Top 10 Apple flops

I vaguely remember hearing about Visicalc....

Wow, what a trip down memory lane! I guess I've been in AppleWorld longer than I realized. Fun.

.mac is great but there is no way I can afford that much a year right now. If it was free like back in the days of iTools then I think every Mac user would have an account and love it but I'm afraid the price point kills off many subscribers that might have really benefited from it.

Yes, the Apple III should be on that list too but with any list like this it's usually just opinion.

CyberDog was awesome! Sure, it never took off but I really enjoyed using it. Also, it seems a little unfair to include the Rokr on this list. Steve all but spit on it at its introduction.

eMate sucked? For education, it rocked. Its battery life was measured in *weeks*, not hours. Instant on and had infrared linking to other emates in the classroom. And the Newton OS was much more elegant and intuitive than OS 7 and 8 at the time. Stable too :-) The eMate would have been perfect as the $100 laptop being touted now (I'm sure prices would have dropped, even by Apple's standards). Don't forget, the eMate was $799US, which would have been less than half the amount of a Macintosh laptop at the time.

Don't underestimate the Newton. Thanks to the crappy HWR of the original, the rest are tainted :-(

The eMate 300 was a Newton product (a MP 2100 with the keyboard as "standard", and was an amazingly robust piece of hardware (designed for classroom use, no moving parts). Combining the ability to word process, draw, spreadsheet, and communicate/collaborate together with wireless networking, it was a perfect tool for classroom use. By not offering too many "frills" it allowed the student to focus on education, rather than be distracted by internet access, IM etc.

Sold to the education market, it was canned as part of the overall Newton clearout. The design did influence the first iBook design.

I have an Apple Pippin (the beige box with little apple logo, not the black Bandai box) -- it was pretty cool and had "fixes" for a lot of the things Mac's had trouble with (the ADB connectors that had to be in place before power-up (technically) were replaced with a sweet new AppleJack design (yes, Apple loved to mess with connectors). Sadly, AppleJack was just before USB and...

The Apple Network Server never really took off: Apple users couldn't work with AIX too well, IBM users couldn't believe they could get an RS/6000 from Apple for about 1/4 of what IBM was asking - had to be some problem, right? Never patched for Y2K problems, but really only died at Y2k+1. Ouch.

I have Newton MP 100 and a 2100 (the latter in daily use) - perfectly cool, a little overpriced, but fell victim to Steve's personal dislike for Scully's big plan.

And a Macintosh Portable: a wonder of engineering (seems like almost every single part was custom designed) -- while the luggable didn't pan out, it did give birth to the PowerBook line, hardly a shame in that.

It's actually quite a tribute to Apple that they've contributed so much to technology (even if sometimes in a bad way). If this list was the worst ten things I'd done, I'd be pretty proud.

I still have the original e-World install *floppies! Still sealed in plastic and the fold-out card they were mailed in!

I still have the original e-World install *floppies! Still sealed in plastic and the fold-out card they were mailed in!

Glaring Omission alert:

Apple eMate 300!

This wonderfully overpriced machine was basically a miniature laptop, unable to do much of anything except bulk up your bag. I remember seeing these in stores and thinking "that looks like it could be Batman's laptop." Unsurprisingly, Apple canned them because.. well.. they sucked. I'm not sure why this wasn't included, maybe because it was just a gigantic Newton, but this was definitely one of the most ill-advised Apple products to date.

Dave, why did you link to this horribly ill-conceived list? Some of things weren't even Apple's (ROKR) and many weren't flops by any stretch (Newton, TAM - "It was discontinued only a year later" - Duh! It was released for the **20th Anniversary** which lasts exactly one year!). But most of all, there's no original thought here and TUAW adds no value.

This post makes me think less of TUAW which had been climbing to the top of my bookmarks folder until now.