Apple’s Five Worst Products, Ever

It just goes to show you how much people love Apple. Would anyone ever post an article about SanDisk’s five worst products, or Toshiba’s five worst products? We complain because we love, so stop yer whinin’ fanboys. Wired compiled an entertaining list from the Apple rogue’s gallery. I spent a few minutes trying to think of my own list of crummy Apple products, and I realized that they were mostly things that I hated not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t live up to the hype, or my high expectations, or they were just too ahead of the curve. The QuickTake, mentioned by Wired, is a great example of that. Too early.In fact, I could put a few of my favorite things on the bad list: the Newton, which started out weak, ended up strong, but wasn’t able to live up to its promise, being too big, too expensive, and too early.

The 20th anniversary Mac and the Cube were both examples of radical design that ended up being both too expensive and undermining the everyday computing experience by being too minimalist or too advanced, or both. Then of course there’s a half decade of underpowered, overpriced beige monstrosities released by Apple in the 90s, like the Performas and early PowerMacs. And how about that Macintosh TV?

And let’s not confine this list to just hardware. How about eWorld? Cyberdog? (Good idea, bad execution).

And let’s not just live in the distant past. Right now there’s an iPod Shuffle with voice control that makes you use Apple headphones.

What do you think? Are we too hard on Apple? We could certainly come up with a good list of crummy Sony products, too, for balance. What’s on your list of most disappointing products?

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