Every one loves a good list post, and this one is certainly entertaining. Newlaunches.com has compiled their list of
Top Ten Apple Products which Flopped. There are some gems in the list, including a couple of products I hadn't even heard of. Here they are:
- Apple Cyberdog, which was an internet suite for the Mac OS back in 1996. I hadn't heard of this until now.
- Taligent, an Apple and IBM collaborative OS
- EWorld. Ah, now here's one I remember! An AOL-like online experience for Mac users in 1994, EWorld only lasted two years (but it was fun!).
- Pippin. The Pippin was a game console that I've never had the chance to play with. Too bad.
- The 20th Anniversary Mac. Waaay overpriced but super-cool to look at, the "TAM" as it's called is sought after by certain nerdy collectors...like me.
- Motorola ROKR. Let's just move on.
- Macintosh TV. Let's just move on.
- Macintosh Portable. The $6500 "portable" Mac was about the size and weight of a baby dolphin. The rest should be self explanatory.
- Apple Lisa. As the first personal computer to have a GUI and a mouse, it was a trailblazer. At a cost of $9,995US (that's $21,500US in Feb. 2007 dollars, Newlaunches points out), it didn't sell very well.
- The Newton. Yes, yes, we all knew that the poor, maligned Newt would top the list. However, I love mine, so there.
Any surprises? Glaring omissions? Let us know.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
3-27-2007 @ 6:22PM
Mickey said...
What? No past Apple CEO's are on this list?!
;)
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3-27-2007 @ 6:27PM
Enda Crowley said...
^^ Haha, nice!
What about the iPod Hi-Fi? That's probably sold less than the Newton has...
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3-27-2007 @ 6:28PM
Eric said...
What about Copland?
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3-27-2007 @ 6:30PM
oki said...
the 20th anniversary mac, is amazing. we have one at home, still runs great. running photoshop 4 with out a prob and with those bose speakers.def an amazing computer, anyone know how to fix the buzzin on the speakers? there was a tutorial online but it has gone down before my warrenty passed. But this comp shows how good apple is after being out for 10 years runs fine compared to our pc from the same era barely runs and needs a cleaning every 3 months because of the virus's and stuff
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3-27-2007 @ 6:48PM
oldefortran said...
Cyberdog didn't do so well but OpenDoc was truly ahead of its time.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:12PM
andy said...
The ROKR is not an apple product. The phone itself was fully developed by Motorola, Apple simply stuck iTunes in it.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:13PM
Aryeh said...
Apple III, anyone?
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3-27-2007 @ 7:26PM
Mark Thomas said...
I loved Cyberdog. It had web browsing, FTP, email, and was very slick and simple to use. Its only real fault was being tied to OpenDoc which, while interesting, was doomed.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:31PM
Steve said...
I'd add "Publish and Subscribe" (remember that?)
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3-27-2007 @ 7:42PM
Tatnasty said...
The Mac clones of the late 90's.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:46PM
Mr Lizard said...
Quicktake. It was a digital camera.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:46PM
Ariza said...
I had no idea the Pippin was ever released
I had a Macintosh TV and loved it - it had a built in tv tuner and came with a remote - plus it was black!
A lot of this hardware was ahead of its time. The only reason a lot of these flopped was because of slow sales which probably has to do with Apples poor retail presence in the mid 90s more than anything.
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3-27-2007 @ 7:48PM
Xo said...
what about the apple cd?
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3-27-2007 @ 7:59PM
Serrano Slim said...
Pippin was the precursor of the Apple TV, a headless Mac with Ethernet, a better remote and a CD-ROM drive. They were afraid to sell it lest it cannibalize Mac sales, and canned the project. Several electronics companies (unsuccessfully) pestered Apple to license the remote design, which might have led to the Apple Remote many years later.
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3-27-2007 @ 8:01PM
rongold said...
CyberDog WAS OpenDoc. And it was quite powerful and flexible, though slow.
I have a CyberDog T-Shirt from Apple's development team (which must have been Canadian because there is also a Maple leaf on the left arm), one of my only developer team T-shirts from Apple—must have been thousands of them in the '80s.
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3-27-2007 @ 8:32PM
Derek said...
.Mac is going to be on there next year I bet. You can put it in the spot that Motorola ROKR is in, since that wasn't an Apple product.
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3-27-2007 @ 8:40PM
jason said...
The Cube......love mine but it was a bit of a commercial failure.
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3-27-2007 @ 8:44PM
Dean Meyers said...
Going way way back to the 1980's there was the Apple III, the hopeful challenger to the first IBM PC's (this is about 1981-2)..the heat sink didn't carry heat away properly, so the chips (which were just pushed down into their sockets) would rise out of place from the heat, and have to be pushed back down into place frequently. And the operating system was called "Apple SOS", pronounced apple sauce. Too bad, it ran Visicalc like a dream (anyone, please, anyone at all remember this predecessor to Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel?)
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3-27-2007 @ 9:22PM
Sam said...
Cyberdog didn't do so well but OpenDoc was truly ahead of its time.
Indeed... there are many companies that are just now coming back around to the OpenDoc way of doing things, especially for collaborative software. Imagine CyberDog if everyone had their own desktop but could share sub-sections of documents with each other live as they're modified. Anyway, I think Apple really lost something by not keeping OpenDoc going, or resurrecting it once they again had the wherewithal.
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3-27-2007 @ 9:35PM
Greenline said...
.Mac is amazing they need to advertise the damn thing and include it in the purchase of a mac or something. When I tell my PC friends that I can access my bookmarks contacts and docs from any internet (not to mention easy and slick websites) they are amazed and want it!
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