I’m a Mac fanboy. I’ll admit it. I have all the latest gadgets. My friend sent me the following email that I thought you all would enjoy.
I think Apple will do just fine, whether or not Jobs returns to re-take the helm.
Amidst all the hype, people forget that Steve Jobs is not an infallible god of technology and marketing.
The Apple II, the first computer Jobs and the Woz put out, was not, in fact, a very good machine. Olivetti and Commodore had machines that were vastly superior. I used (and programmed) them all. The Apple II’s “storage” device, an analog tape cassette recorder, was a disaster, at a time when Commodore was using a digital tape storage device, and Olivetti was using a genuine digital floppy disk. Trying to edit on Apple’s display was an exercise in confusion, while the Commodore 8032 had an editing/display system nearly equal to today’s word processors.
In Jobs’ favor, he out-marketed Commodore and Olivetti, making the Apple II a must-have product. Commodore, old-timers may recall, abandoned its then-powerful desktops and went into games and toy computers. Olivetti, which was making products light-years ahead of those in America, never knew how to market them. (In 1978, I had a portable Olivetti, programmable in BASIC, that had a built-in printer, integral keyboard, and a 2-inch floppy disk unit! Did I mention it was portable?)
I painfully recall the Apple III. That was Steve Jobs’ personal project. As I recall, the Woz refused to have anything to do with it. I wrote a program for an Apple III, exactly once. It was the most screwed-up, buggy computer I ever put my hands on. As a result, I lost a bundle on the program I designed under contract, because coding it was such a horrendous project. As I recall, the Apple III was introduced as the first of a new generation. In fact, Apple dropped it and everyone who had bought one was left with a dead-end product.
Then there was the Lisa. That was Steve Jobs’ personal project, named after his daughter. Apple reportedly buried several thousand of them in a Utah landfill. I refused to touch one, even though my office was in an Apple store that had them in stock.
Then there was NEXT, the company Steve started after he left apple. Anybody know anybody who ever bought a NEXT computer?
A few years ago, I bought my wife an iPod that I think was called “Slim” or something like that. About two weeks later they stopped making it. Instantly, my wife’s was obsolete, another Apple dead end product.
More failed Apple products follow. In fairness to Jobs, some of those on this list were done when Jobs was out of Apple, squandering his stockholders’ investments in NEXT.
- 20th Anniversary Macintosh
- Mac Cube G4. Died in less than a year. (An Apple insider said Apple’s mistake was “depending more on Jobs’ personal taste than market research.”)
- Apple Pippin – a game machine attempt, voted one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.
- Macintosh Portable (15-1/2 pounds, $6,500). A solution in search of a problem. Televideo had one out, but nobody noticed. It was a dream computer for its time.
- Taligent operating system. Mercifully died before it ever reached the marketplace
- The Newton handwriting recognition product that couldn’t read handwriting.
- Quicktake camera. $750 and it couldn’t focus.
- Apple’s music partnership with the Motorola Rokr phone.
- Apple TV (not to be confused with Macintosh TV). Also called iTV.
- Apple Interactive Television Box. Because so many were thrown in dumpsters, those that remain are collectors’ items.