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Your Opinion on the Worst apple devices

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benpete420

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 19, 2014
24
0
Utopia
Post here on what you think are the worst apple devices ever made.

Mine:

Apple PinPin (Failed Gaming System)
Any apple computer made in the 1990's

So what are yours?
Please leave a reply.
 
Apple Pippin (not PinPin) was a decent machine, horribly marketed.

Apple made plenty of good computers in the '90s. The Quadra was a great line of systems for their time. And of course the first iMac came out while it was still the '90s, without which, we likely wouldn't have an Apple any more.

Probably the worst Apple machine was the Macintosh Classic II. Horribly crippled compared to the machine it replaced.

While the PowerBook 5300 series was a good machine for its time (the first PowerPC notebook,) the build quality was just AWFUL. I dealt with them in a corporate environment, and I'm pretty sure every single one we had had to be warranty replaced at least once.

The original Newton, while groundbreaking, was also equally famous for its bad handwriting recognition. Sadly, that reputation helped sink the later models, which had excellent handwriting recognition. (That recognition engine lives on in OS X to this day if you use a Wacom or similar tablet.)

However, what is probably Apple's worst device is the original "puck" mouse that came with the first generation of iMac. Absolutely horrendous little mouse.
 
I'd go with the 5200 & 6200. Faulty cache RAM modules, motherboard EMI clips that scratched tracks, Comm Slot card fences without a locking tab, 5200 RGB video cables that cracked, volume control actuators that never really worked well, entire front panels on the 5200 that would crack their screw mountings, and 6200 power supplies that would blow themselves up.

And the PowerBook 5300 and it's 68K partner the PowerBook 190. The brittle case plastics in the early models and the stupidly small AC Adapter socket with no physical support. I forget how many of those I sent back for complete case replacements.
 
Expensive

The computers in the 1990's were good, but just like you said with apple PinPin, horrible marketing and wayyy overpriced.
 
The Bandai Pippin (wasn't marketed as an Apple product, just powered by) was a decent machine but as Anonymous Freak said, badly marketed and expensive.
Trying to be more than just a games machine was the mistake.

It had the likes of a wireless controller, keyboard and up to 16mb memory cards (when Sony PS had much smaller cards, 1mb/15 blocks).

Too much, too expensive and most of all lack of real games.
Today it's a great collectors item, still pretty expensive and the games even more so! :D
 
PiPP!N was in many ways, both too early, and too late.

Too late, with too little functionality for it's price point.

Too early, as the Internet Appliance era was still a few years away, (Sony eVilla, 3Com Audrey, et al) and still would have been a flop like the rest of them.
 
Ehh, I liked my 180c PowerBook. It was left in a closet, a friend took it to college, and then I got to keep it. It was a beautiful machine and it still looks nice even though it doesn't work anymore. It's aged better than the G3s.

I really wish the tech industry wouldn't have gone to black keyboards. Now that I'm using one for the first time full time (an iMac G3 era keyboard), it is annoying. No wonder they started putting in backlights. Gray was so much better for visibility.

Those two Shuffle that looked like sticks were pretty bad. The original one, and then the one that introduced VoiceOver.
 
jodelli said:
Two words; Mac Portable.
Click to expand...
Nah, the Portable was fine. I particularly liked the trackball. Brilliant for Crystal Quest.

Re 'the 90s', everything was changing so quickly that there were bound to be a few dogs. Many of the Performa range were horribly underpowered, but even less forgivably they were butt-ugly.

But... Apple's very first release of the 90s was the Macintosh IIfx, and their very last was the Power Mac G4 Graphic. That's an absolutely iconic pair of bookends.
 
benpete420 said:
Any apple computer made in the 1990's
Click to expand...

The iMac G3 was made in the 90's and it's known as one of the best Macs ever. It revolutionised computing and put Apple back on the map.
But I agree that machines like the Quadra and PowerBook 5300 were terrible.
 
In terms of look only. I would largely agree that almost all Mac's from 1987 to 1997 were for the most part, butt ugly. Perhaps the PowerBooks looked a little better, but the asymmetry in stuff like my PowerMacintosh 8600 or the intruding amount of lines on stuff like the SE/30. Both those machines are quite good as computers, it just feels like nobody gave 2 monkeys about how they looked.

The 128K and 512K look so sleek and minimalist. They really give the impression somebody spent time going over every asthetic detail. I actually resent the way the Plus has a big pointless "Macintosh Plus" sign written in the front. Needlessly intruding and distracts from a brilliant design.

Almost all Mac's from the iMac G3 onward give again the impression that somebody cared deeply about what they looked like.
Maybe excluding the ClamShell iBooks, not my cup of tea! :p

Actually, I love the sleek look of the Apple II and II Plus. Combined with the monitor III and stand, it looks very smart. Then the IIe was just meh, the IIc was line madness, and the IIgs was a big block of plastic. Again, not hiding their importance and function as computers, the IIgs was especially great, but they don't look as meticulously designed as the Apple II, Macintosh 128K/512K, iMac G4, Power Mac G5 etc.

Just my thoughts!
 
Anonymous Freak said:
Probably the worst Apple machine was the Macintosh Classic II. Horribly crippled compared to the machine it replaced
Click to expand...
It replaced the Macintosh Classic, and THAT was the terrible of the two. The Classic II actually had double the CPU power and held more than 2x the RAM.

Worst Apple devices that come to mind start with the original G4 Mac Mini. Easily a perfect example of underpowered old tech in a new enclosure. The thing only had 1 DDR RAM slot making it cap out at 1GB of RAM in 2005! Selling those things was borderline criminal, and I was fool enough to buy one. Didn't take long before I ditched it though.

Another bad Apple product was Wallstreet & PDQ Powerbooks. They were slow, had terrible video cards which made running OS X basically impossible, the hinges allowed the screen to wobble all the time, and they were portables that weighed 7.8lbs.

Honorable mention would be the clamshell iBook SCREEN. The rest of the computer was awesome, but the terrible 600x800 screens really make these novel computers virtually useless.
 
The Apple Display Connector (ADC). Nice idea, but crippled a lot of machines with one or none (if the PSU died) digital out.
 
AxoNeuron said:
I don't know about that, I have used many mouses at work and I have to say I find the Magic Mouse to be an excellent reliable mouse.
Click to expand...

For audio production the Magic Mouse is brilliant! I can fluidly scroll up, down, left and right so quick. I don't know how anybody can bear a regular mouse. Yeah it's rubbish for games, but so is a touch pad. You can't draw very well with a joystick. Interface devices are task specific, and a Magic Mouse is the best in its class for what it does.
 
Hrududu said:
Another bad Apple product was Wallstreet & PDQ Powerbooks. They were slow, had terrible video cards which made running OS X basically impossible, the hinges allowed the screen to wobble all the time, and they were portables that weighed 7.8lbs.
Click to expand...

In fairness to them, they were discontinued before OS X even came out. That wasn't the fault of the design decisions made when they came out - but rather the development decisions of OS X to make it so slow on older hardware.

In OS 9, they were perfectly usable. (And they could run OS X passably well, the system RAM was far more important to early OS X versions than video chip.) The hinge design was "iffy" at best, though. (Still not nearly as bad as the PowerBook 5300 series/190 series hinge design, though.)

Edit: And 7.8 pounds was on the light side for "desktop replacement" laptops of the day. Ultra-lights were just starting to come out, and they tended to have two-generation old CPUs. (I bought an "ultra light" in 1999 that had a Pentium MMX, when "desktop replacement" laptops had Pentium IIIs.)
 
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Hrududu said:
Another bad Apple product was Wallstreet & PDQ Powerbooks. They were slow, had terrible video cards which made running OS X basically impossible, the hinges allowed the screen to wobble all the time, and they were portables that weighed 7.8lbs.
Click to expand...

Slow? They were as fast as the desktops Apple was selling at the time, as long as you got one that had L2 cache. Remember that G3s were at least as fast as Pentium IIs of the time, and those didn't go into laptops. I do agree that the hinges were junk.
Yes, they were heavy and hot, but any high end laptop of the era was the same.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
In fairness to them, they were discontinued before OS X even came out. That wasn't the fault of the design decisions made when they came out - but rather the development decisions of OS X to make it so slow on older hardware.

In OS 9, they were perfectly usable. (And they could run OS X passably well, the system RAM was far more important to early OS X versions than video chip.) The hinge design was "iffy" at best, though. (Still not nearly as bad as the PowerBook 5300 series/190 series hinge design, though.)

Edit: And 7.8 pounds was on the light side for "desktop replacement" laptops of the day. Ultra-lights were just starting to come out, and they tended to have two-generation old CPUs. (I bought an "ultra light" in 1999 that had a Pentium MMX, when "desktop replacement" laptops had Pentium IIIs.)
Click to expand...
Ever try and run OS X on one of these? It does not work. It's not a limitation of CPU or RAM, but the actual video chip gave it all kinds of problems with OS X including not firing up the display when loading the OS. I just kept mine as a 9 only machine after trying OS X on it for a week. Basically, in comparison to the Lombard that replaced it, the PDQ was a pretty bad machine. It did have a great 14.1" screen though, which made the weight a little more justifiable.
 
Hrududu said:
Ever try and run OS X on one of these? It does not work. It's not a limitation of CPU or RAM, but the actual video chip gave it all kinds of problems with OS X including not firing up the display when loading the OS.
Click to expand...

I did use it in OS X sporadically but didn't regularly use OS X until I got a titanium G4 a couple years later. Given that OS X shipped nearly 2 full years after the G3 was discontinued, it's unfair to call the Powerbook slow on the basis of how it ran nearly 3 years after it first was released.
 
Hrududu said:
Ever try and run OS X on one of these? It does not work. It's not a limitation of CPU or RAM, but the actual video chip gave it all kinds of problems with OS X including not firing up the display when loading the OS. I just kept mine as a 9 only machine after trying OS X on it for a week. Basically, in comparison to the Lombard that replaced it, the PDQ was a pretty bad machine. It did have a great 14.1" screen though, which made the weight a little more justifiable.
Click to expand...

Yes, actually, it was my primary OS X machine from about 2000 (Mac OS X Public Beta) through 2003 (when I got a first-generation 12" Aluminum PowerBook G4 - my first ever "brand new" Mac.) And it was still in service for me for quite a few years after. It eventually became the "public internet computer" at a friend's coffee shop until about 2007 or 2008, running 10.4 via XPostFacto, and Firefox, with a "Guest User" auto-login loading directly to Firefox.

I never had any of the symptoms you experienced. I'm guessing you had something wrong, or a bad install. One week on a single machine with a single install is not a very good basis for comparison. Of note: early versions of Mac OS X were very sensitive to RAM quality - if you didn't have a good RAM module, you could run in to all kinds of problems. Swap the RAM out with higher-quality RAM, bingo - worked like a charm. I experienced this with my beige G3 desktop. And as the PDQ didn't come with enough RAM to run OS X, you had to upgrade it. Therefore, you were fairly likely, if you bought cheap RAM, to have problems.

Again, this was an OS X thing - the sensitivity to poor RAM - not a machine thing. It was true on *ALL* OS X-capable machines.
 
I'm aware of how early OS X performed. I worked my way through Mac OS before finally choosing Jaguar as the first OS X I used every day. It was running on 384MB of RAM which wasn't bad for 10.2 back then. Glad you had better luck with yours than I had with mine. Maybe I'll dig mine out of the bag and xpostfacto Tiger on it. I'm sure you recall how buggy and slow 10.2 was, maybe I'd have better luck with Tiger.
 
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