Apple's 10 worst products ever

Apple's 10 worst products ever

Technology giant Apple, which has tasted huge success with iPhone, iPad and iPod, recently showed the world the latest advancements in software and service it made viz. iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud. However, no company is immune to failure and strange as it may seem, Apple has turned up a turkey once in a while.


10. Apple Bandai Pippin - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Japanese game company Bandai and Apple together made this multimedia and game product in 1996. It came with a CD-ROM drive and could play games for Pippin and Macintosh. It was also able to connect to the Internet. However, as not many people were Internet-savvy, only 42,000 units of Apple Bandai Pippin and only 18 titles of the software were sold.


9. Apple USB Mouse - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Apple USB Mouse was released in 1998. It was designed like “hockey puck”. The location of USB port on the iMac G3 was changed from the center to the left side. This location made right-handed users hard to use it. The mouse was replaced with Apple Pro Mouse in 2000.

8. G4 Cube - Apple's 10 worst products ever

G4 Cube was an Apple computer that was sold between 2000 and 2001. It had an upgradeable video card in a standard AGP slot but there was not enough space for full-length cards. It had less expandability option than Power Mac G4. As a result many customers who wanted high-end features selected Power Mac G4 instead of G4 Cube. G4 Cube died a natural death as sales of Mac Mini, which is relatively inexpensive, grew. Now the computer can only be found in Museum of Modern Art in New York because of its innovative design.

7. Mobile Me - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Mobile Me is an online service produced by Apple for individual users to store email, contact list, calendar, photos, files and websites. It also has a phone tracking feature. It was launched in 2000 but the web application did not allow access to users who used Internet Explorer of Microsoft until June of 2010. There was upgrade in 2008 but various issues occurred with this new attempt. There were users who could not access any email. Some users had syncing problems too. MobileMe inadvertently charged some of European and Australian credit cards and Apple was forced to refund the money. Apple plans to end the service in June 2012.

6. Apple III - Apple's 10 worst products ever

1980 was the year of launching Apple III which is business focused personal computer. It tried to succeed Apple II but the quality of its hardware and system software was bad. On top of it, the price was more than $4000 despite lacking beefy specs. Though Apple II was very popular, Apple tried to make users upgrade into Apple III forcefully. Users drew back and Apple III disappeared in 1984.

5. Motorola ROKR E1 - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Motorola cooperated with Apple to make Motorola ROKR E1 - the first iTunes integrated smartphone in 2005. It allowed users to transfer 100 tracks of music. It had endless nested menus which made music transferring slow. As a result, users selected iPod Nano rather than ROKR E1. After that, new versions of Motorola E2 and E6 did not integrated with iTunes but other software such as iRadio and RealPlayer.

4. Apple Lisa - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Apple Lisa was sold for around $10,000 in 1983 as a personal computer for business use. The sales failed because of it was too expensive and lacked speed. Apple destroyed 2700 Lisa computers and made a landfill to get tax deduction with unsold products. Lisa computers were taken off the shelves and the Lisa line was finally discontinued in 1985 only to be replaced by Macintosh.

3. QuickTake camera - Apple's 10 worst products ever

The QuickTake camera was launched in 1994 by Apple when Steve Jobs was ousted from the company and it vanished when he returned in 1997. Quicktake raked in poor sales because despite its name, it could only take 8 pictures on high resolution and 32 pictures on low resolution. QuickTake died a natural death after failing o keep up with rivals.

2. iTunes - Apple's 10 worst products ever

iTunes was released in 2001 as a music player-cum-manager software and added new features such as buying music track from iTunes store. However, users could not store their music to cloud server with this software even as rivals like Spotify provided this function. iTunes also did not provide the wireless syncing function Zune offered. Moreover, it worked quickly in Mac but was relatively slower in Windows.

1. Apple TV - Apple's 10 worst products ever

Apple TV was launched in 2006 as a set-top box without TV tuner or a personal video recorder. Users needed to connect it with their computers to enable these features. The Front Row interface did not have some of the functionality of iTunes such as rating items, synchronizing from more than one computer, full internet radio support and games. It also did not have CD or DVD drive. Most importantly, it did not allow users to connect popular video services such as Hulu and Last.fm.


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