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#1 2009-10-10 6:51 am
- Czachorski
- Member

- Registered: 2002-12-20
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12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
October 10, 2009 7:51 AM
Fun little read from Gizmodo on 12 failed Apple products. I wonder if anyone here had any of these?
Not everything that Apple touches turns to gold. Case in point—the Apple Pippin gaming system. Never heard of it? Don't worry, you are not alone. Like many of the other products on Oobject's list, it failed miserably.
While certainly not on par with these 12 products, the Apple TV might be the most recent Apple endeavor to fall well short of expectations. Clearly, there is no reason to spend a substantial sum of money on a box with limited functionality when there are much better options available.
Tracking the Tech
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#2 2009-10-11 6:45 am
- geekette28
- Southpaw Extraordinare

- Registered: 2006-12-26
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Haha the Newton - funny how Apple tried sort of tried to make a tablet and failed miserably. Speaking of failed Apple Tablets...
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/jo … /1300.html
Commit random acts of nerdiness and senseless acts of dorkdom
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#4 2009-10-11 7:16 am
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Indeed.
ie. Newton copy/paste >>> iPhone copy/paste
product design portfolio / brothers art
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PowerBook G4 1,33Ghz - dead ram slot Apple won't acknowledge
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#6 2009-10-11 10:01 am
- dv
- Negusa Negest
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
I had a Newton, an eMac, and Clarisworks.
I'll give him the Newton.
The eMac did fine in its target market.
Clarisworks/Appleworks was a competitor to Works, not Office, and it trounced it, thank you very much.
"Now commences the process of cutting off the head, which generally takes from an hour to an hour and a half by an expert workman with a sharp blade." -Reuben Delano, Wanderings and Adventures
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#7 2009-10-11 10:29 am
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Depends on the Newton. Comparing the first Newton the the last is like comparing the first iPod to the current models.
If I remember the TAM was always to be a limited edition thing and ALL of them sold.
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#8 2009-10-11 2:45 pm
- smilr
- Soldering Iron Savvy

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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
My dad had an eMac - worked fairly well, but he did have to have a component of the CRT monitor replaced under warranty.
Still works well as a word processor for my grandmother 
I personally own a Newton Messagepad 2100. Took many many notes on it during college. Smaller and lighter than a laptop (even with the external keyboard), far better battery life. I still consider it a better eBook reader than my iPhone or the Kindle. I've had a chance to handle the earlier newtons on occassion, and yes - they all sucked ass for processor speed and memory space. The 2100 however got it just about right.
A few elements from the Newton OS showed up in later apple products too
But damnit if the excellent Copy-Paste scheme isn't on the iPhone yet, a shame.
There is some solace in knowing that some things just can't be attained by throwing piles of money at them in the name of corporate greed. --CaptKevMan
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#9 2009-10-11 4:58 pm
- NightCougar_37
- For Gallia!!

- From: The back of my Twilight Drake
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
dv wrote:
I had a Newton, an eMac, and Clarisworks.
I'll give him the Newton.
The eMac did fine in its target market.
Clarisworks/Appleworks was a competitor to Works, not Office, and it trounced it, thank you very much.
Personally I still prefer Appleworks to Pages. Its mostly the little things that make AW so much easier to use. I just hate the menu layout in Pages as well as that floating tool thing that you have to use for everything. Tabs are nice n all but in Appleworks it was either instantly there or you just dropped a menu and boom. I constantly get annoyed with Pages trying to find something because on Works it was already on the screen. Specially the fonts and sizes. Really I shouldn't have to navigate through a whole series of menus to find it when Appleworks had it standard in the toolbar.
Cube didn't fail in design or expandability as the upgrade market has show since. It failed cause Apple put a premium price on it and pitted it against the towers.
Last edited by NightCougar_37 (2009-10-11 5:04 pm)
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#10 2009-10-11 6:01 pm
- Pariah
- James Carville Fan..

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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
The eMac was so popular that Apple moved it out of EDU only and made it available retail.
Hardly a failure.
"and it's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Barack Obama
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#11 2009-10-11 9:21 pm
- dv
- Negusa Negest
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
And unlike the G3 iMacs it replaced, it had a fan. :swoon:
"Now commences the process of cutting off the head, which generally takes from an hour to an hour and a half by an expert workman with a sharp blade." -Reuben Delano, Wanderings and Adventures
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#12 2009-10-12 1:36 am
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
No offense, but why would you link to Gizmodo instead of the site that actually did the writeup?
http://www.oobject.com/category/12-fail … -products/
Anyway, out of the whole list the only failures are:
Pippin
Apple 3
Lisa
TAM (it counts that they never sold even 10K of them at the full price with concirge sevice, IMO.)
Cube (and even that was moderately succssful, it was more of a controversy than a failure.)
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#13 2009-10-12 6:36 am
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Like the plethora of similar articles written before it, this one is a big steaming pile of fail. I don't know why they pop up from time to time, probably just some editor run out of ideas feeling a deadline looming, or something.
The Newton's brilliance was in its database storage ("soup") philosophy, and its OS that was designed from the ground up with stylus input in mind.
I owned a Cube (still do, actually, although I don't use it anymore), and most if not all of the criticism I received for buying one I file under "you are jealous because you can't afford it or justify paying a premium for a computer you don't need to hide."
.tsooJ
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#14 2009-10-12 8:33 am
- macnuke
- just a plano guy
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
I have a Newton 2000.
still works and kinda fun to pull out once inna while when the nerdie ones are all showing off the blackberries and iphones.
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#15 2009-10-12 10:25 am
- Pariah
- James Carville Fan..

- From: Belly Of The Beast, Oklahoma!
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
The inclusion of Apple Works is absolutely retarded.
There are throngs of dedicated AW users out there, thousands of custom scripts and templates for every imaginable use and it is still very popular with teachers.
AW is one of those apps that quite afew people will be keeping legacy hardware around just so they can still use it.
Frankly I think the lack of development of AW after the NeXT crew came in was all about their attitude towards anything not derived from NeXT tech. So, like a lot of other good Apple tech, AW was tossed in the trash.
"and it's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Barack Obama
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#16 2009-10-12 1:40 pm
- jerwin
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
The article has very little substance. It's just a list.
I'm not even sure that the author is familiar with misery.
Some subjects actually enjoy pain, and withhold information they might otherwise have divulged in order to be punished.
Central Intelligence Agency. (1983). Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual
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#17 2009-10-13 6:42 am
- Orion
- Bovi-sapiens

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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Pariah wrote:
The inclusion of Apple Works is absolutely retarded.
There are throngs of dedicated AW users out there, thousands of custom scripts and templates for every imaginable use and it is still very popular with teachers.
AW is one of those apps that quite afew people will be keeping legacy hardware around just so they can still use it.
Frankly I think the lack of development of AW after the NeXT crew came in was all about their attitude towards anything not derived from NeXT tech. So, like a lot of other good Apple tech, AW was tossed in the trash.
I still use Apple Works, even though I have MS Office installed here. AW is much easier to get along with and doesn't try to reformat whatever it is you are working on.
Farming is easy when your plow is a pencil and you are a thousand miles from the cornfield. -Dwight D. Eisenhower
Don't curse the farmer with your mouth full.
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#18 2009-10-13 12:03 pm
- Mr. T
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Yeah, AppleWorks was very successful. You can't call something a failure just because it was succeeded after 16 years. In the tech world, that's about as successful as you can get.
The eMac, as Pariah mentioned, was a hit.
The iPod U2 Special Edition doesn't even qualify as a "failure," it was a marketing gimmick. Apple figured that a few prospective buyers would be stupid enough to pay extra for black paint, and they were right! We know the U2 edition met Apple's sales projections, because if it fell short, then Apple would've lowered the price to match the white version. They didn't need to.
I would say that Apple's biggest failures in the company's darkest days were all of the over-funded projects; some of which, never saw the light of day: Copland, OpenDoc, QuickDraw 3D, off the top of my head.
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#19 2009-10-13 5:14 pm
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Mr. T wrote:
The iPod U2 Special Edition doesn't even qualify as a "failure," it was a marketing gimmick. Apple figured that a few prospective buyers would be stupid enough to pay extra for black paint, and they were right! We know the U2 edition met Apple's sales projections, because if it fell short, then Apple would've lowered the price to match the white version. They didn't need to.
Same with the TAM
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#20 2009-10-13 5:23 pm
- jerwin
- Sophist
- From: The Garden of Pure Ideology
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
dv wrote:
The eMac did fine in its target market.
The education market is very strange. IIRC, Bren has a education iMac that seems... well pitiful. Price above all else, I suppose.
Some subjects actually enjoy pain, and withhold information they might otherwise have divulged in order to be punished.
Central Intelligence Agency. (1983). Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual
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#21 2009-10-13 7:32 pm
- Nefarious
- Tuning Fork
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
Orion wrote:
I still use Apple Works, .....[snip] AW is much easier to get along with and doesn't try to reformat whatever it is you are working on.
I'm a fan of the drawing module.
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#22 2009-10-14 1:16 am
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
ScifiterX wrote:
Mr. T wrote:
The iPod U2 Special Edition doesn't even qualify as a "failure," it was a marketing gimmick. Apple figured that a few prospective buyers would be stupid enough to pay extra for black paint, and they were right! We know the U2 edition met Apple's sales projections, because if it fell short, then Apple would've lowered the price to match the white version. They didn't need to.
Same with the TAM
The TAM did fail to meet its expectations. It was $10K including personal devliery and concierge installation, which very few people wanted to pay. The service was canned and the price was massively slashed, and it still took months for them to be sold off.
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#23 2009-10-14 8:46 am
- dv
- Negusa Negest
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- From: Minneapolis, MN
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
jerwin wrote:
dv wrote:
The eMac did fine in its target market.
The education market is very strange. IIRC, Bren has a education iMac that seems... well pitiful. Price above all else, I suppose.
Thanks to our wonderful, wonderful, bureaucracy, it's easier to get a new computer than to get a RAM upgrade for an old one.
So, yeah, initial CPU purchase price is kind of all that matters.
"Now commences the process of cutting off the head, which generally takes from an hour to an hour and a half by an expert workman with a sharp blade." -Reuben Delano, Wanderings and Adventures
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#24 2009-10-14 11:39 am
- Mr. T
- Best of both worlds

- From: omnipresent
- Registered: 2002-04-02
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Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
~Coxy wrote:
ScifiterX wrote:
Mr. T wrote:
The iPod U2 Special Edition doesn't even qualify as a "failure," it was a marketing gimmick. Apple figured that a few prospective buyers would be stupid enough to pay extra for black paint, and they were right! We know the U2 edition met Apple's sales projections, because if it fell short, then Apple would've lowered the price to match the white version. They didn't need to.
Same with the TAM
The TAM did fail to meet its expectations. It was $10K including personal devliery and concierge installation, which very few people wanted to pay. The service was canned and the price was massively slashed, and it still took months for them to be sold off.
Yeah. According to wikipedia, the machine initially retailed for $7,499 and quickly dropped down to $1,995, which was "at or below the cost of production."
Personally, I wouldn't have bought one if only for the LCD. LCD's were terrible 10 years ago. My old 17" CRT from 1996 did 1280x960 @85Hz in 24-Bit color with perfect blacks. The TAM, released two years later, was 12.1", 800x600, with 16-Bit color, charcoal-grey blacks, shaky contrast, and uncontrollable motion blur. Form over function, I guess.
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#25 2009-10-14 12:17 pm
- jerwin
- Sophist
- From: The Garden of Pure Ideology
- Registered: 2003-01-01
- Posts: 7021
Re: 12 Apple Products that Failed Miserably
The TAM, released two years later, was ... with charcoal-grey blacks, shaky contrast, and uncontrollable motion blur.
You've seen a TAM, up close?
Some subjects actually enjoy pain, and withhold information they might otherwise have divulged in order to be punished.
Central Intelligence Agency. (1983). Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual
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