Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Biggest Hardware Flops of All Time
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
People **** on the Cube for lack of upgradability, but that's such BS.
You could bump the RAM to 1.5gig (same as the big tower), swap out the HDD for a larger model and even swap the video card (sure, options on GPUs were limited, but there were still 3 official replacements). You need more than one disk? Thats what the firewire was for.
You could bump the RAM to 1.5gig (same as the big tower), swap out the HDD for a larger model and even swap the video card (sure, options on GPUs were limited, but there were still 3 official replacements). You need more than one disk? Thats what the firewire was for.
Because it charges in the time it takes you to make a coffee or go to the toilet, so it doesn't make the slightest difference whether you can use it while it charges?
Lots of things ahead of their time were flops. Amiga 500/1200 were about 7-8 years ahead of their time and still being upgraded by fans today. The 1200 flopped back in the day.
I have a coworker that still uses the orange on for their blue 12 mini. looks pretty cool actually.
Try every three days. About five hours to charge. I never use it. Will only use plugged mice, and and old macally at that.
Fixed that for you
...but seriously, people have preferences for mice when it comes to size, shape, weight, number and type of buttons, chirality (that's my dictionary bingo done for today) etc. so one design is never going to please everybody. Unfortunately, Apple really only make one underlying design of mouse at a time, and those are the ones that are included with iMac or offered as the impulse "oh, yeah, I might need a mouse" check-box add-on when you buy any other Mac. So I'm not sure they're really selling on merit.
As for the charging position: it would be a better design if you could continue to use the mouse while charging. Yes, once charged it is good for a month, but that doesn't mean that you won't be in the middle of something important when it runs out - and unless you take the time out to give it a full charge the same thing will happen tomorrow. Does it make the mouse unusable? No. Are mice that you can keep right on using while they recharge just that little bit better? Yes - which is a bit disappointing because they're often (a) cheaper and (b) available in a better range of shapes and sizes.
...or one of many (often cheaper and/or with more features and a better choice of shapes) third-party mice which work that way... which is kinda the point.
Yes, because why does being ergonomic matter for something you're going to be using as an important tool for doing precise work for hours at a time?
Good call. I actually have one and it would be my nominee for worst-designed Apple product (flop or not). Apart from the insane charging position (designed to break either the pencil, the lightning port in your iPad or both) you can add to the list of magical brilliance:
- There is no "off" switch and if you don't use it for too long it runs completely flat and turns into landfill
- Yes, you can charge it more safely with a cable, but that involves not only carrying around a cable, but a tiny male-to-female lightning adapter.
- No provision for storing it/clipping it to the iPad etc.
- It is perfectly round and liable to roll off tables. Pens & pencils are made hexagonal for a reason.
- It is designed to look exactly like a regular (albeit round) "lead" pencil, and a brand new full-length one at that... because, obviously, lead pencils were carefully designed to be ergonomically perfect for their job, not to be cheaply mass manufactured for a few pennies each, and their length was chosen to be perfect for drawing with - not so you could keep cutting away at the wood to expose fresh lead. The result is actually quite top heavy since it puts the centre of gravity way above where you hold it and its made of denser stuff than a pencil. Look at other drawing instruments not constrained by being lead pencils - pens are typically shorter and stubbier than a (brand new) pencil, paintbrush handles are usually tapered (reducing the weight) and even a real pencil spends most of its useful life being shorter than it started out. The design thinking for Apple Pencil clearly started and stopped at "wouldn't it look cool alongside a real pencil in the marketing blurb".
- Why not a Wacom-style inductive digitiser that didn't need a battery in the pen (Samsung had no problem building that into tablets)? If not that, why the expletive wasn't it designed to charge from the newly added magnetic smart connector? That would be explained if it had been compatible with older iPads & phones with purely capacitive screens - but, no, it only worked with the new iPad Pro that it was developed alongside (but oviously in a different silo).
The G4 Cube followed the same fate as the 2013 trash can Mac Pro
The G4 Cube was hampered by absolutism.
1. Steve insisted that it had to be silent, which ended up limiting it to the 500mhz chip. The engineers even built in a fan mount on the bottom of the chassis to account for faster, hotter processors, but were never allowed to install the fan. I know this because my Cube has a Noctua fan that I installed down there 15 years ago.
2a. The device never got a chance for any physical revisions, even minor. The VRM board is located next to the (very standard for the time) 2x AGP slot, which means that Apple couldn’t install the same Radeon 9000 Pro graphics chip that they installed in every other G4, limiting the GPU to either the anemic Rage 128 or the still slow OG Radeon. Users were able to move the VRM board to a different location, allowing the extra 1/4” of clearance for the Radeon 9000 card, but Apple never implemented that change.
2b. The flat air vent on top. It’s just too easy for people to put papers/books/etc on top of the cube, blocking the airflow. A peaked or slanted grill would’ve given the Cube more of a chance to breathe, and along with a fan, would’ve prevented a lot of consumer dissatisfaction when the Cube overheated and shut down.
2c. The touch sensor power button is very cool and doesn’t break up the Lucite case, but it’s just too easy to brush against when tilting the Cube to plug in a peripheral. A standard button would’ve worked better.
I still have a Cube in the corner of my office, connected to a 23” Apple Cinema Display. I think it’s a fantastic machine, and Apple squandered millions in engineering by not making a few minor changes. If Apple had done a revB with the above tweaks, it would’ve allowed them to move up to the 733 and later gigahertz chips, as well as given them significantly more flexibility when it came to GPUs. And back then, in the era of Quicksilver and wind tunnel G4 towers trying to cool dual processors and an internal PSU, a single fan, cooling a single processor, with an external PSU, would’ve felt like a godsend to a lot of people (My G4 towers were loud - including my dual 1.25GHz when I fire her up these days).
The Cube flopped in sales because Steve didn‘t want practicality sullying his vision of a perfect computer, and he’d rather kill it than see it compromised. Me? I love the concept of a computer with the footprint of a Mac Mini, where everything can be swapped out. Mine’s lightly modded with a fan and a Radeon 7500 these days (the old, flashed nVidia 6200 suffered a blown capacitor), but I’ve seen people showing off Cubes with late-PowerBook era 7447a G4s running at 1.5GHz, Radeon 9000 Pros or newer (with moved VRM board), and other mods. Such a shame.
1. Steve insisted that it had to be silent, which ended up limiting it to the 500mhz chip. The engineers even built in a fan mount on the bottom of the chassis to account for faster, hotter processors, but were never allowed to install the fan. I know this because my Cube has a Noctua fan that I installed down there 15 years ago.
2a. The device never got a chance for any physical revisions, even minor. The VRM board is located next to the (very standard for the time) 2x AGP slot, which means that Apple couldn’t install the same Radeon 9000 Pro graphics chip that they installed in every other G4, limiting the GPU to either the anemic Rage 128 or the still slow OG Radeon. Users were able to move the VRM board to a different location, allowing the extra 1/4” of clearance for the Radeon 9000 card, but Apple never implemented that change.
2b. The flat air vent on top. It’s just too easy for people to put papers/books/etc on top of the cube, blocking the airflow. A peaked or slanted grill would’ve given the Cube more of a chance to breathe, and along with a fan, would’ve prevented a lot of consumer dissatisfaction when the Cube overheated and shut down.
2c. The touch sensor power button is very cool and doesn’t break up the Lucite case, but it’s just too easy to brush against when tilting the Cube to plug in a peripheral. A standard button would’ve worked better.
I still have a Cube in the corner of my office, connected to a 23” Apple Cinema Display. I think it’s a fantastic machine, and Apple squandered millions in engineering by not making a few minor changes. If Apple had done a revB with the above tweaks, it would’ve allowed them to move up to the 733 and later gigahertz chips, as well as given them significantly more flexibility when it came to GPUs. And back then, in the era of Quicksilver and wind tunnel G4 towers trying to cool dual processors and an internal PSU, a single fan, cooling a single processor, with an external PSU, would’ve felt like a godsend to a lot of people (My G4 towers were loud - including my dual 1.25GHz when I fire her up these days).
The Cube flopped in sales because Steve didn‘t want practicality sullying his vision of a perfect computer, and he’d rather kill it than see it compromised. Me? I love the concept of a computer with the footprint of a Mac Mini, where everything can be swapped out. Mine’s lightly modded with a fan and a Radeon 7500 these days (the old, flashed nVidia 6200 suffered a blown capacitor), but I’ve seen people showing off Cubes with late-PowerBook era 7447a G4s running at 1.5GHz, Radeon 9000 Pros or newer (with moved VRM board), and other mods. Such a shame.
Sure they looked cool. I’m just saying, it turns out the trash can had the exact same problems as the cube. But they did it again anyway, and it failed in the same way. It would be one thing if they hadn’t been so boldly prideful about it.
I just think it’s ironic that it was Schiller both times who was promoting it, and then apologizing for it later.
Entire economies are build on undercutting the competition on price. A race to the bottom strategy must have its merits under certain circumstances, both for the producer and consumer.
”The battery, on a full charge, will last several weeks. The Magic Mouse is the only mouse I use with my M1 iMac, and I consistently get anywhere from 6-8 weeks on a full charge. That's using the mouse 40-50 hours each week for work, plus other fun activities in the evenings like gaming, photo editing, etc.
"But it takes so long to charge," you might say. Charging your Magic Mouse from 0-100% does indeed take about 2 hours, but can you not find two hours in over a month to charge up your mouse in the grand scheme of things”
It's time you all got over how the Magic Mouse charges
I can admit that the Magic Mouse has a sub-optimal design, but the charging issue is overblown when you break it down.
www.imore.com
Certainly. And what a grim prospect that is for the poor souls enslaved to such an endeavour.
Not undercutting the competition on price seems to have worked pretty well for both Apple and its customers who are always free to go buy some bottom of the barrel garbage should they so choose.
Mine too. The G4 Cube looked great. I wish they hadn't given up on it. It was too expensive and it had some minor design flaws that could have been remedied.
The Newton, once the kinks were ironed out, was a really good device just ahead of its time. It had a lot of potential. I used a Message Pad 120 on Newton OS 2.0 for years. I really liked mine and only when the screen died catastrophically did I give it up. Palm had more success but their devices were not nearly as good.
Yes, that specific product failed spectacularly. By your logic the Pippin didn’t fail either since there’s gaming on Macs and iDevices.