Pitched at the business market the Apple III was one of those products driven by marketing rather than passion. Apple bounced back with the Mac to show that, for this company, passion wins.
all time worst apple products
The Oobject Rotten Apple Award. To mark this week’s 10th anniversary of the death of the Newton we have picked some of the products from Apple, that we’d rather forget.
We could have picked many more from the years when Jobs was in the wilderness and Apple attempted to be market driven rather than design driven, under Sculley. Reactive rather than pro-active. One problem, the gallery would have been a sea of similar, anonymous items. For the Sculley era machines, assume that we mean every product in the range.
(update: Apple’s earnings are just in and they are blow-out. After hours trading shows that as of today, Apple is worth more than IBM.).
Vote for your all time worst product.
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The LC 500 is probably the worst ever Mac design. It takes the idea of the original Mac (to integrate the monitor and CPU unit) and makes no attempt to create a custom chassis for the combination. It is, quite literally, as if you had glued a monitor to a pizza box LC.
The IIvi was only on the market for four months. It gave a whif was what was to come as Apple continued to slide into the gray goo of imagination-less corporate America, under Sculley<p /><p />When, marketing guru, Sculley was hired from Pepsi, he was asked whether he wanted to change the world or sell sugared water. Unfortunately he didn't know the difference.
The eMate is a mutant hybrid offspring of old and new Apple. It was the last of the pre Jonathan Ive machines but it also marked a departure from the bland gray box days under Sculley.
By far the worst Macintosh ever in history, with so many design flaws and corners cut.<p /><p />You can read the full horrifying list here: http://lowendmac.com/tech/x200.shtml
Submitted by Dan
With the LC 630, Apple had finally created a machine that was indistinguishable from a PC
1994 to 1997 saw the nadir of Apple as a product company. A desperate attempt to gain market share of the OS allowed third parties to build licensed Mac clones such as the Umax SuperMac.
While I have this machine and have a soft spot for it, Dan Palka has, with some justification suggested it as a contender.
If you want to win a trivia quiz, the Network Server 500 was the first Apple machine to run Unix. Unfortunately it wasn't OSX but IBM's proprietary flavor, AIX.<p /><p />The network server was the result of Apple flailing around looking for new markets, rather than focusing or innovating.
John Galt has suggested the inclusion of the Mac Portable, which, to be fair, should certainly be included in this list if products like the Message Pad are. Like the Newton, it was a good try but ultimately a failure. The laptop was destined to be the form factor that would succeed.
There are some people who consider the Color Classic to be the Quintessential Mac, just like there are some people who are slide rule enthusiasts.<p /><p />The Mac in a box was long in the tooth when the plus was released, but to extend the form factor which fundamentally constrained the screen to previous limitations of cost and technology, to a ten year life-span, was fairly willful.
Its very hard to pinpoint exactly what was wrong with the Powerbook Duo - as an idea it was fairly sound, but the problem was that as a product line it was a second rate computer with a first rate cable management system.<p /><p />These days a raised plinth serves for what the duo dock was trying to achieve, and in many ways the idea of attaching a laptop to a bigger screen is increasingly becoming the de facto standard.
at the time of writing, this week is the 10th anniversary of the death of the Newton, with the release of its last ever version, the message pad 2100.<p /><p />Like many things Apple, the Newton was not all bad. It was a technological marvel, but it had been originally released as an unfinished product and was a form factor that sat uncomfortably between pocket and folio sized.
The Mac classic kept the originally masterful Mac design going, when it was no longer made sense. Here it is put to good use as a toilet paper dispenser.
The iMac was one of those things that was borderline genius/insane. Looking back it is one of the worst things that iVes [sic] ever designed, and yet it was this iMac, candy-shop, style of design, put Apple squarely back on track.<p /><p />The iBook crosses that fine line. It is insanely ugly.
With the dock connector version of the iPod, Apple momentarily lost their nerve, introducing a row of buttons where they avoided them on both previous and subsequent models.
The Powerbook G3 Series is not to be confused with the powerbook G3 (the word series is part of the name).<p /><p />Its really not that bad, but there is something half-assed about it. Its has arty curves but none of the exuberance or flair of later Apple designs. Apple had not quite come out of the closet yet, with this machine.
Amazingly, the bastard child of iMac, the horrid little eMac managed to continue to be produced until 2007.<p /><p />Since the principal design feature of the iMac/eMac was its CRT monitor shape, the fact that CRTs already looked anachronistic in 2007 made this an instant non-classic.