The 8 Worst Apple products Of All Time

Here’s to the crappy ones. The duds. The mistakes. The screw ups. The wrong place at the wrong timers. The ones who functioned poorly. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for basic usability principles. You can try to use them, you can try not to hate them, actually you will definitely probably hate them, but just about the only thing you can’t do is eBay them. Here are the eight worst products in Apple’s History.

The Apple QuickTake Camera line was marketed for three years before they woke up and smelled the coffee. The shooters took hilariously awful pictures with resolution that rivaled that of a postage stamp, while coming equipped with all the warmth and clarity of a paused VHS tape from the early ‘80s. Oh, and they were 800 bucks. No wonder this was one of the first products to go when Steve Jobs returned to power in 1997.

The Pippin was named after a smaller and more tart relative of the McIntosh Apple, which only serves as a reminder of what happens when you start naming every product in your lineup after fruit. Much like the crummy Pippin Apple that nobody has ever heard of, the Apple Pippin was a crummy gaming platform that nobody has ever heard of. Essentially the thing was just a dumbed-down Macintosh desktop designed to play CD-ROM games. Think Dreamcast but 60 times less awesome, and with literally only 10 games.

Oh my god, where do you even begin with this thing. Imagine spending all day at your computer using one of those Ice Breaker Gum tins as your mouse. It’s a nightmare. NOBODY, we repeat NOBODY liked using this thing. Every time you wanted to use the mouse you had to stare at it to figure out which way it was facing. We keep a box of them around the office just to use as a stress relief device.

This was actually a really slick device when it came out in ‘96, and still bizarrely has a cult following today. It had a built-in TV Tuner, a custom-engineered Bose sound system, high-speed LAN capability, and a desk footprint that rivals that of today’s iMac. Only one problem: Scrooge McDuck and Jerry Seinfeld were the only guys who could afford it. Adjusted for inflation the computer would be well over $10,000, and that’s factoring out the door-to-door white-glove concierge installation service. Think about this people, $10,000 for a computer that came out before AIM was even invented. No thank you.

The Cube is a really beautiful piece of design from the mind of Apple wunderkind Jonny Ive. The PowerMac (to the right of the monitor above) was a perfect cube artfully suspended within plexiglass, accented by matching peripherals. Its one fatal flaw? Being woefully underpowered. When it hit shelves in 2000 with a similarly numbered price tag people expected a device that could keep up with the times, instead they found a tissue box crammed with tech from 1998 at 2002 prices.

This had to be one of the biggest *shaking my head* moments that Steve Jobs ever had. Under pressure from all angles to get his iPod/iTunes tech into the hearts and pockets of increasingly mobile consumers, Motorola pushed out this unholy union of two radically different tech companies. The phone was borderline unusable. Little wonder why Apple pulled the plug on the terminally ill partnership before they even had a chance to re-up.

The only good thing The Newton ever did was hack the mainframe using a payphone on a moving train in Under Seige 2 — which, if you ask us, is Steven Seagal’s opus. Sadly, like virtually every product placement in every movie ever, the Newton couldn’t actually do that. It couldn’t really do much of anything, frankly. And even if it could do what you wanted it to do, the chances of the battery lasting long enough for you to actually do it was slim to none.

Our guess is that you’ve never even heard of eWorld, and that’s because Apple has spent the better part of the 21st century making sure that it was wiped from history. eWorld was a bizarre, strange beast that came into your life on two unassuming floppy disks. It was an Internet Service Provider that took Apple’s “user friendly” ethos to bizarre and dizzying heights. It was navigated through a cartoon map that appeared to be drawn by Nickelodeon. Want to pick up your email? Better walk over to the Post Office. You actually had to phyisically click on buildings in order to access information. Oh, and it was $8-a-day for the privilege of using the Internet for dummies.


Want more of the world's best Tech delivered straight to your inbox? Click here to sign up for our daily email.