In Depth: 9 half-baked Apple products that went sour
When Steve Jobs speaks, the world listens. His fabled Reality Distortion Field makes even the shiniest piece of chrome and plastic glisten just that little bit more.
The phrase 'One more thing' moves every member of the audience to the very edge of their seats, knowing that whatever follows, they'll soon have one in their possession.
But it wasn't always like this, and even the all-powerful Apple of today sometimes stumbles in mid-stride.
We've gone in search of the 10 biggest flops, missteps and bad ideas that found a half-chewed worm emerging from the apple of our eye.
1. Pippin
Super Nintendo. Master System. Jaguar. Megadrive. Pippin. Can you spot the odd one out?
It sounded like a child's toy, but not many children ever had the chance to play on Apple's ill-fated games console, Pippin. Technologically speaking it was a Mac in a smaller box, intended to play hot CD-based gaming classics like Terror Trax, The Journeyman Project and Mr Potato Head Saves Veggie Valley.
But whereas most games manufacturers quickly learned the importance of controlling their ecosystem with a vice-like grip, Apple planned to sell the core technology to several different companies – which is ironic in light of the company's current modus operandi.
Unfortunately, like everyone who tried to take on gaming giants Sega and Nintendo, Pippin was a miserable failure. It was an underpowered, undersupported system that reportedly only sold around 5,000 units in the US.
Being a computer, Pippin did have some interesting technology on its side, including innovations like internet access, but without the games to back it up, it was all for nothing. Also, it was called Pippin.
After Pippin crashed and burned, Apple largely gave up on gaming – and most developers still avoid the Mac. However, times have changed. The iPhone's gaming library hasn't defeated the mighty Nintendo, but it's the first thing for a long, long time to pose a really genuine threat to it, if only among casual players.
2. Apple USB Mouse
The infamous 'Hockey Puck' is one of Apple's most mocked inventions, appearing with the launch of the iMac in 1998 and promptly hanging around homes and offices like a bad smell for years to come.
Not only was it ugly, it made pointing and clicking about as much fun as typing on a keyboard covered with needles, using a speech recognition system that insisted you neck a balloon full of helium before every instruction, or anything involving Microsoft Office's 'helpful' paperclip. Not only was its round shape clumsy and uncomfortable, it was far too imprecise when gripped and prone to turning instead of moving.
The cord was far too short if you plugged it into the machine rather than the USB ports on a Mac keyboard, and the buttons weren't very comfortable. Some good did come out of it, though – third-party manufacturers made a fortune selling alternatives and adaptors.
3. MobileMe
Apple had no excuse for MobileMe to flop. The idea was as obvious as it was brilliant – syncing mail, calendars, files and photos between your computer, your iPhone (you did buy one, right?) and the web. So what went wrong? Well, everything.
Not only was it overpriced – and at آ£50 for a year, remains so – but the original version barely worked. File sharing was missing in action, online storage was too slow and the calendar was a joke compared to Google's offering. As for email, it was fine if you actually wanted to use an Apple-branded address, but with more and more of us switching to personal domains, especially for professional purposes, MobileMe's lack of proper domain mapping really bit down hard.
Even the launch of the service was a big disaster – the pages were slow, the servers were constantly down, the push messaging promised didn't work, and worst of all, a number of trial users found their credit cards charged too early. Apple tried to patch up problems by extending the service's free trials, but there's no doubt that what most who tried it in those early days remember is a horrible experience from a company that makes its money providing the best. Not cool, Apple. Not cool at all.
4. Apple Lisa
Apple kit is too expensive. That's the most common criticism of the company, and it has been right from the start. The Lisa, launched in 1983, was an attempt to go after business customers by offering a more powerful system, higher resolution graphics and support for multitasking and protected memory.
It found a market, particularly in document creation, but the cheap availability of both IBM PCs and standard Macintosh systems worked against it. The Lisa did however offer expansion ports, and a snappy name – although one with no easy explanation. The official version is that it stands for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but nobody believes that.
The standard backronym is Lisa: Invented Stupid Acronym, but most believe it was simply named after Lisa Jobs, Steve's daughter. Jobs worked on the project for a while before jumping ship to work on the Macintosh project.
5. Newton
Pity the poor Newton. Probably Apple's least-deserved flop, this PDA platform (the actual devices were called MessagePad) was truly ahead of its time. It featured integrated handwriting recognition (which worked reasonably, if not completely reliably), was controlled by a touchscreen, and offered lots of applications to make early adopters' lives easier, including notes, contacts and dates.
That's nothing too special by today's standards, but it was an exceptionally powerful device in the early '90s. However, this was only intended to be the start of Newton's capabilities. Apple saw the devices as computers in their own right, and we've yet to truly see a successor that has actually pulled off that massive leap. Perhaps the iPad will be it…
6. Motorola ROKR
While the hardware was Motorola, the appeal of the ROKR was all down to Apple. This was the first phone built around syncing to iTunes, and one of the few third-party products to get the full Steve Jobs stage treatment. And… it wasn't good. At all.
Not only was it a tacky product, it was stuffed with infuriating limitations, like only being able to hold 100 songs no matter how much extra storage it was given, offering no way of buying music online and connecting to your Mac or PC via a slow USB 1.1 cable instead of the faster 2.0 standard.
Jobs's demo of the phone conveyed absolutely none of his usual enthusiasm, and for good reason. This was 2005. In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, and the failed first attempt at a Jobs-approved phone was consigned to history.
7. Apple TV
The Jobs seal of approval isn't always a guarantee of quality, then – and Apple TV is another example of a product that failed to make the grade.
Apple TV combined the worst of several worlds – reliance on the Apple ecosystem, lack of an optical drive and the state of internet-available entertainment in the UK back in 2007 – to produce a largely useless electronic paperweight.
In fairness, the Apple TV wasn't a terrible unit, but it hit too early and was too much a company player instead of focusing on what customers would actually be best served by. Nowadays there are so many other options available that the window of opportunity for it has well and truly closed.
Apple still makes the devices, but even it has largely moved on to focusing on new products. Apple TV may have introduced people to the idea of media streaming in their house, but it's products like the WD-TV Live and PlayOn that are finally making the humble computer a fundamental part of the TV watching experience.
8. QuickTake Camera
Much like the Newton, the QuickTake's failure had less to do with the product itself than the situation it found itself in. It was one of the first consumer-level digital cameras, so it was fairly rough and ready – no screen, no easy photo deletion – and it shot at a resolution of 640 x 480, with a pitiful 1MB of memory.
Three different versions were released from 1994 onwards, but like most of Apple's non-computing-focused products, Jobs axed the line after returning to power.
9. The Twentieth Anniversary Mac
$7,499. We shall repeat that: $7,499. No matter how much of an Apple obsessive you might be, no matter how much you think the user interface and style warrants high price tags, dropping $7,499 on a new machine to celebrate a company's milestone is on the wrong side of the Lala River in the valley of Areyoukidding.
This was 1997, when a regular Mac of the same specification would cost you just $3,000. Apple managed to sell a handful at this insane price, but it was quickly forced to back down. By 1998, when the unit was discontinued, the price was down to under $2,000.
It may have looked snazzy next to the resolutely ugly beige boxes of the time, but the Twentieth Anniversary was proof that you can in fact put a price on style, and it's one that most people aren't ultimately that willing to pay. It has become something of a collector's item, however; perhaps that counts as success of a kind.
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Opinion: Dropping IE6 support: what took so long?
From March, you could add Google to the list of companies that will be ditching support for Microsoft's antiquated web browser IE6 (support will gradually be phased out over a number of months). Naturally, you knew this already, but isn't it great news?! Just ... well ... great.
Since this epochal announcement from everyone's favourite 'definitively not evil' search engine, most of the people working in the web industry have taken on the form of geeky Munchkins, belting out choruses of 'Ding-dong! The witch is dead!'. The tech media, too.
Actually, it went beyond tech. It went MAINSTREAM! So, I have to ask myself: why am I constantly spitting out profanities under my breath whenever someone asks whether I've heard the 'big news' about Google and IE6?
And why have I been intentionally avoiding the calls of lazy journalists who think it's OK to get quotes from other journalists when a big story breaks? (Actually, I should ignore those all the time.)
Heck! I should be happy that we're finally at a point where a combination of increasing web literacy and media coverage is seeing IE6's market share drop quicker than ever, and – in the process – helping to promote web standards. But all I'm left thinking is this: 'What took you so freaking long?!'
Long time flawed
Security flaws in IE6 aren't a new thing; lack of standards support in IE6 isn't a new thing. So what have you been doing with your time? And I'm not just posing this question to companies: I'm posing it to the self-same tech reporters who have – now Google says it's OK – finally decided to put their collective boot into IE6. In fact, I blame these people more than Microsoft.
Other than the developer community, and some select journalists, groups, and publications, where has the pressure been coming from?
Those working within Microsoft have been all-too-aware of the shortcomings of IE6, but also had major clients still relying on that browser within their organisations. All a bit Catch-22, and – with no concerted pressure – it was an issue that probably wasn't going to push itself to the front of Microsoft's web strategy.
According to figures from the British Population Survey, 73.9 per cent of the UK's population can now get online. Many of these people don't read PC Plus, The Register, or other tech-focused magazines, so how were they going to find out which browsers they should be using?
In the last few years a number of security holes have been found in IE6 – holes that have resulted in users suffering at the hands of online scammers. But still we've had no national campaign of any note to educate people about the serious consequences of using an outdated browser. But I'm not crowing; I'm as guilty as most.
Despite pushing for the phasing out of IE6, it took .net – the magazine I edit – until last year to put together a coherent campaign to get rid of IE6. We should have done it much sooner.
As we stated within our campaign, this wasn't about being anti-Microsoft. Most people within Microsoft – and especially in the IE team – are now vocal supporters of web standards, and are well aware of the shortcomings of IE6. But Microsoft is a business, and there should have been more pressure put on it – and its clients – far earlier to make a change and spread the word about the problems that its browser faces.
Hanging grimly on
To put things into perspective, in February – despite an 11 per cent drop – IE6 still had 20 per cent share of the market! Most companies would happily settle for that amount of users in any given feld. (Incidentally, these figures are courtesy of Net Applications, and the logs for your website – depending on your demographic – could differ wildly.) That's a huge number of people still using a very antiquated piece of software.
I really hope that the events of the last few years will prevent us from making the same mistakes in the future, but my concern is that history will repeat itself, and yet again it will take years for an important message to finally filter through to those web users that don't immerse themselves in web culture (you know, the normal ones).
However, we do have one beacon of hope; there is one man who has the power to send the media machine into meltdown, and has the ear of many in our respective political parties. One man who can single-handedly force an issue into the public arena, where it can gain the necessary oxygen to help it develop from an ember to a flame.
No pressure, Mr Fry – but we're all counting on you.
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