In terms of market capitalization, Apple currently ranks as the most valuable company in the world. However, the company behind the wildly popular iPhones and iMac-s has, over time, come out with flop products too – some of which have been listed below.
Last November, the media was all abuzz with how the newly launched iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C were breaking all types of initial sales records in the Indian markets. On the global level too, Apple Inc. has every reason to be pleased with the revenue figures generated by its major gadgets – right from iPhones and iPads, to iPod Touch and Apple TV. However, that does not mean that the company has never come up with disappointing products. Here are twelve Apple products that turned out to be humongous flops:
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Macintosh TV – In 1993, Apple planned to release a gadget that combined the functionality of a television and a computer, but the end-product – the Macintosh TV – was horribly bad. There were complaints about problems in the TV tuner card, while the performance of the device as a computer was not up to the mark either. The price tag of Macintosh TV was rather exorbitant too, and people stayed well away from it.
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Pippin – The range of iPhone and iPad apps in India and abroad is nothing short of phenomenal – but Apple’s foray into the video gaming market was shockingly dismal. The Pippin gaming console was developed on the outdated Mac OS 7 system, and its game library was surprisingly limited. The processor speed of the console was well below 70 MHz, which was another disadvantage. With Nintendo and PlayStation starting to expand their user bases worldwide, the loss-making Pippin had to be withdrawn.
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iMac USB Mouse – Launched in 1998, this strangely-shaped USB mouse was a far cry from the user-friendly Magic Mouse that is so popular at present. The roundish structure of the mouse made it difficult to operate, and its responsiveness was not always reliable either. Single-touch input gadgets are a specialty of Apple Inc, but this one simply did not work.
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Newton – When an ambitious line of PDA devices has comic strips dedicated to it – you can well imagine how bad it was. The Newton operating system came out in 1993, and boasted of unique handwriting recognition features as its standout feature. Ironically, this property turned out to be Newton’s bane, with the recognition often being faulty and erroneous. No wonder Doonesbury cartoon found inspiration from it!
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PowerPC – The decision of Steve Jobs to collaborate with IBM to create the PowerPC central processing unit (CPU) is one of the worst ever in the entire timeline of Apple. The haphazardly put together computing platform supposedly had chips with high-end megahertz properties – but its sales figures, after a steady start, fell away drastically. To its credit, Apple kept trying to revive Power PC till 2005, after which it simply had to give up the ghost. The Intel processors had moved way ahead by that time.
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Ping – Hyped to the skies, Ping was one of the biggest disappointments in the domain of music-related products from Apple. Critics from iPhone app development companies worldwide pointed at the absence of playlist-sharing features as the biggest drawback of Ping. In essence, all that it did was recommend such music to people that were already present in the iTunes store. Let alone being a big breakthrough, Ping was not even looked upon as necessary.
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Macintosh (20th Anniversary Edition) – Progressive reductions in price were not enough to save this poorly conceived product from turning out into a turkey. Launched to mark the 20th anniversary of Apple Inc, the limited edition Mac had side speakers, a slim LCD screen, and thoroughly inconvenient vertical disc drives. It looked ungainly, and most people did not consider it to be worth buying.
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QuickTake – QuickTake was Apple’s attempt at making a digital camera, and to be fair, its technical specifications were pretty impressive. The shutter speed was good, the battery performance (three AA batteries) was satisfactory, and the overall design was simplistic yet elegant. What really killed off the product was the intense competition from companies like Canon and Kodak – which offered similar cameras, at significantly lower prices. Launched in 1994, QuickTake went off the shelves after three years of struggle.
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Copland – In the mid-90s, Apple’s iPhone app development in India or other countries was not strong, the company was reeling under a couple of major flops – and the time was not quite right to bring out the futuristic Copland vaporware tool. Copland was intended to provide superior multitasking features and smarter memory management, along with seamless integration with most Mac devices. The response to the release of the beta version of Copland (in 1995) was lukewarm at best, and the full-version – released much later – was a predictable flop. To its credit, Apple managed to use elements of Copland in its successful Mac OS 8.
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iPod Photo – People who love music on the go swear by the Apple iPod, but the response to the iPod Photo was not half as enthusiastic. Billed as a unique video iPod, the shockingly low-resolution of the images on the device was the biggest factor behind its failure. The 40 GB iPod Photo was more expensive than the regular iPod too, and was, understandably, not worth purchasing.
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G4 Cube – Make no mistake, the concept of placing a full-feature Mac inside a eight inch cube did not lack in the novelty factor. The design of the G4 Cube – the handiwork of Jonathan Ive – won decent reviews and a couple of awards too. After all the hype and hoopla about the G4 Cube, people finally noticed its price tag – which was an unbelievable $1599! A classic example of a good enough product, destroyed by a wrong pricing strategy.
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Lisa – The year was 1983, the Macintosh had not yet made an appearance, and Steve Jobs and his colleagues had high hopes from Apple Lisa – the first Apple computer with a graphic user interface (GUI). The strategy of naming the computer after Jobs’ own daughter did not prove to be a lucky charm – partly due to its chunky design features, and mostly due to its extremely high price (a shade under $10000). Thank goodness, Jobs managed to ensure that ‘1984 will not be like 1984’ – and company returned to profit-making ways, with Mac.
While the Apple TV is making waves in the international markets, its initial version (the first-generation Apple TV) was a flop as well. Macintosh Portable, which is often considered the precursor of the modern-day Apple laptops, did not find much favor among end-users either. The iPod 3G turned out to be too minimalistic for its own good. Like every big company, Apple Inc. made products that bombed in the markets – but the company learnt from such mistakes, and of late, flop products from the company have become pretty much unheard of!
Hussain Fakhruddin
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