Filed under: Apple Corporate, Apple
Top 10 Apple flops
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Aryeh said 7:13PM on 3-27-2007
Apple III, anyone?
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Mickey said 6:22PM on 3-27-2007
What? No past Apple CEO's are on this list?!
;)
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Vincent said 4:43AM on 3-28-2007
And Copland? Opendoc? Apple III? Greatest Apple flops!
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Enda Crowley said 6:27PM on 3-27-2007
^^ Haha, nice!
What about the iPod Hi-Fi? That's probably sold less than the Newton has...
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Eric said 6:28PM on 3-27-2007
What about Copland?
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oki said 6:30PM on 3-27-2007
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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thefireguy said 12:08AM on 3-28-2007
I take issue with your list for a number of reasons - the main one being that some of these products found themselves cut from production, long before they ever really took hold (i.e Cyberdog), mainly because Apple found a better solution and simply re-directed there money and time or a number of them went on to be favored as other products (i.e AOL and Palm).
In the case of E-World, Apple end-up outsourcing it, them sold it - it became AOL - a real winner for a number of years till Time-Warner stop feeding it money!
The Newton was sold to Palm which went on to much fanfare till iPhone surfaced!
Most of the others were never fully developed or were used as marketing tools
Just my two-cents for what it worth
Have a great day
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oldefortran said 6:48PM on 3-27-2007
Cyberdog didn't do so well but OpenDoc was truly ahead of its time.
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Jonathan Baldwin said 1:29AM on 3-28-2007
Cyberdog was a good concept - it relied on little applets but I forget the name of the technology. The 'future' was made up of little programs you could join together, so you could insert a spreadsheet in a word processing document without having to launch a spreadsheet app, etc etc.
One that's missing: Hotsauce - though IIRC it was bought by someone who's now using the idea successfully. Or did I dream that.
Copland I'd put on there, and the Cube. But I think a distinction is needed between 'flop' cos it was bad, 'flop' cos it never shipped, and 'flop' because it never took off, no matter how good it was.
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Xo said 7:48PM on 3-27-2007
what about the apple cd?
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andy said 7:12PM on 3-27-2007
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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Kevin said 9:54PM on 3-27-2007
CyberDog I loved this browser. I cannot remeber but there was a variant produced a by a programmer named Blaked that used the OpenDoc hooks that made me fall in love with OpenDoc. OpenDoc like functionality and interoperability has been popping up in many of Apples apps since OSX came on the scene. It is still ahead of its time.
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rongold said 8:01PM on 3-27-2007
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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Mark Thomas said 7:26PM on 3-27-2007
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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Steve said 7:31PM on 3-27-2007
I'd add "Publish and Subscribe" (remember that?)
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Tatnasty said 7:42PM on 3-27-2007
The Mac clones of the late 90's.
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Ariza said 7:46PM on 3-27-2007
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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Mr Lizard said 7:46PM on 3-27-2007
Quicktake. It was a digital camera.
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Doug McIntosh said 7:51PM on 3-30-2007
I hate to crosspost, but, as a service to "oki", regarding your Twentieth Anniversary Mac's "Buzz", this forum might be of service:
http://forums.macnn.com/65/power-mac-and-mac-pro/205968/anybody-still-using-the-tam/
Thanx, TUAW, for letting me cross-post that link.
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Serrano Slim said 7:59PM on 3-27-2007
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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