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Your Opinion on the Worst apple devices

Hrududu said:
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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In the grand scheme of things, Jaguar was actually the "smoothest" OS on it - but for public-internet use, running (what was then the latest) OS was more secure. Tiger ran passably for what the machine's job was. If you want to play with an old machine just to play with an old machine, I'd put 10.2 on it. If you want to use it for "serious internet surfing", then 10.4 with TenFourFox is probably the best bet.
 
MobileMe - It was the slowest and most unreliable cloud service to ever exist.
Ping - It was the most weak attempt at a social network ever.
Hockey Puck Mouse - Horrible mouse.
iTunes Match - It never worked as it should have done. Always confusing tag information, album art, explicit and clean versions of songs and horribly slow uploading.
OS X 10.0 and 10.1 - Both terribly buggy, slow and lacking features.
iPhone 4 - Great looking phone but underpowered and had a lot of signal issues.
 
I'd say for a physical device the apple hockey puck mouse
138404-usbmouse_original.jpg

For services, that's got to be Ping. I have no idea what they were trying to accomplish with that. Its purpose and execution fell flat.

MobileMe deserves honorable mention, but at least we know what it was tying to do, its execution fell flat.
 
Wow. I had forgotten that Apple tried to do the Ping thing. That was bad.

I'm surprised about all the hate on the hockey-puck mouse. I find that mouse ergonomically OK. Its main issue is a lack of a right click, which is how all Apple mice were for a long time. I actually thought the "Pro Mouse", while very pretty, felt worse as far as the click mechanism goes. The Magic Mouse is my least favorite. Horrible ergonomics and so many accidental gestures....

Some of the biggest flops I would say are:
  • TAM. Super overpriced. (Conversely, its one of the collector's items I want most...)
  • Newton. Had bad public reception (although I found it to be quite capable back in the day)

The LISA is probably the product I would deem as the worst. Revolutionary, maybe. But it got replaced with the Macintosh, with which it was not binary compatible. It was super expensive, and couldn't do a whole lot due to short life and lack of software development commitment.
 
The early Pro Mouse had a tension adjustment underneath for 3 settings of button gram-force. The later ones didn't and I always wondered what gram force was decided upon. The cables on those were the worst!

And Apple kind of admitted a failing in the 'puck' mouse when they added an inverted dimple to the button actuator in an attempt to give tactile feedback as to the rotational position of the grasp.

Personally, I never had a problem with the puck mouse, but the pro mouse and the mighty mouse did have a problem with the button on soft surfaces like a bed.
 
roadbloc said:
iPhone 4 - Great looking phone but underpowered and had a lot of signal issues.
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I wouldn't say the 4 was underpowered on release at all. It is certainly a weak phone today but in 2010 it was rocking Infinity Blade no problem. It's Geekbench Score is pretty damn good for the time.
 
My Duo 210 went back to the repair shop for replacement keyboards 3 times. But a 5300 had even worse build quality, barely lasted a year of use. And then there was trying to use an Apple III in a warm room.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
Hockey puck mouse, closely followed by the magic mouse and then any other mouse made by apple.
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Love the Magic Mouse, personally. The hockey puck I guess is what I would consider the worst I ever used. All the Macs I used however were rock solid--IIci, 7100, G3 Beige, G4 DA, G5 1.8DP, MBP Early 2008, Mac Pro 2008. Skipped a few less than stellar releases by luck though (Spec-dumped G4s!)

I can't honestly give you a list of crap Apple devices, I've never used one, and "worst" implies a certain level of quality outside relative merits.

People going on the services have plenty to pick from though. Ping and iTunes Match felt half-baked, and their cloud services are only now kicking into full gear.

MacTech68 said:
The early Pro Mouse had a tension adjustment underneath for 3 settings of button gram-force. The later ones didn't and I always wondered what gram force was decided upon. The cables on those were the worst!

And Apple kind of admitted a failing in the 'puck' mouse when they added an inverted dimple to the button actuator in an attempt to give tactile feedback as to the rotational position of the grasp.

Personally, I never had a problem with the puck mouse, but the pro mouse and the mighty mouse did have a problem with the button on soft surfaces like a bed.
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It's always amazing going back to old mice and realizing how bad they were, even the early optical mice (which felt like a godsend from the trackball back in the day.)

The wires on the Pro Mice did have a tendency to bend and fray right at the mousehead. Haven't noticed that on today's wired Apple mice, although the trackballs tend to get gunked fairly easily.
 
Ping was originally designed for Facebook integration. Shortly after it's release Facebook began blocking Apple from using their API. Apple wouldn't agree to the terms Facebook demanded, so they had to take out the Facebook integration. It wasn't a great service by any means but that was a major nail in the coffin, especially in 2010-11. Spreading the service with the help of Facebook would likely have lead to more users and more development. I thought it was a gimmicky service but I also think that about most of social media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping#Facebook
 
Anonymous Freak said:
In the grand scheme of things, Jaguar was actually the "smoothest" OS on it - but for public-internet use, running (what was then the latest) OS was more secure. Tiger ran passably for what the machine's job was. If you want to play with an old machine just to play with an old machine, I'd put 10.2 on it. If you want to use it for "serious internet surfing", then 10.4 with TenFourFox is probably the best bet.
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I stored that thing away in it's bag a loooong time ago. I still fire it up every year or so just to ensure it still works. It currently has 9.2.2 on it. I really wouldn't use it for anything more than syncing my Newton's anymore.
 
In terms of reliability, no Apple product has let me down as hard as the G5s did. LCS problems, motherboard failures, RAM slot failures... my company had a dozen of those and only a couple made it the first two years without some sort of major issue. The ones that didn't crap out still had ridiculous power consumption and noise heat output- to be expected given how powerful they were, perhaps, but still an annoyance.

Maybe we just got a bad batch... we almost switched to Dell Precision for our next set of workstations, but we decided to give the 8-core Mac Pro a shot, and they held up just fine.
 
Asuriyan said:
In terms of reliability, no Apple product has let me down as hard as the G5s did. LCS problems, motherboard failures, RAM slot failures... my company had a dozen of those and only a couple made it the first two years without some sort of major issue. The ones that didn't crap out still had ridiculous power consumption and noise heat output- to be expected given how powerful they were, perhaps, but still an annoyance.

Maybe we just got a bad batch... we almost switched to Dell Precision for our next set of workstations, but we decided to give the 8-core Mac Pro a shot, and they held up just fine.
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Agreed. We had a few in the office and all failed. One plus is that one was so bad Apple swapped it, even though it was way out of warranty, for a new 2008 Ali iMac which is what I still use today! :cool:
 
The worst Apple devices in my opinion:
iPhone 4S
IPad 2
IPad 3
iOS 7 and 8
iPod touch 4
iPhone 5C
 
What about the worst iPod? It's hard for me to hate on iPods, but if I had to choose I'd say the third generation iPod Shuffle is the worst.

It only worked with the included Apple earphones with remote because it had no buttons on the device itself. The earphones where different from standard Apple earphones with remote because they had no microphone, so they're also not fully compatible with your iPhone. The earphones sound very bad and break easily. When your earphones break or you want to use different ones you are out of luck as other earphones are not compatible.

It was really cute and small and had a cool stainless steel version (and it was the only Shuffle with 4GB), but other than that - crippled by design.
 
The beige era seemed to be cheaply made, Once Jobs came back, even tho the imac was just a G3 in a new case it and the newer colored towers took right off. All in one molar macs were huge, heavy but awesome and easily upgradeable, then they became imacs and it was a puzzle to get anything upgraded in them. The towers being easy upgrade was nice tho.
 
benpete420 said:
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.
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The worst? Think Apple tried to make a digital camera...was far too expensive,and had lousy picture quality.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
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.
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My Teal puck mouse is still around, even years after the iMac itself has disappeared. God, what a love hate relationship with that mouse. Good thing I've got relatively small hands.
 
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