Apple's Five Failed Products

Five failed Apple products

Apple is currently one of the world’s best tech giants. According to the latest data from Forbes, Apple has taken the throne by beating the world’s biggest tech companies with a market capitalization of 3.02 trillion US dollars. After going through many ups and downs from the beginning, it took Apple 42 years to become the first American company to reach the 1 trillion mark in August 2018. After that, Apple became the first company in the world to achieve a market capitalization of 3 trillion in just 4 years. The company crossed this unimaginable milestone in January 2022.

However, Apple’s history and journey have not always been glamorous. Like other companies, Apple has also had to accept the bitter taste of failure. Many of their products have not been able to do business as expected in the market. Today’s discussion is about ten such failed Apple products.

The Apple III

The Apple III was the first failed product in Apple’s history. After the Apple Two took the technology world by storm, Apple launched the Apple Three computer in May 1980 as its successor. The company hoped that this would take Apple’s success to the next level. But instead, the computer became Apple’s first failed product. Since the computer did not have any cooling fan, the device would become as hot as fire after a short period of use. Due to overheating, problems would arise in the circuit board of the computer and the chips would come out of the sockets. As a result, the entire system of the device would have problems. For this reason, Apple was forced to remove about 14,000 computers from the market. This was Apple’s first computer, which was not designed by Steve Wozniak.

The Apple Lisa

The specialty of the Apple Lisa is that this computer had a graphical interface. Although laptops are now available to everyone, having a personal computer with a graphical interface was a fairly rare thing in the 1980s. Because computers were not yet as readily available as they are today. That is why people did not hesitate to buy Apple Lisa as their first personal computer with a graphical interface by spending about 10 thousand dollars from their pockets. However, the reality is different. Apart from this feature of the graphical interface, the high price of the computer was not acceptable in any way. In addition, the device was very slow. It was also quite difficult to use, so users had to be disappointed. As a result, in 1986, Apple gave an opportunity, where it was said that Apple Lisa users would be able to buy a $ 4100 Mac Plus in exchange for their computer for just $ 1500. Many people took advantage of that opportunity. They were able to sell about 10 thousand Lisa computers at $ 9,995 per computer. They spent more than $ 150 million to make these 10 thousand computers, while the income from them was $ 100 million.

Apple Macintosh Portable

This was Apple’s first battery-powered laptop. Although the Macintosh portable computer was portable in name, it was not easy to lift it at all. Because, its weight was close to 7 kg. Due to the complexity of the battery, the computer sometimes did not start even after plugging in. The device lasted only two years after its launch in 1989. At $7,300, the computer had 1 megabyte of RAM and 256 kilobytes of ROM. The device was a disaster in the name of being portable.

Copland

Copland was one of Apple’s most ambitious projects. In the 1990s, when the Macintosh system could not keep up with the times, Apple planned to bring a new model system called Copland to the market. The company said that Copland’s operating system would run various Windows apps and compete head-to-head with the Microsoft Windows operating system. But after several years of continuous efforts, Apple could not show any expected results, so the project had to be canceled.

The Apple Pippin

Apple lost its bet in the console gaming market with Pippin. Companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Sega had already maintained their dominance in the gaming world. As a result, popular game companies also made games compatible with these devices. The Apple Pippin, which came to the market in 1996, was priced at $600. On the other hand, a high-performance Nintendo 64 console could be obtained by spending only $200 from your pocket. Due to its high price, the Apple Pippin could not last more than a year in the market. In addition, the number of games on it was relatively small. Despite the goal of selling 300,000 units in the first year, Apple was able to sell about 12-42 thousand devices by the end of the year.

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