

Apple's five worst products ever - sabon
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/isuck-apples-five-worst-products-ever/

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tjogin
I don't know, it seems this is more a list of products that didn't happen to
strike the writer's fancy — rather than _canonical_ failures. Whether
something is a success or failure is not a whole lot about personal opinion —
it's about observable, measurable fact.

For instance, the white earbuds, whatever you may think of them — had a pretty
important role in popularizing the iPod, as they stood out from the rest. iPod
users, in spite of having the actual devices hidden in their pockets, could be
identified from afar (among users of other unidentifiable brands of mp3
players). Look at the iPod commercials with the black silhouette people
wearing white earbuds. I'd say Apple's earbuds, regardless of audio quality,
has been a phenomenal success. They're not failures by any stretch of the
imagination. You may think they suck, and you may be right, but they're not a
failure.

About the same thing goes for iTunes. You may think it suck, and you might be
right. But it's not a failure. It is a resounding success. iTunes has become
the leader in music organization (second only to manual "organization" in ad-
hoc folders). iTunes has been essential to making the organization,
synchronization and purchasing of music an overall smooth experience.

While I agree with most of the points brought forth; iTunes is becoming
increasingly bloated, being responsible for many things that has absolutely
nothing to do with music — it maintaining that role has also made it easier
for users already familiar with iTunes to start buying apps for the iPhone,
synchronizing their calendar and contacts, etc.

I agree iTunes needs a bit of an overhaul, everything not related to music
organization should be moved into separate apps dedicated to just doing that.
So yeah, iTunes sucks. But it is not a failure — it is an enormous success.

Having the opinion that something sucks does not magically make it a failure.

~~~
yef
Apple is a great company with many great products, but fanboyism irks me to no
end. The article isn't about market failures, it's about bad products from a
user standpoint. For the ones that I've used, I agree wholeheartedly:

Hockey Puck Mouse: I could never feel how it was oriented. I know I'm not the
only person who had this problem.

Earbuds: They fall out of my ears if I'm not completely still. I know I'm not
the only person who has this problem.

iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries
well, has terrible error messages (or none at all), movie rentals don't work,
sync'ing works weird, the list goes on and on and on. I know I'm not the only
person, again.

I would add OS X to the list in terms of usability as well. Take, for example,
the 7-year long thread on Jeremy Zawodny's blog about focus-follows-mouse. Why
couldn't they put an option in the mouse settings to allow focus-follows-
mouse?

~~~
phsr
_^ iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large
libraries well,_

What is considered a large library? I have about 3500 songs, and I am not
having problems.

~~~
gb
I have about 16k and it's almost unusable. From what I hear the PC version
performance is much worse than the Mac version though.

~~~
bioinformatics
I have 52k, usage is fine on iMac late 2007, but at times a little bit slow
when scrolling through the cover art.

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yangyang
They say of the Mighty Mouse: "inexplicably copying the ThinkPad’s red nipple
instead of using a scroll wheel"

That's completely incorrect. The Mighty Mouse has a mini trackball, the
trackpoint is a pressure-sensitive stick.

~~~
lanaer
Indeed. And it the scroll-ball were larger, I’d probably like it. Just do
that, and make the 2 buttons physically distinct, then it would be a halfway
decent mouse.

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Xixi
"Anything we missed? While these failures are big, we have restricted them to
the modern-day Apple, and ignored the Jobs-less wilderness years of beige
boxes and overpriced printers."

Didn't I see the Quick Take somewhere in the list ? As a matter of fact Steve
Jobs "steved" (as we used to say at the time) those when he came back to
Apple, with all the printers, the Newton, and everything that was not, well, a
Macintosh (or the softwares running on it).

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georgekv
_ahem_

Newton / Cube / Lisa / Pippin / 20th Anniversary Mac

~~~
locopati
I must stand up in defense of the Newton. It was way ahead of its time when it
came to user experience. Version 1.0 was like most version 1.0s not quite
ready and its handwriting recognition took a lot of criticism (even getting
Doonesbury to riff on it). By version 2.0, that problem was completely fixed.
Alas, 2.0 came 2 1/2 years after 1.0 and was too little too late. In addition,
NewtonScript was an excellent language to program in (able to create apps
quickly with a minimum of effort).

The Palm Pilot wouldn't have been what it was without Newton having tested the
ground first and finding the mines.

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DannoHung
I have one of the iHiFi's

I dunno, it's a pretty good speaker and it's nice that it's good for plugging
into a computer, sticking the iPod in, and bringing outside.

The biggest problem with the damn thing is that the iPhone has always been
ridiculously flaky with it, and I don't mean the cellular noise.

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tspiteri
I think the author just doesn't like iTunes. So he picked four other products
which he believes everyone dislikes, and which did not have so much market
success, and says that iTunes should be disliked by everyone too. But as far
as I know, iTunes is quite successful.

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st3fan
They missed the worst one: the Mighty Mouse with the scrollball that you
cannot clean.

~~~
mblakele
There are lots of ideas at
[http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200602101154178...](http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060210115417864)
(first hit from
[http://www.google.com/search?q=Mighty+Mouse+with+the+scrollb...](http://www.google.com/search?q=Mighty+Mouse+with+the+scrollball+that+you+cannot+clean)).
Most of them seem pretty close to Apple's suggestions at
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1537> \- sometimes with alcohol instead of
water.

Mine hasn't needed cleaning yet, but it's less than 12 months old.

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tedshroyer
[http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_...](http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_apple_flops)

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scblock
There have been actual failures, and then there is this list, seemingly chosen
at random. Wired would do well to separate those categories.

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jcromartie
This is pretty shortsighted for being a "worst ever" list. What about the
Pippin?

