implies that competition is there, which means Apple isn't first. Apple's strength is to find new, developing markets, and make something that blows everyone else out of the water.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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what are metrosexual-wannabes?
Men who apply make-up and don't end up looking better.