Apple's First Flops 434
Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."
Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple Pippin (Score:5, Interesting)
And the 3rd flop was ... (Score:4, Interesting)
And of course were an horrible flop
It's funny because back then, the nickname "Mac III" made a lot of people associate it with Apple III, and there was, in the Mac hackers community, a bad feeling about it
Apple: Never again use "III" in a product name
Ben.
Apple is a 2.0 or 3.0 company most of the time... (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, Apple screws up a lot, particularly in first versions of a new product. As the article says, the Lisa was a flop, but it led to the original Mac, which led to the real hit, the Mac II.
The Mac Portable was a terrible product--but it led to the Powerbook, which defined the laptop computer. The Cube was overpriced and didn't have a market, but it led to the Mini, which is kicking ass.
The iPod was a hit from the jump, but the Newton was dead from its announcement date (we knew it was in trouble when they started handing them out as employee awards).
Re:Apple Pippin (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/14/b346998.htm [businessweek.com]
the business week artical from 96
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [wikipedia.org]
The wikipedia entry
http://www.macgeek.org/museum/pippin/ [macgeek.org]
and the macgeek pippin / bandi museem
I belive it was released by bandi it just got drowned by the price and the fact it was a bit ahead of its time (look at consoles now , offering simmilar multi media features)
Re:Classic tech support advise! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple History (Score:2, Interesting)
I always found the history of Apple, Inc. and their technology fascinating. I'm 26, and the first computer I used at school was an Apple IIe. My first computer my parents bought me was a IIgs. That was a great machine in its day, if only it had a hard drive it would have essentially been a Mac since it had an early version of the Mac GUI. At that time, anyone who was anyone in BBS land wanted a PC though, so I switched and am still using x86 hardware today (I don't care to start an argument - terminal software and BBS software was far superior on the PC at the time). Nonetheless, I enjoy reading about Apple history.
Ok, I did have a point to this post. Another great site is:
www.apple-history.com
(Not hyperlinked on purpose - be gentle. And no, I'm not affiliated with this site.)
I can still find nostalgic messages we posted on Fidonet via USENET when I search once in awhile. That was before I discovered the USENET, which AFAIK was largely accessed with UNIX at the time. Oh, how naive I was, and probably still am.
Lovverly Lisa (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Quite The Contrary (Score:1, Interesting)
The 3.5" drive where developed by sony 1980.
Re:Apple IIGS? (Score:5, Interesting)
That machine was the last of the Apple
That machine would have made Apple big, had they had not spent all their marketing efforts onto the Mac (whose hardware was inferior in many areas to the GS, but whose OS was superior).
Re:And the 3rd flop was ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple Pippin (Score:2, Interesting)
Hopefully they won't suffer the same fate.
Apple Giotto -- prototype tablet PC (Score:2, Interesting)
A couple of comments.... (Score:3, Interesting)
If Apple had just priced the G4 Cube correctly it would have been a hit, because its desktop footprint is really not much bigger than the currently fashionable Mac Mini. And it would have allowed people to buy less-expensive monitors, keyboards and mouse pointers, too.
The iPod was a hit from the jump....
I have to disagree with that. It was only when the version for Windows that included USB 2.0 support came out and the unveiling of the iTunes Music Store that the iPod really took off in popularity.
Re:A couple of comments.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree completely. The Cube didn't have a market because it was overpriced.
I have to disagree with that. It was only when the version for Windows that included USB 2.0 support came out and the unveiling of the iTunes Music Store that the iPod really took off in popularity.
I don't agree 100%; the iPod was a clear success from its first launch, but you do have a good point about the overall market exploding with the PC version--and again, that goes to show that Apple tends to do much better with the second and third iterations of a product than with the first.
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
However, we are talking about a hypothetical situation where Apple is the desktop monopolist, not Microsoft. Naturally, they'd want you to buy everything from them, but very likely they would be forced to allow competitors to build competitive hardware, just like IBM was in the 70s.
4 years ago, (Score:1, Interesting)
I am looking at 4 dual G5 Xserves for my mail infrastructure. So evidently they have made HUGE progress.
Perhaps they are starting to realize that "looks" aren't everything, and sticking to industry standards is vital to getting into the business market (Unlike Microsoft).
It's interesting to see where Apple has been, and where they are going. Maybe the chip on Stevie's shoulder is wearing off?
For most consumers, hardware is less of a factor (Score:4, Interesting)
There's enough of a market within homes, particularly digital homes, to drive Apple growth without business penetration. Apple is trying to be the new Sony and the hardware is a commodity; it's the software and design that are the real added values.
Apple /// not a flop (Score:1, Interesting)
By releasing the product early we could prove that we were not a "one product company" and thus likely raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an optimistic market.
The Apple
Jobs, Wozniak and dozens of others newly made millions at the turn of 1980 laughed all the way to the bank. Wendell Sanders, the lead designer, took the heat, but he made some money as well.
x86 itself doesn't imply loss of control (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO running OSX on "x86" doesn't necessarily imply generic beige boxes. For example, Apple could easily build its own x86 boxes and still maintain hardware control, or they could have someone else build boxes to a particular spec that would be OSX-x86 compatible. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are good examples of controlled x86 and PPC hardware from the "other guys".
What I think would be really cool would be a box that is designed specifically to run OSX-x86, but can also run XP and/or XP apps natively without emulation (dual boot, vmware, wine, ...).
Blisa a flop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
I find that it is easy to write cross platform C++ on the Mac and then port it to Windows. I've done it the other way too, but I like XCode better than MS Visual Catastrophe. And for GUI, I like Qt or else I use Cocoa on Mac and Win32 on Windows. The nice thing about Cocoa is you don't accidentally put a Cocoa call into your cross platform C++ module, because Cocoa requires Objective-C or Objective-C++ which makes it easy to identify which files are portable.
The times I ask people to write portable code on Windows, I've been clusterfucked by people who will stick a Win32 call right in the middle of platform independent code, so I got Macs for my team.
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:3, Interesting)
They threatened to cancel Office for Mac if Apple didn't take the deal and drop all the lawsuits.
Most Spectacular Crashes (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a 660AV, and it was a nice machine- I liked it; it was an affordable 68040, and that's why I bought it (I believe- this was almost 10 years ago). Speech recognition was kind of cool, but didn't work all that well. The software modem stuff was crap, the DSP-powered fractals only exciting for about 5 minutes. It was one of the newer machines capable of loading its ROM into RAM for a very noticeable speedup, at the penalty of a couple MB of lost memory, and memory was megabucks at the time. Basically, Apple oversold the DSP capabilities, because virtually NOTHING came out that actually used the DSP, even though it was very quick. PowerPC came along, and everyone promptly forgot about the DSPs.
...but MAN oh MAN could that thing crash in spectacular ways. Why? Well, the main OS would crash, but the DSP would keep chugging along, but would get garbage from the main system...and you'd get an incredible video acid trip, along with all sorts of squeals, static, etc from the audio. One time, my soft-modem went completely bonkers, going on+off hook like crazy until I pulled the plug.