t’s almost hard to imagine that like all companies before it and all companies that came after it, Apple Inc. has had some very bad ideas in the past. In fact, some of them were so bad, I’d feel like a horrible person for not sharing them with you guys. Don’t thank me, I’m doing this for myself as well.
Let’s take a look at some moments in time when Apple wasn’t innovative in the good sense of the word.
The Apple III
Back in the 70’s, everyone knew about the Apple II. The new version that released in the 80’s wasn’t as popular, however. First of all, it cost $3,495 – $4,995 and second of all, they made it without a fan to keep the machine quiet – which made it overheat. You can tell not many people were pleased to own that one.
The Newton
Before you had tablets and smartphones, you had a PDA. And Apple had a PDA that had one major selling point: it was able to convert your stylus-written text into computer text. And it was so bad, that everyone made fun of it – it was even featured in The Simpsons.
The Pippin
The what now? Exactly. This was Apple’s attempt to break into the console gaming market in Japan. Remember how people always make those jokes about how you can’t play games on a Mac? Yeah, the Pippin wasn’t much better either.
The Lemmings Ad
This one was so bad it quickly reached legendary status. Apple made a commercial for the Super Bowl of 1985 where they essentially had some businessmen with briefcases blindly follow each other across a ledge. It was seen as a huge insult to their customers.
The Hockey Puck Mouse
We’ve all come to accept computer mice as being, well, shaped like a mouse. Sort of. But then Apple decided to make a round mouse. And as you can guess by now, it was deemed very awful for everyday use.
The Lisa Computer
Before the first Apple computer in 1984, we had the Lisa in 1983. Sadly, the Lisa cost almost $10,000 and it was horribly, horribly slow.
The Copland OS
After sticking to their Mac OS and getting rid of Steve Jobs in 1985, Apple wanted to create a new OS that would have backward compatibility with Mac OS. This project was called Copland and was abandoned in 1996 after spending millions of dollars on the project and deciding to buy a new OS that was developed by – yup, you guessed it – Steve Jobs. That OS was later released in 2001 as Mac OS X.
