Apart from phenomenal products like the iPod, iMac and Macbooks, Apple in its 30 year old history has churned out super flop products too. Here is a list of 10 products in reversing order from Apple which fizzled in the market.
No 10 – Apple Cyberdog
Apple’s to answer to Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator was the Cyberdog an Internet suite developed to work on the Mac OS. Introduced in Feb 1996 in beta stage, Cyberdog was an OpenDoc-based suite of Internet applications, including email and news readers, a web browser and address book management components, as well as drag and drop FTP. The components could be reused and embedded in other documents by the user. However Cyberdog was a memory hog and sucked up more memory than both the web browser and mail applications in other suites. Also saved documents were not viewable from applications which did not support OpenDoc’s Brento format and as web standards evolved Cyberdog became obsolete. It was replaced a year later in May 1997 with Internet Explorer for Mac as the default browser till Safari made debut in October 2003.
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No 9 – Taligent
Apple joined forces with IBM (really surprising) in 1988 to develop the next generation operating system to replace Mac OS. In 1992, Taligent Inc. was formed as Apple-IBM joint venture to complete the software codenamed Pink, an ambitious object-oriented operating system. The only product it shipped was CommonPoint which comprised more than 100 object-oriented frameworks, providing developers with a powerful platform-independent model that supported interactive collaboration. By 1995 Apple did not have an OS capable of running CommonPoint and by the end of 1995 it became a wholly owned subsidy of IBM which was later dissolved in 1998.
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No 8 – Apple EWorld
In 1994 Apple partnered with AOL to develop EWorld which was intuitive and easy to use and included services like email (eMail Center), news, and a bulletin board system (Community Center). Users of the service were referred as ‘EPeople’. The service was heavily GUI dependent was based around a “town hall” theme where each of the serviceís branches were individual “buildings”. The town hall metaphor made eWorld simple to access and provided users with a strong sense of community. However Apple kept the prices very high and did not advertise the product. It came preinstalled on new Macintosh’s but was buried away several folders deep on a default installation which majority of the customers could not find. After 2 years on March 31 1996 the service was officially shut down,
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No 7 – Apple Pippin
Apple Pipin was the technology for a multimedia player marketed by Apple, it was powered by a 66-MHz PowerPC 603e processor,had a 14.4kbps modem and ran a cut-down version of the Mac OS. Apple’s aim was to create an inexpensive computer to play CD-based multimedia titles and mainly games, however the timing couldn’t be worst as it was released in a market already dominated by Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64. Only 42,000 of these ill fated devices were sold before a silent death.
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No 6 – 20th Anniversary Macintosh
To mark the company’s 20th anniversary Apple released the TAM (Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh) in May 1997. At a time when CPU speed was still measured in Megahertz the TAM was pretty futuristic, it had a 12 inch TFT-LCD monitor (800 x 600), 250 Mhz processor, ATI 3D Rage II video chipset and ATI 3D Rage II video chipset. It had a vertically mounted 4X CD-ROM drive and Bose speakers with a sub woofer which doubled as a power supply. The TAM ran on Mac OS 9.1 and had a 2 GB hard drive, it was discontinued in March 1998, less than a year from launch due to the huge $7,499 price tag.
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No 5 – Motorola ROKR
Technically speaking the iPhone is not Apple’s first cell phone, in 2005 it partnered with Motorola for the ROKR phone. As with any Apple product it was widely expected, it featured an MP3 player with an interface similar to the iPod interface and allowed users to playback music purchased from iTunes store. The phone had decent specs in its times – 512 MB memory, Bluetooth, bright display and Micro SD card for memory expansion. It still flopped mainly due to awefully slow transfer rates compared to dedicated music players and a firmware which limited only one hundred songs to be loaded at any time.
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No 4 – Macintosh TV
The limited edition Macintosh TV introduced in 1993 was one of only a few Macs to come in black, it came with a cable-ready TV tuner card, and included a CD-ROM drive. The Macintosh TV was essentially a Performa 520 which could switch its built-in 14″ Sony Trinitron CRT from being a computer display to a cable-ready television. It had a 32 Mhz processor, 4 MB RAM and 160 MB hard drive. Reasons for its failure were its inability display television feeds in desktop window and mediocre graphical performance.
No 3 – Macintosh Portable
The Macintosh Portable was Apple’s first portable computer, launched in 1989 it was powered by a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 Mhz and had 1 MB of RAM (expandable to 8 Mb). It featured a black and white active-matrix LCD screen and a full keyboard. However the Lead acid batteries added to the bulk, it weighed in at 15.8 pounds (7.2 kilograms) and was a bit bigger than a briefcase. Other than the mammoth size also in question was the $6,500 price tag which lead to the doom of the Macintosh Portable.
No 2 – Apple Lisa
Way back in 1983 Apple released the Lisa one of the first commercial personal computers to have a GUI and a mouse. It was powered by a Motorola 68000 CPU at 5 MHz and 1 MB of RAM. The Lisa operating system featured cooperative (non-preemptive) multitasking and virtual memory, then extremely advanced features for a personal computer. The use of virtual memory coupled with a fairly slow disk system made the system performance seem sluggish at times. One of the main reasons of Lisa’s failure was its astonishing price of $ 9,995 dollars ($ 21,500 in Feb 2007 dollars).
No 1 – Apple Newton
Released much ahead of its time in 1993, the Newton (official name was MessagePad) was touted as the future of computing. It would be the first in a new line of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The Messagepad was the first pen based system running on the Newton Intelligence OS. It was powered by a ARM 610 processor at 20 MHz and 640k RAM / 4 MB ROM. It sported a reflective black and white touchscreen with a resolution of 336 x 240, PCMCIA card slot for expansion and Infrared port for communication between MP’s. The main capabilities of the device was its communications and organizational features. It could fax messages, send e-mail, had applications to organize names, dates, phone numbers, etc, printing, wireless paging and perhaps the most important of all it could supposedly read and recognize handwritten words on the screen. The Newton’s astronomical $ 1000 price tag, poor handwriting recognition, large size (did not fit any pocket) and the “Doonesbury” comic strips by Gary Trudeau pushed it towards failure, however the Apple Newton was produced for six years.
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Honorable Mention – Apple Puck Mouse
Introduced with the original iMac in 1998, it has only one button but figuring out where that button was and orienting the mouse without looking down created an ergonomic nightmare. Apple did a small indentation in a later version so you could figure out where to put your finger, but you still had to find the indentation. The Puck Mouse was discontinued a few years later.
131 responses to “Top 10 Apple products which flopped”
Top 10 Apple Flops
What!? No, say it isn’t so, but it is. Apple did produce a lot of crap and newlaunches was kind enough to pile all of that Apple crap together for one craptacular list. Most of the items consisted of some…
you forgot to add Safari, Mac OsX, ipods, ibooks, imacs and everything with an i in front of its name. apple sells overprice, dumbed down crap.
No. The Newton was one of Apple’s BEST products ever, not worst. Try to understand the impact that it had.
Lame list. The ROKR wasn’t Apple. And the other items on the list were from 12 to 20 years ago. LAME.
I wouldn’t call the Lisa a flop seeing how it pretty much kicked off the whole Mac thing, despite its price. It did sell to image-conscious companies, sort of like how it was sooo cooool having a black NeXT cube on your desk because it meant you were a real swinging dick. I even sold a few of them to university profs with too much grant money.
However I’d sure call the Mac XL a flop. By the time that boat anchor came along it was already an obsolete lump of crap ready for the landfill (and yeah I know Apple scuttled most of the leftover Lisa and Mac XL carcasses in a landfill somewhere).
Say what you will about CyberDog, it was a pretty good email client. I used it until it became too much of a pain to install OpenDoc on my computer.
Hey, I have a Pippin, a MP 100, a MP 2100 (used daily) and a Mac Portable (all in good shape, the Pippin is even in Apple colors (beige and rainbow apple) not Bandai.
It’s worth pointing out that AOL was a derivative of AppleLink Personal, and to call the Portable, Lisa and Rokr “flops” is a huge over staement: the rokr continues to be a good, high end Moto phone; no Lisa = no Mac; no Mac Portable = no PowerBook.
The frequent quotes of “high price tags” also need to be taken with a grain of salt: at the time, compared with other hardware offerings, there was nothing outrageous about the prices.
Oh, and the 20th Anniversary Mac, that came with a guy/gal to install it in your home? That wasn’t really supposed to be a blow-the-doors off sales monster.
I owned a few of the items on this list and even though they weren’t successes they were still great products. As someone in the process of starting my own company, you really need to fail once or twice before you get it right. Look at the products you see on this list and compare them to current apple products you probably own.
http://www.gordonphoto.net
For the record, the Newton did NOT fail due to poor handwriting recognition. In fact, it wasn’t until a couple years ago that an other PDA came close to the ability of the Newton.
It was, however, ridiculously expensive, and largely ahead of its time.
what a terrible work?!?!!? yes some things are true but it looks like you got informations in the trash can of a junkie idiot and elaborated them with the inteligence of a gay squirrel…. Macintosh Portable ??? 20th Anniversary Macintosh ???? Newton ??? sorry but was Leonardo da Vince a failure beacouse the helicopter and planes he tought of did not fly in 15th century?? Newton in particular was an economical failure but one hell of a good idea and 14 years later everybody is tryng to do something similar… The portable was THE portable and 20th Anniversary Macintosh, was not made to be sold in lot of units, it was a commemorative computer made for few, with a concept study for the future.
Sorry for the english… i’m italian…
Looks like most of these things flopped due to marketing issues or cost. Some of these items are pretty amazing (e.g. Lisa).
If this is Apple’s worst, they sure did better than the list of Microsoft’s worst I saw a month or two ago.
The Newton was such a failure that there is still active development for it. In all honesty, the MessagePad 2100 was the best computer I ever used. It was never in the way. Totally transparent.
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Systems/Handhelds/Newton/
The puck mouse has to be without doubt one of the worst mice ever produced by apple or any-other company for that matter. It was an RSI inducing nightmare of a device, whom ever devised it’s creation should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
As for the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, I loved it’s design truely was way ahead of it’s time. It even made an apearance in the movie Children of men, the character played by Micheal Caine had one in his home, I’m sure you didn’t miss it, you couldn’t of been asleep could you?
The ROKR isn’t an Apple product. It’s a Motorola product, and Apple provide an application to run on it.
-jcr
no mention of copeland anywhere?
Haa haa, I am familiar will all of these. Having first hand experiences with the majority of these failures, its safe to say that Im sticking to my PC.
Don’t forget the OS X Finder!
There is one other spectacular flop that should be on the list. The Apple III. Supposed to extend the Apple II series into the business market. It was plagued with hardware problems, lack of software and limited acceptance as a business computers.
puck mouse was the worst. Came with the first imac.
the biggest Apple failure was losing the lawsuit with Microsoft for stealing the GIF concept that MS used for the first windows os
Hmmm… I’m confused by this. Taligent was never released so I don’t really get how it was a “flop.” The 20th Anniversary Mac wasn’t a flop. It was a very expensive computer that just didn’t sell many. Are all Ferrari’s flops because they sell so few? With a $7500 price tag, it was never intended to sell a lot. The ROKR isn’t an Apple flop because it is NOT Apple. No matter how you spin it, it is a Motorola. Moto interface, hardware, and design. It is not an Apple product. THe Mac Portable, Lisa and Newton were ahead of their time so I think that a flop is a poor adjective. Finally, I’m not really convinced the “puck” mouse was a flop. It was poorly designed but it sold well because for some time that was the only mouse you got with a computer so everyone had one. The iPhone will be pricey but I don’t forsee it being unsuccessfull.
P.S. I don’t recommend the use of the word “fanboy,” it makes you sound ignorant.
You included the Lisa without including the Apple ///? That’s interesting. The Apple /// had a high price tag, significant expectations that it would “save” Apple from the IBM PC, and a major recall to fix chips that could become unseated. At least much of the technology of the Lisa could be used as a springboard for the Macintosh. On the other hand, the Apple //gs didn’t try to salvage anything from the Apple ///. Quite a mess of a product.
A couple more contenders which I think should have been in the top 10:
1) The Apple Cube, which has to be the most beautiful Apple product that’s ever flopped. I still want one.
2) The Apple III. Apple decided the Apple III (considered to be a proper business computer, not a ‘toy’ like the II) had to succeed at any cost, and the Apple II bore the brunt of that decision. At the time, the Apple II was the dominant personal computer, but with development and marketing resources taken from the II and given to the doomed III, this eased considerably IBM’s near-total takeover of the personal computer market in the 1980s. So the III wasn’t just a flop, it scored a crucial own goal in Apple’s formative years.
Hey. Don’t be too hard on the ‘luggable’! I mean 1989? Wasn’t it pretty much the first ‘laptop’? Or lap crusher, as the case may be.
Oh the memories!
I was a beta tester for eWorld… I sold the t-shirt years later at a garage sale. Wish I still had it.
I thin you missed the QuickTake camera in the list.
Accurate and Great list!
Ug, I used those puck mice through 4 years of design school – what a nightmare. My wrist has never been the same…
You missed one of the all great Apple hardware flops. Tha Apple III, its failure almost destroyed the company; as it was supposed to replace the Apple IIe in the pre MAC era. It was simply not competitive with IBM compatibles and the Commodore Amiga.
LOL WIKIPEDIA MORE?
The puck mouse feels surprisingly good when you get used to it.
Uh… no cube?
CyberDog was perhaps the most successful OpenDoc app. OpenDoc itself is a much more appropriate failures. Format was Bento, not Brento.
Where’s the Apple III? The Cube? What is your metric for failure, exactly?
Actuallly when the Mac Portable came out, we sold quite a bit of them, so I wouldn’t consider it a failure compared to oh, lets say the PC jr. Additionally you have to give Apple credit for creating the PDA market and without the Newton there wouldn’t have been a small company who made a new software program to have better handwriting recognition on it. The program was called Graffitti and the company who wrote is was called……PALM!
Why do you think the Palm OS looks suprisingly simillar to the old Mac OS?
Eworld was light years ahead of anything else out there and AOL didn’t really support it that well. That’s why it died.
While the ROKR may have been a disappointment to many, I loved mine. It had a nice form factor and a powerful speaker for a cell phone. Another bonus of that speaker was that the speakerphone was excellent. True, the transfer speed stunk – but I always loaded mine overnight. I’d still be using it today if I hadn’t gotten a Treo for it’s superior web features.
What about John Scully? He was the biggest flop of all, wasn’t he?
I’ve never owned an Apple anything… they charge way too much for way too little. Sorry!
Hmm.
Nothing gets you more hits that badmouthing Apple.
Good concept, shitty list.
Not a good list.
I think they just made a bad list to create more traffic to this site.
All the reasons why this is not a good list, has already been said a few times here.
I had a Newton, and I loved it. It had more features than a lot of new PDA’s don’t even have today
The Lisa was a flop? The Lisa practically single-handedly introduced the world to Xerox-Parc-style graphical user interfaces. The Mac may only continued the trend and brought it within the reach of the rest of us.
And if you’re going to complain about the first Mac Portable weighing 15 pounds, why not mention that the first Compaq Portable weighed in at 28lbs, nearly twice that.
I could go on, but it’s pretty obvious that you need to revist Dictionary.com and recheck the definition of “flop”.
Anyone that’s never owned an Apple product, and yet claims that Apple products are inferior to the competition really doesn’t understand the reality of the situation. Apple products have always set the bar upon which competitive products are based. Poor management led to the dark period of the early 90s, but Apple’s core has always been there… thinking different and aiming to create products that change the world for the better.
This was a poorly-assembled list of “flops”.
People who say that Apple is overpriced have never compared the prices to an competating product.
Apple seems pricy because it only makes high-end products. No wonder a macbook is more pricy than a dell-laptop. Windows runs faster on a intel Mac than it does on any PC laptop.
And the Iphone price of 499 should be compared to the new nokia (closes product but not even by a mile) which sells for 899.
Don’t talk trash about things you don’t know!
Love the first idiot comment.. “..dumbed down crap”. Pretty amazing there are people like this out there. For example, OSX is considered to be the best OS hands down, even Microsoft thinks so..
To Dimmer: No, you don’t have a Pippin – they were never released. And that’s not Bondi, it’s charcoal gray, the same color as the Powerbooks of the same vintage.
how about you list the 10 major flops that microsoft has done?
DOS
Win3.1
Win95
Win97
Win98
oh boy… WinMe
WinXP
Longhorn lol
and the latest Vista
—
Win2000, and WinNT are good products imho
Why can’t mac useres ever admit a failure? Of course the newton was not a failure because it created an industry… so f(*^(%n what? What about the iPhone? PDA’s MP3 players and Phones are not new and neither is the combination. So? Is it so hard to understand that Apple is a mere company that wants your money and NOT a religion in which to have blind faith? You are talking NOW about MacOS X as a real option, but it is only an option NOW because Apple LOST every single battle it gave. They gave up the OS for a BSD core, they gave up the PPC for x86 they gave up scsi for IDE+SATA etc etc. They even RUN windows for heavens sake! And NOW it is an option? Please! Oh dear, who am I talking to? As if it matters to any of you
I Hate Apple they really do suck. These are things they wish didn’t exist. Microsoft is so much better then them only apple has crazy obssessed fanbois.
What a bad list, this guy is probably too young. An example: the 20th Anniversary Macintosh, was only offered to specific people, you couldn’t just go to a store and say: “I’m want to buy one” (even if you wanted to pay a lot), Apple decided in advance to only produce a limited quantity. Please, do remember that someone came at your door and installed it for you !
True the Message Pad was discontinued, although the 2100 was still way more advanced than anything you can find on the market right now. No to speak about the OS and the development language -NewtonScript- (comparable to the language self).
The macintosh portable did really well, until it was replaced by lighter and better systems. It is like saying that Mac OS 8 flopped, because it was replaced by Mac OS 9…
I worked 2 years with eWorld. There was nothing else that did the same thing. It replaced AppleLink. It was needed to get development support from Apple, because POP and IMAP email clients didn’t exist yet.
Again: What a bad list.
Yes, Author; it looks as if your list has been roundly criticized for being misinformed, poorly researched, and ill-conceived, with an unhealthy dose of “me-too” Apple-trashing. Tell us, how do you plan to apologize to the community?
You jack ass PC w*****! LOL…
I sit here typing on my dual proc 2 gig G-5 Mac that has been on for over three years without a single system problem. I’ve burned up three external drives but the g-5 just keeps on going. Oh.. yah i have a pc too. It sits and waits for me to play games inbetween downloading the latest virus definitions and requires me to install windows at least once every 8 months or so.
Laugh all you want and poke fun at Apple’s few shortcomings then think about this. Had Apple not pushed the world into GUI’s you’d still be punching in dos commands. Grow up you ridiculous weenies! 😉 Oh.. yah… be sure to pony up the cash for the latest windoze debacle Vista!
It’s BENTO. Can’t be bothered pointing out other infelicitous bits. Yawn.
Just a quick note: Mac OS 9.1 was the latest version of Mac OS that the TAM could run. Now based on it’s release date I believe it would have shipped with 7.6… Mac OS 8 came out later on in 1997. As a result Mac OS 8 may have been pre-installed at some point, but the TAM was discontinued before it could be shipped with OS 9 on it.
You always get idiots like ‘takn’ jumping on the dumbed-down bandwagon. Usually, it just means they’re too stupid to work out where the Terminal is.
To all the microsoft fans such as the first one to comment takn if I recall him right, there’s one more thing starting with an I that Apple didn’t develop or invent. I-diots…
Takn = prick
Whoaw : How interesting to see the reactions about this …
First of all, I tend to agree: bad list (expect for the puck mouse !)
And in my opinion, no bigger mistake than cutting off the licencing of Apple-like machine to manufacturers other than Apple (but it is my opinion, don’t argue with this, please)
Secondly, thank you, yes, thank you very much to you … kids, arguing “my OS is best, your is a piece of junk/crap” and other “I hate apple/windows” expressed with all the force of the ones who have NOTHING to say.
Are you happy with your toy ? Yes ? Are you sure ? So why trying so strongly to justify your choice by vomiting on others ?
Dog or cat ? Blond or brunette ? Mac or PC ? Who cares of your frustrations ? Use what you choosed, have fun, and stop filling posts with useless, 6-years-old-brained affirmation. Please.
don’t forget the biggest flop of them all. the transition from apple 2/3 to the first mac. ‘here is a new apple computer! you can’t take anything from the old apple computer with you though!’ FLOP! even at 15 years old i knew that would be a considerable setback for them. hell, i even switched to PC at that point and never went back. and i WAS a huge apple 2c fan!
zapconquest on March 28, 2007 1:39 AM, “The puck mouse feels surprisingly good when you get used to it.”
where are YOU putting it?
It was interesting seeing a lot of this, and never saw the Pippin till now, and I’ve watched the Apple stuff for years. The Mac “Portable” LOL! But that portable, while the lead acid battery is lothable, had a awesome keyboard. There really wasn’t much in the way of laptops then, UNLESS you took a STacy (an Atari ST laptop) plugged in the Spectre (The mac emulator) and THEN you had a portable Mac. 🙂 I mean an actual laptop Mac before the real laptop Macs came out.
I guesss Apple III was not a noteworthy enough flop. Or Copeland. If there is anything this list seems to say is “These are the noteworthy flops we cared about.” 🙂
I know many with a MacTV, Mac Portable, Mac Cube (oh many drooled over those and still do), and Newtons… killed in the end by internal politics at Apple.
When I see this list I see times where Apple tried to think outside the box. Sometimes when you do, you will have failures. But Apple has had many successes. But it is fun to see the ideas Apple has tried. But then I like to see any occurence where people have thought outside the box. Not just Apple.
There is no reason for the TAM to be on this list. It was voluntary pricey and designed to be a collector, using high end technologies (TFT monitor, CD-Rom player, internal modem…) when going on sale.
Love the first comment of how apple is “dumbed down”
I can open a terminal window and enter REAL unix commands into my system, comile my own code, access my box from anywhere without any special software…. and then use the best GUI on the market.
What can your windows box do besides download security patches and run spyware? Oh games, right… umm, they have machines for that.
CyberDog was great. It was OpenDoc that sucked.
Your list lacks clarity and order of importance. The number one Apple flop is without a doubt Copeland. It’s the flop that nearly killed Apple.
The Moto Rokr is not an Apple flop – but a Motorola flop. Why it is on this list attributed to Apple (they only supplied the iTunes software guys) is beyond me.
Plus, the Twentieth Anniv. Mac was far from a flop. It was a limited run item that was intentionally super expensive. For what it was, it met it’s expectations.
You also failed to mention the Cube. Huge flop.
As for eWorld, it’s debatable as to whether it was a flop or not. Sure, it didn’t work out for Apple, but it morphed in to AOL, and they certainly had a very profitable ride with it.
Remember The Apple Flops?
It may seem hard to remember today, but Apple wasn’t always so good with products it tried to launch. And there’s no better way to remember the bombs than with a list, which NewLaunches.com has done with a list of…
Puck mouse sucks until I put an iCatch on it. Now its my favorite. It’s the most comfortable mouse I have ever used and I go out of my way to buy them. I’m always in the market for a good puck.
[if you have a box full of working puck mice, just give me a hollar, I’ll give you $2 a (working) mouse]
Don’t forget about those stupid leather iPod cases…
Boy when you you Apple Fanboys come out, you come out. Listen, the article doesnt say that Apple sucks now (it does, but that’s besides the point) it’s just pointing out some of their flops. How ’bout a little perspective people
Here, here Fred. Way to attempt to bring the discussion back in line. Settle down people – and pay attention to the point of the article. Agree or disagree, this is simply a list of failures – doesn’t mean everything on the list was a bad product – simply that it failed commercially. Sometimes good things fail – Beta was a technically superior format to VHS, but without industry and consumer buy-in, it was doomed to failure.
Just wanted to leave some positive feedback. Like, cool list, guy.
You missed the apple quicktake (one of the first digicams on the market). Apple printers enjoyed decent success, but were ultimately discontinued. I think there used to be apple projectors too.
Macintosh portable is not a failure…without it, there would be no powerbook -> ibook -> macbook!
To Kevin Bradley: You don’t know what you’re talking about. The Pippin was a specification for other manufacturers to follow, not a direct Apple product. Before its demise, Bandai came on board as a licensee and released their version of it. So it *was* released.
There are also a few white-colored Pippins floating around out there. These are development machines that Apple released to game producers. After the Pippin went under, many of them ended up in private hands.
Windows and Mac OSs all suck (except OS X, which is just expensive). Linux is the greatest. You guys can all go open your wallets to these companies like sheep going to slaughter! I use SimplyMEPIS Linux and it not only works great, it does everything you need for a home computer, without having to buy the most expensive hardware. I can also run whatever windoze programs I might need (though not necessarily want) thanks to WINE or Crossover Linux. If I had an extra few thousand to burn, I might just get an iMac, but my main machines will still be Linux.
I think it’s important to define what constitutes a “flop”. For instance, I still have my G4 Cube. It’s a great piece of engineering and with no fan it’s as quiet as can be. But I don’t consider it a flop, just not correctly priced.
Apple has the problem of being so advanced in their thinking they sometimes abandon a product before the market catches up, just like the Newton.
This is an amazing and forward thinking company that the others follows. They have become the “R&D” for less talented companies.
Oh and BTW, MICROSOFT SUCKS!!!
I can STILL send a fax from my messagepad 110!! No more AOL service on it, but used that for several years and didn’t have to carry a laptop to keep in touch with the office. A color version in the SAME FORM FACTOR- with todays technology – (large, bright hi-def screen, lots of RAM, fast CPU, Wifi, BT, – would be a huge winner for Apple if it could also synch with Mac/PC.
When you look at the list, Apple’s “flops” were usually not technical flops but rather marketing flops. That is, if you take any great product and don’t price it right, it will fail.
Cyberdog was just a show piece for OpenDoc which was clearly ahead of it’s time. It was years ahead of OLE that Microsoft was pushing and was recognized as such. The “classic” Mac OS was not capable of doing it justice.
Taligent was an overly ambitious project that just wasn’t handled well. I suppose it’s fair to say that project was a flop.
Pippin was not marketed by Apple. It was a Bandai product. It was a flop and had poor specs, etc. But, Apple just delivered to Bandai’s specs.
Similarly, the Rokr is a Motorola product. Apple only helped with the iTunes integration. The iPhone is an example of what Apple can do. Big difference!
Apple Lisa? Sure, a $10,000 machine in 1982 is not going to appeal to the mass market. That said, it was the first commercial computer with a GUI interface. It may have been a marketing flop, but not a technology flop.
Similarly the 20th Anniversary Mac and the Mac portable were over priced. The form factor of the 20th anniversary Mac was innovative compared to anything else done at the time. The Mac portable was just an average product. If you think it was heavy, I recall using a Toshiba portable in the day that was even bigger. That’s just the way portables were until Apple came out with the first Powerbook. Note a trend here… Apple has historically been high priced, but also innovative.
Newton? The Newton started the whole PDA market and pioneered much of the handwriting recognition in use today. Jobs killed it when he returned for political reasons as it was Sculley’s creation and not his. Clearly Jobs had an ax to grind with Sculley and this was sort of his way of doing it. It was expensive, but it’s features were again, ahead of it’s time.
eWorld was just a case of bad timing. It was introduced at a time when people were moving away from online services like AOL, Compuserve, Genie, etc. and instead going with generic ISP services. Remember, AOL, the most successful service was derived from Apple’s own Applelink technology. Your story makes it sound as if Apple borrowed from AOL in order to make eWorld.
The Macintosh TV had as much success as any other PC/TV integration product. Poorly. There never was, nor will there be a market for that sort of convergent device. Set top boxes are not the same thing.
The puck mouse was a poorly designed device. This was clearly a form over function scenario that Apple should be embarrassed of. Quite frankly, it’s probably the only item on the list that Apple should be embarrassed of. The form factor was actually popular with children, but it was too easy to hold the mouse the wrong way due to it’s circular shape.
Are you guys kidding? That list contains some of Apple’s greatest triumphs.
You just don’t get what makes Apple Apple.
20th Anniversary Mac wasn’t a flop. ROKR isn’t an Apple product. And if you leave the G4 Cube and the Apple III off the list you’re really not thinking straight.
re:takn on March 27, 2007 8:08 PM
you forgot to add Safari, Mac OsX, ipods, ibooks, imacs and everything with an i in front of its name. apple sells overprice, dumbed down crap.
Limited edition items and honorary items like the 20th Anniversary Mac shouldn’t automatically count as flops as they were never meant to sell in large numbers.
colossal waste of time. the author of this is clearly a young, 20-something, frustrated, ill-informed techie. most of the products listed are from a decade ago or more. many of which (newton, lisa, mac portable, pippin) were all ahead-of-their-time products and are consistently copied today.
“stories” and comment sections like this are why web forums and places like slashdot are nearly useless today. too much brainless ego fodder from young morons who somehow learned how to type. someone recently coined it perfectly when they said, “[these people are] uniformly bitter, small-minded geeks who overestimate their own importance and their own skillz.”
Some of the specs on the 20th Anniversary Mac are wrong… it was introduced in March 1977, not May 1977, and it came with System 7.5.3, not OS 9.1. Does no one do fact checking anymore?
Regarding the Apple ///, when production wound up it had sold around 110,000 units. Not great, especially when compared to the Apple ][ family, but a respectable showing for the time. Much of what was pioneered in or due to the /// found life in other products: ProDOS and AppleWorks for the ][ series; the floppy disk subsystems in the Lisa and early Macintoshes, for a few examples. I had a great love for that machine, it was a programmer’s dream in the early 1980’s.
Was the puck mouse really a flop? Most people I know were plugging a two-button mouse into their iMacs and tossing the puck into a box. I doubt the puck cost Apple a single sale. So it wasn’t used, but was it really a flop?
Oddly enough I dodged every flop on the list (except I had to drop that pesky puck into a box) along with the tiny keyboard that came with the iMac.
stop defending apple u apple freaks!!! they did not say they were terable they said they floped in sale ect ect.. read and try to understand what they are saying first!!
Bad list.
No Cube?
No eMate?
No Performa?
No PowerBook 5300 (flame ON!)?
No Sherlock?
OS 7.6?
WEAK!
Clearly this was written by a the PC guy in the Mac ads.
I am writting this on my 10 years old Newton.
Not bad for Apple #1 flopped product.
It’s an interesting list, but I agree with other commenters that there are notable omissions (the cube) and products such as the anniversary Mac don’t truly deserve to be on there.
Some of the “flops” were predicted – eg the ROKR – which some analysts believed Apple deliberately wanted to fail, so they could break with Motorola at the earliest opportunity having got their foot in the mobile door.
However there is surely a critical difference between a product failing because it was so ahead of its time (and therefore expensive – like the Newton) and a product failing because it was just crap (the Puck mouse). Nearly all of Apple’s “flops” are in the former category – just too pricey and ahead of their time.
I’d pull the 20th Anniversary Mac off the list. It was a prestige product and saying it didn’t sell well is like faulting Ferrari for not selling as many cars as Ford. I’d also pull off the Newton. I loved mine. I used it in place of a laptop because it was cheaper and it’s handwriting recognition, while a little slow, was better than my Palm m515. The machine I’d like to nominate is the Duo 2300c that I got to replace the Newton. That whole DuoDock thing never lived up to its billing and mine dropped dead after it was out of warranty a couple of months. I fired up the Newton a couple of months ago and it still works.
Apple’s OS has always been an abominable piece of garbage. The reason I stick to Macs is that the remaining OSs out there are WAY worse pieces of crap. Look at Vista! It doesn’t even come close to 10.4.9 (which is about to be replaced). As for “dumbed down”: LIKE a Lexus automatic transmission? Hmn..
It appears this list was just put together to bash Apple without any real research as Apple’s first and possibly biggest flop is omitted, and other items listed were actually successes or created a market that was later filled by better releases either from Apple or competitors. These should not be considered flops. Also, if ROKR makes the list, then Microsoft Word 6.0 should make the list as well.
^Well put Fred^
Listening to windows people talk about mac’s always reminds me,,, just what great piece of Hardware did Microsoft ever invent? Just remember Apple is a hardware and software company. Not just a plain Microsoft,,,,,,
I LOVED eWorld! I was a beta tester and ranked #3 for most hours logged in during beta. I was sooo sorry to see it go. And to whoever said Macs weren’t a religion, I gotta tell you that you’re wrong. While there are a few people out there that will say they “like” Windows, there are millions who will say they “LOVE” their Macs. Unless you’ve owned one, you just can’t understand it. I’m a savy Mac/PC user. I can build my own PC system. There are some things I *have* to use the PC for. But if I could use the Mac, I’d junk the PC in a heartbeat. Sure some products cost more. Clothes cost more at the boutique than they do at Wal-Mart. But how good are Wal-Mart clothes? Then again… Wal-Mart sells iPods, so the “Apple is too expensive” bandwagon would be a bit hard to jump on.
If you love your PC, good for you. But if you’re not a Mac user, why are you even reading this?
Yea i dunno, i dont think these are failure products except maybe a few… many of these are industry firsts that paved the way for things that we take for granted today. The lisa was the first computer to ship with a GUI and a mouse, the Newton was essentially the worlds first PDA (damn good one at that, even compared to a lot of the newer ones in certain areas)… and the TAM wasn’t meant to sell well at all! It wasn’t a failure, it was years ahead of its time and is still an awesome piece of technology… i think its a rather bad list.
“you forgot to add Safari, Mac OsX, ipods, ibooks, imacs and everything with an i in front of its name. apple sells overprice, dumbed down crap.”
Safari: Best god damned web browser ive ever used, period, and ive used nearly every one worth mentioning, IE, Firefox, Camino, AOL, Netscape, Mozilla and on and on.
OS X: Best god damned OS ive ever used, and ive used Windows, Linux, Mac OS Classic, and UNIX
iPod: Best little music player ive ever used, simple to use, just works, durable (try dropping your palm or pocket pc on a stone floor and have it survive)
iBook: Great little laptop, I own one, I have since upgraded to a Tibook, but if you need something for basic web browsing and music playing then it will do you good.
iMac: Beautiful, functional, amazingly powerful computers, try finding a consumer PC that has SATA and Firewire. And im talking abotu the older G5 ones, they run circles around Windows PC’s anyday.
I wish all you cheap bastards who wail about the cost of Apple products would piss off. You’re cheap, you buy crap, you have no idea what you’re talking about. PC weenies, go f*** off!
Eh…the list is surprisingly crap, i dont even remember cyberdog/eworld, but they seemed like good concepts..
I agree the Rokr is Motorola, and that the 20th century mac isnt a flop really, it was a special edition model that really wasnt supposed to sell much…
and the Lisa as a concept was a great idea, im not sure it was a -big- flop, but it didnt do well in the market…
What about things like the Apple III? that thing flopped hard….
And might I add, microsoft/pc folks, its not like you havnt had some TRULY fantastic crap come your way :/ so dont act so high and mighty, its just so much easier to point a finger at apple who makes computer hardware AND the software that runs on it
Might I add yes, I am a mac user, i prefer OS X to Vista, mainly because when i installed Vista on my very nice high end pc it went 5 minutes and then crashed to the point i couldn’t even boot back into it….that and Vista is just XP with DX 10 and a ton of interface shit ripped from OS X
Hmm…Most of these products where ahead of their time. Regardless of whether or not they flopped means nothing & I do not indend to join in the “I Hate Windows/I Hate Mac” child play. All that is evident from this list is that Apple is a very innovating company…
“It appears this list was just put together to bash Apple without any real research as Apple’s first and possibly biggest flop is omitted, and other items listed were actually successes or created a market that was later filled by better releases either from Apple or competitors.”
I agree with this. Th author (he hasn’t give is name, why ?), did not made a serious research work in this article (like many journalists or pseudo-journalists today).
The Newton was an exceptionnal product. It didn’t work because it has been crushed to soon, just before Palm, Handspring and osers rised. This product was much better than the product of these companies.
For the Macintosb portable, the author has a very short memory. The portable was heavy, yes, but it was the case of many portables at this time. And the Macintosh Portable had 10 hours of autonomy, which is incredible (even today). It was expensive, but like many Apple products, and there are not all in this list.
Lisa was the first Mac Experience, and as this, it was not intended to sell like hotcakes, but to show what Apple can do. And the real first commerciel Mac computers where the Mac 512 and Mac +.
And to finish how could the 20th Anniversary Macintosh be a failure ? It was a collector, with a limited numbers of units …
If this is the level of serious you need to write an article on the net, well, everybody can be a net journalist !
dumb list. The writer should have done some research instead of placing things that make no sense whatsoever.
Microsoft Flop:
Micorsoft BOB
Ok, so weve got products that flopped.
Now, how many of these products actually sucked?
The truth is, products dont flop because they are bad, they flop because people arent yet ready for the features they possess (like the Newton) or because, literally, they are released at the wrong time (like the Cube, it is a good computer, it was just released at the wrong time)
I could fill an entire webpage with Microsoft products that sucked, but I cant think of any Apple ones (save mabye the puck mouse, but thats a matter of personal opinion)
I am a switcher, and, to be honest, the Macintosh hardware and operating system are by far the best I have ever used.
Interesting to me that most of these “flops” would appear to be ideas ahead of their time and primarily failing because available technology wasn’t up to par with the concept. The better article and question would be, what did these early efforts spawn. Innovative doesn’t mean successful in dollars…
To me their biggest mistake is a line of radio ads I’ve been hearing about how “cool” you look with Apple gear, that people “know” you’re on top of you game when they seem a Mac Book and the stylish alum case and glowing apple…. etc. P.U.!
All comments aside, and I agree the list is badly researched as said by many posters, some of the information is wrong and contains typos etc, but why even post such an article now? Did someone have too much free time on their hands?
Rather pointless really.
Even worse, some of these items aren’t even products per se, ie Cyberdog was bundled / downloadable software, couldn’t be bought therefore technically not a product. Taligent was a company, yet is referred to as a ‘product’ which flopped.
Overall dumb article.
I believe an apple a day keeps the doctor away….But in this case a doctor a day keeps the apple away….So please do not buy apple or support it as a product buy only the apple that is our nature’s gift to us….GO NATURAL.
Apple has so few failures that you have to go back a ways to find them. Microsoft on the other hand has to rip off everything Apple so that the sheep that use it have something to crow about. Check out Vista for example – a blatant rip off of OSX, and a poor one at that. Only 5 years late! As soon as Apple releases it’s next incarnation, MS will be scrambling to again copy their ingenuity. Oh well, blatant rip off is the highest form of flattery, I suppose.
I have 3 round mice, each attached to G$ computers – in regular use: I love them! Look cool, attract all sorts of interesting comments from clients!
Takn,
One has to have an IQ a bit above the 55 points you sport to truly appreciate all that Apple has to offer. Windows would not exist had it not been for them.
Apple eMate.
Here’s a review:
http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/review/apple_emate_300_blast_from_the_past_review
The ipod is horrible and has almost no market share. MS is sooo much better. Windows is virtually hack free and no viruses can creep in like the millions that cripple the mac. Anyone can get a new pc with the latest bells & wistles for less than $100 and the macs? They start at over 10 grand! The iphone will never ship but everything that MS does is a hit, I mean everything! Just try to find anyone that has ever had ANY trouble with Windows! Nobody uses macs anymore. PCS RULE
Well, a few failures is the price of breaking new ground (The Newton is a case in point). Innovators need to learn from their mistakes; Any rich company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank can copy the latest success.
Dosboy, U R GAY
The ipod has 60% market share. Macs are actually cheaper for the power- my brother say this article where they took a dell inspiron or whatever P.O.S. it’s called and compared it to a macbookpro and the mac WAS more expensive BUT WAS MUCH FASTER AND HAD WAY MORE SOFTWARE! Windows sells unbelievable crappy flops. The Iphone will ship. Apparently they’re already being preordered. The PC’s also don’t have the latest bells and whistles- Core 2 duo, 802.11n, etc. How many PC’s have you seen with those- very few. Plus, dells do not cost $100 and macs not $10,000. PC’s SUCK and MACS RULE. Everything you have said is a lie you gay peice of sh*t
You must be retarded.
By the way, DOSBOY, the macbook is such a fast selling computer. And this vista sh*t is a carbon copy of mac. Just wait for leopard.
Come on, mac fans, support me against this weiner shnitzel.
Dudes..the 20th A. Mac WAS a flop. Apple releases only a few of these machines but even those remained unsold. And the newton is great but it failed to sell.
Is dosBoy being sarcastic? For his sake I hope so…
People with PCs simply cannot afford MACs, Lol.
Different market.(i.e., you pay for what you get).
Looks like all the Apple Kool Aid Drinkers are out trying to defend Apple Slacker moments. Nice try those of you in DENIAL.
The ROKR WAS a JOINT DEVELOPEMENT project between Apple and Motorola, and the President of Motorola wasn’t happy with being goaded into it wspecially when DIRT BAG Jobs announced right after the release that Apple was developing the
“iPhone”.
A BIG loser that should have been on the list was the Apple QuickTake Digital Camera that Kodak made for them and it flopped for Apple (sold well for Koday cause Kodak didn’t OVER CHARGE FOR IT like Apple ALWAYS DOES!)
Speaking being made for Apple, Apple HASN’T MADE ANYTHING with their name on it since farming out the manufacture of the Apple ][e to a Canadian company who then farmed it out to a company in Japan … that was the beginning in 1979 and it has NEVER STOPPED! Apple was the FIRST US OUTSOURCER!!! Hows that Liberal Apple Kooks!!
Do I get a prize if I worked on two of these? I worked on both the Apple Newton (NewtonMail) and eWorld.
I have an article on my blog which goes into some of the details about what killed eWorld. It is not, as most people expect, that the product did not work. It was mostly the bad shape that Apple was in at the time that made them jettison less important projects like eWorld and Newton. They had to make some difficult decisions to survive.
http://chris2x.com/2005/02/12/the-eworld-that-was-and-wasnt/
Fascinating article, fascinating comments. It’s good to see that the MAC-PC Flamewars continue, what would we do without them for entertainment?
As to the list – since there is no definition of the word “Flop” (what is the criteria, sales, reliability, cool factor) it’s hard to comment, but there are a couple of points:
1) Apple is a hardware company. Allowing cloners cost them sales, so cutting the cloners out made good sense.
2) Apple has always worked on the edge. When you work on the edge you are more likely to fall over, then if you stay in the safety zone.
3) Apple hardware tends to be rock solid. I know a lot of people still using G3 Powerbooks – they just keep on working. My new Gateway notebook is a lot more fragile – course it’s also a lot less expensive (and runs NWN2).
4) If I told you to go cut down a California Giant Redwood, and gave you a paring knife to do so you’d think I was crazy. If I gave you a 10 Kiloton nuke you’d think I was crazy. Compare the product, and how well it performed it’s function when trying to make a list like this. If it sold badly because it was a piece of junk, that’s different than if it sold badly because the marketing program stank, but it worked fine.
Consider the Trade Wars 2002 game for example. It sold less than 10,000 copies. It has been in constant development for most of the last 20 years. Some of us (me for instance) have been playing it for most of that 20 years. Oh yeah, and it still uses ANSI graphics, there’s no GUI, everything is text mode.
Considering all of the above was it a failure? No, it wasn’t. Instead it was the most successful game of it’s type, was almost made into a movie at one point, has run under multiple operating systems (from DOS 2 to Windows XP, and various versions of Linux/BSD), and is more popular than it ever was.
This sort of list if it does NOT contain a complete list of the criteria is subjective, and cannot be rationally discussed.
So what are the criteria? List them, re-write the article, and we can then have real fun arguing whether or not you are right. I have dibs on the tactical nukes.
Wayne
I still use my Newton 2100 every day and am thinking of getting a smaller 120-130. The only thing the Newton lacks is a button on the screen that causes it to reboot into a Nokia 770-800. But the Nokia does what most computers couldn’t in 1997 so you can’t say that Apple left it out. Until someone builds the Nokia 770 emulator / hardware kit for the Newton I will continue to carry both around. I mostly use the Nokia because it can stream
some live radio stations that I can’t get the Newton to stream,and I use it for web pages but all of my handwritten notes, stories, people,email and recorded interviews are in my Newton. It is a perfect thing, I only wish Apple or someone would make a new one with the same os and modern hardware. A lap top is just too big for my life and I hate typing and starting up.
I never knew what a TAM was but I often used one at Tekserve in NYC, which is by the way one of the best reasons to live in NYC but that article belongs with “Failed City States” Now I will be busy looking for a TAM that I can own since it is fast enough to use today and one of the best looking machines that I have ever seen.
You should have included OSX in the flops.I like the flying desk widgets but the rest of it, including the look is just junk. I don’t care what the underlying base is, I want the old 9 interface. I have 4 macs and everyone runs on 9 and one has X only because
there is a sound program that needs it. I edit video on all machines but not in FCP which also should be on your list. Its a power hog, people buy it because they think it does everything but if you don’t have $10,000 worth of hardware sticking out of the back of your machine you can’t do any more with FCP than you can do with an edier costing half as much. And with FCP are wasting expensive machine power, screen space,workspace
options, project management options and render time. What a scam.
ms is not more worse than apple!
every os has problems
to use windows is much cheaper, if the black macbook whould´nt coast so much (with this lame 64mb video chip) i whould buy it. but i never whould buy an ipod -> dudes, ipod sucks and itunes too
sometimes, i use UBUNTU look for this!
-und es heist wiener schnitzel-
i onder if any of these apple bashing richard craniums have ever used any of the beautiful products made by the most deign/tech conscious firm in the world. BTW look at the share price and earnings today.
Oh, bug off, Microsoft fan (takn).
The reason Apple has to “dumb down” products is to attract those who are used to being treated like an idiot.
Having had an Apple III, a Macintosh Portable and a Performa 6200 (Arrrggghhh) – I could expand the list …. (I also had a Macintosh and a PowerBook 100 that served me well!)
I know Apple products all too well from my own user/owner first hand experiences … I added a lot of money to the retirement fund of the likes of Steve Jobs … good for him I guess … Shame on me …
I seconded the recommendation for having Apple computers installed for all workers at our corporation back in 1992 … again … Shame on me …
I preferred the elegant looks of Apple products … but as our staff ended up increasingly yelling at me … “There is more to computer usage than what meets your eye” … I had to acknowledge their majority opinion … but I went with the recommended IMac’s in 1998 … Shame on me …
We never should have bought the Power Mac G4 Cube’s in 2000 … I liked the ‘look’ but I acknowledge the disaster of that decision … Apple cost us a fortune in replacements, maintenance and upgrades till 2002 … then we went to using PC’s only and IT expenses fell to 30% … I was astounded … Shame on me ….
Most of the world had been using PC’s for some time (Including our competitors) … it is obvious that other computer users in our business and around the world grasped a certain reality quicker than I did … again … Shame on me …
I no longer make tech recommendations … My reputation for sound decisions is somewhat tainted … we bought and installed too many “Sour Apples” …
Seems like one of Apple’s biggest problems with many of the above-mentioned flops was take-up rather than effectiveness.
The blurbs above make it seem to me that their myopia with launching new cutting edge products over time has been wanting to recoup development costs too quickly rather than focusing on developing marketshare – and so basically pricing themselves out of the competition.
Those who are slating Apple’s other products and features like os x have never used them for any length of time.
I’ve used both pc’s and macs, and I KNOW what is the best for productivity in a high workload and demanding environment.
I’m in business where time matters, reliability matters and Apple make some amazing products. You get what you pay for. Pay £300 for a pc and yes it flies when you first have it, but it can’t handle day after day after day hard, intensive 10 hour days for several years like an Apple.
The iphone is an amazing product, one of many Apple have pioneered. They are a brave company, they will try and fail, try and succeed, the iphone will be imitated the world over.
The original is the best. An imitation is only a copy, the easy way.
Vista says it all. OSX was the first and the best. Don’t slate it unless you’ve used it and by ‘used it’ I mean used it properly,. not playing in Pc World.
CLEARLY!!!! the worst flop of apple of all time was when they fired Steve Jobs. Other than that everything is a learning curve, you cant call something a “flop” when it carved the way for every personal computer that the entire world is using today! p.s. the puck mouse really was a bad design, but it was a huge step up from the ergonomic nightmares of its squared of predesessors.
well, I have owned all of these products. My dadhas worked for the apple company since it was founded, and all of these products were revolutionary at the time. whoever made this Mac-Bashing thing is an idiot. and it is obvious that Mac is STILL ahead of everyone else. I just got a MacBook and i’m giong to get the new Mac OSX Leopard in a few days; the most powerful operating system in the world!
Son of a gun
The maker of this list isn’t trying to bash macs, he’s giving a list of mac products that failed ON TH E MARKET. Not to say they were bad, they just didn’t sell well. I think the list is pretty interesting, since a lot of the things that failed to sell either succeeded later or someone elses did.
First of all, although expensive, Apple has produced innovative, cutting-edge products which allow people like me who are not-so-computerly-talented to do fairly complicated stuff. They also allow proficiant computer users to do AMAZING things.
Secondly, Windows isn’t horrible. They’ve produced some fairly good pieces of work. Vista, however was a flop that everybody should agree on. My friend who would die for anything Windows hates vista.
Apple produces good work, as does windows, but Apple’s work is of a much higher caliber, so the price is worth it.
Leoperd is pretty damn good.
I am a Mac guy, but I admit that windows has put out some good things. People shouldn’t be battling over which is better, cause they are both pretty good.
however,
MACS ARE BETTER!!!!
or at least simpiler
Microsoft invented the scroll wheel for the mouse…if Microsoft didn’t do it, there would be no Mighty Mouse. And in my opinion, I think we should expand onto every mouse that Apple ever made, I mean, no right-click ?!
Hehe, Mac users get so defensive when their toys get even a slight bashing.
Maybe ‘flop’ isn’t the right word for most of these products, but its an interesting article nontheless, full of some cool tech that people may have forgotten about. It’s also nice to look back at a time when apple weren’t bang on the money every time, and weren’t the all encompassing, lifestyle dictating behemoth that they are today 😀
Don’t get me wrong though, I think macs are cute!