Forbes is running an online poll, “What’s The Worst Product Apple Has Ever Released?”
Choices and current results (Total Votes: 771):
• eMac – 1%
• eMate 300 – 1%
• FairPlay DRM – 2%
• G4 Cube – 3%
• Hockey-puck iMac mouse – 20%
• iBook – 0%
• iMac – 1%
• iPod – 2%
• iPod Shuffle – 3%
• The Lisa – 9%
• Mac Mini – 0%
• MacBook Pro – 0%
• Macintosh 128k – 0%
• Macintosh Portable – 2%
• Macintosh TV – 3%
• Newton Message Pad – 12%
• Mac OS X – 1%
• Pippin Game Player – 5%
• PowerBook 150 – 0%
• QuickTake Camera – 1%
• Rokr – 7%
• XServe – 0%
• None of the above – 4%
• I love everything they’ve ever made. – 12%
• It all stinks. Steve Jobs is the devil. – 8%
The poll is here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Artist” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: For the record, the ROKR phone is Motorola’s, not Apple’s. Apple only provides the mobile iTunes software for that Motorola phone. And, yes, we picked for the “Hockey-puck iMac mouse.” That the Newton Message Pad has received 12% currently is a travesty – the people voting for the Newton have never used one.
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I remember the box of twenty or so floppies that came with my PowerBook 5300CS. Then again, most software packages were a pain. Pagemaker had a few dozen. Please insert disk number 1,891. Disk read error. Please reinstall this application.
Simple… MS Windows in all variants if damn Apple hadn’t let (released) the MacOS so Microsoft could copy the world would be a better place.
Matt – The IIgs is, by far, my favorite computer of all time. I had more fun on mine than any computer since. Now, I LOVE my PB and OS X is friggin awesome and I wouldn’t trade it for anything but, for me, there was something magical about the IIgs. And, granted, it was serendipitous that I was the right age at the right time for that computer but man, it was such a kick ass computer for its time. I’m happy to see I’m not the only one who feels that way.
The Blue and White G3 (especially the first model)
+++ Mac Portable — Worst Apple Product Evar.
Compare that P.O.S. to the Powerbook 100 that replaced it.
I almost voted for the hockey puck also, until the Portable showed up. It was a corporate turd created from the worst committee.
I mean, the macs at that time were portable enough.
Oh, and I forgot:
(Mac OS 7, 8, 9) EXTENSIONS!
My tie vote for best:
Apple IIgs and Mac SE/30
One remarkable aspect is the number of these old machines that still work.
As an ancient in the world of Apple my list would be
1) Apple ///
Rushed out the door before final QC. It was a disaster in virtually all senses of the term. I actually had the misfortune of using one for a while.
2) System 3.0
HFS was just not thoroughly tested before this was shipped. The HFS concept was great, but the OS was so buggy that I went back to 2.x (I forget which iteration of 2.x) and waited for the next iteration of 3.x before I reinstalled it on my 512k at the time. When the update came out I ran out and bought a Plus.
3) Hockey puck mouse
Someone actually told me Apple thought a huge, untapped market was children. This mouse was supposed to be great for children’s hands. But that market researcher must have forgotten one simple fact — those children come with adult parents with adult sized hands.
4) Taligent
A version of rudimentary version of Pink was actually running within Apple as far back as late 1990. It ran OK but needed finishing and polish. Then “the powers that be” (AKA Sculley, et. al.) decided that it needed to be 100% backwards compatible and it needed to support such new, “cool” ideas as OpenDoc, among many others. Thus Pink evolved (over the following six years) into the unworkable and bloated Taligent project as a next generation OS being done with IBM. Both Apple and IBM spent millions on this fantasy “be all, do all, replace all” operating system. It was none of those things, and thus became nothing to anyone.
5) eMate 300
Even several children I knew at the time who had played with it thought it was pretty lame. Enough said.
6) Pippin and Macintosh TV (tie)
Both products which could not decide what they were. What was the Pippin? A gaming console? A network computer? An early Mulitmedia PC? What was the Macintosh TV? A Mac? A TV? (But both are great trivia questions: Has Apple ever shipped a game console? and What Mac had the shortest production run and what was it’s color?)
8) Apple Portable
Another one of those products where Apple tried to ship something that pleased everyone. The active matrix display did not have the cursor “submarining” effect of Wintel portables with passive matrix displays, but it drew more power. Apple wanted a “mouse” integrated so it stuck a huge trackball on it. Apple wanted enough lifetime out of the battery to go coast to coast. Thus they ended up with a huge battery. Apple wanted to have minimal memory effect in the battery so Apple didn’t choose the NiCd batteries which were cutting edge for portables at the time and instead went with the heavier lead acid batteries. Just another case of by trying to please all Apple pleased virtually no one. (The Apple Portable was almost the same weight as my old Plus — and I already had the transport case for my old Plus. I considered them both “luggable” computers. So I saw absolutely no advantage in buying a Mac Portable.)
9) The whole several dozen different Performas/Not Performas fiasco.
What was made a Mac a Performa versus not a Performa? Why were there *SO* many different versions of each? Why did they all have such complex numbering schemes associated with the various models? The confusion alone drove customers away. By the time it was all said and done some retailers were selling the Performas WITH an Apple monitor for less than $800 just to get them off the shelves and out the door.
Lastly…
10) There was a certain model of Apple personal laserwriter that was almost as bad in quality as the Apple ///. I don’t remember the exact model as I never had one, but I knew several people who bought them and many of them were either DOA or had to be returned for replacement/repair within weeks of purchase.
With regard to those who list System 7. It wasn’t that bad (even in its 7.0 release it was not anywhere near as bad as 3.0). Apple just did a terrible job of getting developers to ship truly 32 bit clean software and software specifically designed to support it. Then there was that whole fiasco of the “System 7 Savvy” versus the “System 7 aware” versus the just “32 bit clean” designations. Thus even when carefully chosing applications you sometimes had probems with the things crashing. I know several people who stayed with System 6 and just upgraded to System 6.08 from System 6.07 in order to get the drivers that were part of System 7, but the application stability of System 6.
I am shocked SHOCKED that there isn’t a place to vote for the ImageWriter /// (3). I never EVER saw one of those that actually worked. The ImageWriter and ImageWriter //’s were solid dependable printers, the ImageWriter /// killed it’s entire product line!
— Hano
NewType said, “I think Newton is getting such a high response because it was a product that almost killed Apple. Consider that it cost more than $1 billion…”
I read somewhere yesterday (I can’t remember where now) that after SJ returned, they sold off the bulk of the Newton technology and recouped all the money they’d spent on it. I’d never heard that before. I could have sworn it was on MacCentral but I can’t find it now.
I bet my ImageWriter still works, where ever it is. BUT IT WAS LOUD AS HELL. How my parents slept while I was printing away in the wee hours I’ll never know. Hehe. Anyone remember the centerfold that was floating around (Countlegger maybe) that used numbers and letters to create the image? You couldn’t tell what it was up close, just a bunch of random characters all over the paper. Oh but when you hung it on the wall (or behind the door in my case)…
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Worst Apple OS: System 7 Pro
IIvx
what a pos that was
end of line after 2-3 months
Wasn’t there something called CyberDog? I can’t remember much except it sucked.
I have to agree with those 6200 haters. Those things were brutal. I think they were 75Mhz or 100Mhz… 601’s (???) and were crippled with little to zero upgrade options, and were slow as molasses on the current OS. I think they were around in ’94 or ’95? We were looking to purchase a computer at that time, but we definitely waited for the 6360 in ’96, with the 603e processor and PCI.
–mAc