With the success of the iPod, the subsequent resurgence in popularity of the Macintosh platform, and the recent iPhone smash hit, it's hard to imagine that Apple was once a company that tried to enter every market possible, leaving a trail of flopped products in its wake. Forbes lists ten of them, and we take a look at some of them, and add one of our own.
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Member since:2005-07-29
The GS was not a failure....like you said Apple killed it. The GS sold very well and had a lot of native software. Believe me I have a Woz ROM 1 and a ROM 3 model. They replaced the //e in a lot of schools in the Los Angeles area until the Mac took over.
I wish they made a 32bit version of the 6502!
Member since:2006-05-26
For a rather lengthy period of time (not sure how long off the top of my head) the only way you could get color on an Apple computer was to get an Apple 2 series system: this was intentional, as for some weird reason, it was perceived (IMO) that adding color would have been not as business-like for the Mac. As of the time the Apple 2GS was released, anyway, no Apple-made Macintosh supported color at all, either in hardware or software, for the display.
Sadly, Apple seems to have purposely crippled the Apple 2GS in favor of the Macintosh being pushed: keep in mind that the Apple 2GS was actually more expandable than any Mac up to that time, in both RAM as well as other hardware! It also had far more software available, though not much for too long that actually took proper advantage of the hardware capabilities. ProDOS was renamed to ProDOS 8, to clarify the difference between that and ProDOS 16, which was the predecessor to GS OS, which wasn't released until after I no longer had access to an Apple 2GS system (I was in high school when it was released). A pity, really: GS OS was/is far more powerful than MS-DOS ever was, at least at that time. GS OS: a mixture of inheriting a combination of Mac OS fundamentals along with ProDOS, which was derived (and scaled down from) from Apple 3 Sophisticated Operating System, which also was a major influence on the Mac and Lisa OS.
Member since:2007-01-22
I remember when color was considered frivolous! Only a game computer needs color!
Maybe it was because in the business world, everything worth doing had to be printed and there was no way you could print in color with a laser, dot matrix or daisy wheel printer.
Edited 2008-10-31 02:10 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
"The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about."This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Member since:
2007-03-07
Oh, one more I forgot about.
The Apple IIGS (Apple II Graphics and Sound). It had the benefit of being Apple II compatible (which the Apple III did not without software emulators being loaded first). But the Macintosh (which was not Apple II compatible) had already passed it by. So ultimately the Apple IIGS ended up being a huge failure. Virtually no software was ever written for it that could take advantage of the "GS" part, and customers were mostly stuck with Apple II software, which basically made the GS pointless.
Ironically, Apple killed the GS with their own competing system. hehe
Edited 2008-10-31 00:36 UTC