Apple's most failed product?

13

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  • Reply 41 of 66
    Quote:

    Originally posted by MacUsers

    I have one of those, never had a problem with them though



    Well, aren't you lucky. I had to the Color StyleWriter 2400 it was not so hot, the ink cartirages weren't so good either. HP really does a great job with their printers.
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  • Reply 42 of 66
    jwilljwill Posts: 209member
    I never had a problem with that printer either. I had it back when there was a Performa 6400/180 in the house, running Mac OS 8.6 I think.
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  • Reply 43 of 66
    I had mine with a Performa 560, running system 7.5
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  • Reply 44 of 66
    Mine was on OS 7.5, maybe mine was just messed up or something, but I always thought the StyleWriter were known for not being a great printer.
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  • Reply 45 of 66
    ringoringo Posts: 329member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by tonton

    In terms of most dollars spent, entire project scrapped, I'd think the choice would most likely have to be Rhapsody.



    What? You're using Rhapsody!
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  • Reply 46 of 66
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    The Stylewriter printers were just rebranded Canons, no? And, yes, they were pretty poor, but they came through a few times for me in a crunch, if not that with great quality. I don't recall that Apple ever actually designed/manufactured its own printers, including the early laser printers.



    I think tonton is thinking of Copland and Gershwin. Rhapsody came after, when Apple first bought NeXT. It got folded into OS X development, and Rhapsody proper was released as OS X Sever 1.0. There was also AIX, Pnk and Taligent, but those were always considered more R&D projects. Copland was long considered Apple's Last Great Hope.?



    Yes, Copland is probably the single biggest failure, even bigger than the Lisa. Copland almost buried Apple singlehandedly. Apple at least had the Apple ][ line during the Lisa fiasco, not to mention the Mac that soon followed. Even the Newton had a limited success. Except for a few morsels from Copland development like Vtwin and the OS 8 appearance manager, there's very little to show for a few billion US dollars spent on the project. What other good ideas Copland was trying to develop, NeXT already had the technology, and was often better anyway. That is to say, if the Copland equivalent was even up and running. Copland was never really shown to the public; Apple created Director movies to demonstrate the UI and concepts because they could barely get a Hello World app to run on it until it was too late.
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  • Reply 47 of 66
    chinneychinney Posts: 1,019member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    The short answer: The Lisa was way too expensive, and they marketed them as business machines which meant going against IBM at the time. There were lot of other issues: development costs, the Apple III, the Mac, IBM clones, proprietary and expensive components, and the project was nearly run aground by Jobs before he was moved on to the Mac project in order to salvage the Lisa (the Mac was basically R&D at that point, not expected to be a real product). That's just to name a few.



    Jobs did learn to love a lot of the ideas and features the Lisa provided, and they showed up in NeXT and later in OS X when Apple left some of the Lisa's good ideas out to dry (they did bring in a lot of other stuff from the Lisa too). Stuff like sheets, the Dock, services, column view, the more unix-like guts, etc.



    here are some screenshots from an old article about the Lisa's GUI.



    Sorry to digress?




    Thanks. As I said, I used at work as a student it but did not know much about it at the time, nor had I looked into it since. Your account seems to confirm, however, that with all its faults, it was still an advanced machine for its time. I can't believe that it took all of this time - really until OSX - for some of its advances to be incorporated on a mainstream OS. All those years I was forced to frig around on DOS and Windows (I did not have my own computer until I bought this one in Sept. 2001). I think that Apple might have been a bit slow in modernizing

    its own OS over the years, so.....



    Maybe I could nominate the Mac OS over the 90s as a failed product. Not that it was all that bad, but it could be argued that it failed to do much for Apple and failed to mak e the big leap forward fast enough.
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  • Reply 48 of 66
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Chinney

    Maybe I could nominate the Mac OS over the 90s as a failed product. Not that it was all that bad, but it could be argued that it failed to do much for Apple and failed to mak e the big leap forward fast enough.



    That's because Apple let the Mac OS stagnate while they put so much wasted energy into Copland. System 7 was around for a very ver long time, while MS rolled out Win95. Apple was lucky to settle for Mac OS 8 in time for Windows 98. The impotence of Apple in the mid-1990's is amazing, moreso considering that they're around despite it.
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  • Reply 49 of 66
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    Actually, I wasn't sure if it was real or not when I posted earlier. But, here it is...



    http://www.macgeek.org/museum/pippin/



    A quick google search turned that up. Lots of pictures!




    I've heard of Pippin before but have never seen any of the photos. It looked rather neat. ^^
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  • Reply 50 of 66
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Jim Paradise

    I've heard of Pippin before but have never seen any of the photos. It looked rather neat. ^^



    Does that Pippin logo look like the NeXT logo or what?
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  • Reply 51 of 66
    Quote:

    Originally posted by BuonRotto

    Does that Pippin logo look like the NeXT logo or what?







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  • Reply 52 of 66
    satchmosatchmo Posts: 2,699member
    Here's a few more to ponder:



    The Macintosh TV (black AIO enclosure...not sure it was available to the general public)



    The Macintosh Color Classic

    A colour version of the Classic Mac but utilizing a 9 inch screen with something like 512 x 384 screen res.
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  • Reply 53 of 66
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by \\/\\/ickes

    HELLO!!!!



    The apple puck mouse!







    Even Steve said it was a bad idea.




    The feel of the puck mouse is better than the current Pro mouse. I loved it. Perfect for 3 finger mousing.
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  • Reply 54 of 66
    Quote:

    Originally posted by CubeDude

    That looks more like an N64 than a GameCube.



    I wasn't talking specifically about form. It was more about the expansion capabilities on the bottom. And it uses optical media.
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  • Reply 55 of 66
    mlnjrmlnjr Posts: 230member
    I loved my Color Classic. Sold it for about $450 in 1997 or '98 and graduated to a 6500/225. The jump from 16 to 225 megahertz was phenomenal. Not as nice as the jump from 225 to 800 on my LCD iMac, though.



    I'd say the award should go to Cyberdog.
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  • Reply 56 of 66
    709709 Posts: 2,016member
    I'd be curious to know what the sales are on the packaged version of iLife. To me this the most potential to be canned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you get iDVD with any SD Mac, and if you don't have a SD...why would you buy iLife anyways? Is this strictly for the bandwidth impaired?



    As far as Keynote goes, it is by far one of the best pieces of software Apple has ever produced. I just finished my 5th *major* presention this weekend (by *major* I mean <500 people in a room, Fortune 500 company and running the whole damn show (video and all) off a friggin laptop). It rules.
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  • Reply 57 of 66
    amoryaamorya Posts: 1,103member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Mac Man 020581

    The Apple SytleWriter printers. Gosh, those things were so terrible.



    I have a Stylewriter 1200 - black and white, but it just kept going and going... needed a new ink cartridge about once in a blue moon, and just worked. No setup, no diagnostics... plug in and it works. It even managed to turn itself on if it was off when you chose print, etc... definitely a very Apple product.



    Amorya
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  • Reply 58 of 66
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by 709

    I'd be curious to know what the sales are on the packaged version of iLife. To me this the most potential to be canned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you get iDVD with any SD Mac, and if you don't have a SD...why would you buy iLife anyways? Is this strictly for the bandwidth impaired?



    Apple obviously doesn't expect to sell a bunch of boxes of the iLife suite, especially at this point. They made it for upgrading users of iDVD. You couldn't possibly download iDVD and all the goodies that come with it; it's a full DVD in itself, isn't it? When a new version of iDVD comes out, iLife will get a new box for upgrading users. Everyone else gets it preinstalled or just won't upgrade.
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  • Reply 59 of 66
    ryaxnbryaxnb Posts: 583member
    Tops would have to be... not the Lisa!

    The Apple III.

    Also, I can think of 500 other ones:

    Lisa

    Mac 128k didn't sell too well after originial hype.

    Cube

    QuickTake

    PowerBook 100

    PowerBook 5300

    x200 series.

    Bad technologlogically:

    Apple III

    PowerBook 5300

    PB 100?

    x200.

    5300

    Bad in the market:

    Lisa

    Apple III

    PB 100 (until price cut)

    QuickTake

    Cube

    iMac 17" = isn't really bad in the market, but expensive.
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  • Reply 60 of 66
    ryaxnbryaxnb Posts: 583member
    yikes! G4

    Color LaserWriter
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