Six disasters from the book of Apple

4:28PM Tuesday July 8, 2008

On the eve of what I thought would be another triumph for Apple - until I saw Vodafone NZ's iPhone 3G pricing plans and saw the huge reaction - here, for your edification, are some Apple disasters. Enjoy the schadenfruede - but to paraphrase the great Chinese military writer of 2000 years ago (Sun Tsu), every defeat is a lesson. Is the hope.

Doh! Six Apple disasters

The Lisa (early 1980s)

Apple had early success with the "two Steves" (engineer Wozniak and project driver Jobs) selling the Apple computer, then the Apple II (from April 1977 at US$1295) into enthusiast and education markets. The successor Apple III project had its specs constantly revised and the shipping date slipped further and further.

On May 19 1980, the Apple III was released at the National Computer Conference for $4340 to $7800 depending on configuration.

It's successor was the Lisa, finally introduced in January 1983 for a staggering US$9998, alongside with the new Apple IIe introduced for just $1395 ... what was Apple thinking? The IIe was a huge success and stayed on sale for a decade.

The next year a rival Apple product, the Macintosh, really blew the Lisa out of the water. The Lisa 2 was launched at the same time as the first Mac - the Lisa 2 cost US$3495; the first Mac was US$2495. The next year, Apple stopped all Lisa production except for the Lisa 2/10, which was renamed the Macintosh XL. Three months later the XL was discontinued too.

What should Apple have learnt from the Lisa? Don't complicate product lines.

The Apple Portable (1989)

It was the first portable Mac - if you had good biceps, anyway. Under the aegis of mercurial Frenchman Apple Jean-Louis Gassée, then president of Apple, the Portable had ballooned into a rugged, big, heavy and underpowered, overpriced machine that even the Mac fan-mags dubbed the "laptop for Ironman" . The Portable only had a grey-scale LCD, and featured a user-swappable trackball you could switch from the right to the left if you were more sinister than Dexter.

I know, I had one ... but hey, at least it was Mac.

What should Apple have learnt from the Portable? Keep 'em light - not everyone has a gym membership. Apple partnered with Sony after this, learning to miniaturise. Apple emerged with a much sleeker, much more successful laptop and Sony released the first PlayStation.

The Newton (1993-1998)

In 1993 Apple launched the Newton, a small (for the day) device that could go online, email, had a calendar and address book, and could even recognise ordinary, cursive handwriting and turn it into text.

One of the original entries into the PDA (portable digital assistant) device categories, the Newton was impressive and pushed development, but after five years Apple killed it, with the market clearly won by the cheaper, smaller Palm Pilot.

The Newton may have been a first step towards Apple telephony - the last models had microphones and speakers built-in just where they'd need to be on a phone.

How good was the Newton? 

I know someone with one. It still works, but it's too slow, dated, and stopped syncing with modern PCs (it has a serial interface only). Peter bought it in 1996 for $500 and used it for making check lists at work, writing emails and sending faxes. he got some cool extra programs for it, like a car maintenance app that even worked out your fuel economy.

The Newton was was axed in 1998, but a Newton community exists to this day.

What should Apple have learnt from the Newton? How to make an iPhone.

The eMate 300

The eMate 300 was a later development of the Newton into a laptop. It had a 480x320 pixel 16-shade grayscale, backlit display, a stylus pen, a full-sized keyboard, infrared port and standard (for the day) Mac ports. Built-in rechargeable batteries lasted up to an impressive 28 hours on full charge.

It was offered to schools in 1997 - even in New Zealand - as inexpensive and durable for classroom use. However, the eMate 300 did not have all the features of its contemporary Newton equivalent (MessagePad 2000), which hamstrung the 300. In 1998 it was cancelled along with the rest of the Newton line. I have yet to meet someone who owned one.

What should Apple have learnt from the eMate? A machine for kids has to be tough - but also powerful.

The Cube (2000-2001)

Beautiful, small (at just 20.3 centimetres high) and with classical lines, it captured the imagination - of Steve Jobs anyway. Anecdotally, he was said to have been mystified by its failure.

The Cube had a G4 processor and was hard to expand, despite having a price that put it into the tower category - but a Mac tower was easy to expand. Admired by designers for its looks and for its virtually noiseless (fanless) operation, the Cube had all its cables hidden. Neat - but that made it really hard to plug anything in and out.

Was it any good? Yes, it was fine - second-hand models actually sold for more than the new price for a couple of years after its demise. I still have one, running my home network. It was just too expensive for a machine so hard to upgrade.

What should Apple have learnt from the Cube? Small and simple aint necessarily beautiful to everyone. Note that along those lines, Apple pundits are surprised the tiny Mac mini is still around.

PowerBook Duo (1992-1997)

A series of Apple subnotebooks more compact than the PowerBook line, the Duo came in seven models (Duo 210, 230, 250, 270c, 280, 280c, and 2300c).

The Duo was a great idea - very portable, you left your dock on the desk and plugged the Duo into it when you got back. But it was never popular - the Duo used a smaller-than-standard keyboard that was difficult to type on. The only usable standard port was a dual printer/modem RS-422 serial. It only had a passive matrix display (the following year, switched to an active matrix display and a colour active matrix display option).

The docking idea was clever - accomplished via a 156-pin Processor Direct Slot, the Dock had full access to the Duo's CPU and data buses. The original Apple Duo Dock allowed the PowerBook Duo to fit completely inside, turning the PowerBook Duo into a full size, full-powered, fully functional desktop computer, with the standard desktop ports. It could support a heavy, high-resolution display on top and included a floppy drive, two NuBus expansion slots, an optional FPU, level 2 cache, a slot for more VRAM and even space for a second hard drive

What should Apple have learnt from the Duo? Slimming - only the MacBook Air weighs less than the much older Duo, and nobody wants to limit a computer by taking it off the desktop.

- Mark Webster mac.nz

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