Sour Apple highlights
Worst Apple Products
The recalls, misses, pricing shocks and design decisions that made Apple history messier and more interesting.
Apple IIISteve Jobs insisted on a fanless case for quietness; it ran so hot that chips popped out of their sockets. Apple’s official advice was to lift the machine and drop it to reseat them. The first 14,000 were recalled, and the III never recovered its reputation.
Apple LisaA mouse-driven GUI machine priced at $9,995, a year before the cheaper Macintosh took its customers. It sold poorly, and around 2,700 unsold units were buried in a Utah landfill in 1989 for a tax write-off.
Macintosh TVAn all-black Mac with a built-in cable-TV tuner, but you could only watch TV full-screen, not in a window, which defeated the point. Apple pulled it within months. Just ~10,000 were ever made, and they are now prized oddities.
Newton MessagePadA PDA a decade ahead of its time, undone by handwriting recognition that mangled words. It was mocked relentlessly (“egg freckles”) and skewered in a Doonesbury strip. Jobs axed it on his return. Its ARM-chip lineage, ironically, powers Apple Silicon today.eWorld1994 · Service
eWorldApple’s cheerful, cartoon-town online service was pricier than AOL and walled off just as the open web was taking hold. It never passed ~150,000 users and was shut down on March 31, 1996.
Apple Bandai PippinApple licensed a stripped-down Mac as a CD-ROM games console, built by Bandai. Underpowered and overpriced against the PlayStation and N64, it sold a few tens of thousands and now headlines “worst console” lists.
Twentieth Anniversary MacA flat-panel luxury concept Mac with Bose speakers and a tuxedoed concierge delivery, priced at $7,499. Almost nobody bought one, and Apple cut the price to under $2,000 to clear stock.
The “Hockey Puck” MouseThe round USB mouse that shipped with the iMac G3 looked good but felt awful. It was perfectly circular, so you could never tell by feel which way was up. Apple swapped it out within a couple of years.
Power Mac G4 CubeA fanless 8-inch cube suspended in clear acrylic, striking enough to land in MoMA’s collection, but pricier than a tower while offering less, with hairline “mold line” cracks in the case. Apple discontinued it after a single year. People still put it in design books and still didn’t buy it.iPod Hi-Fi2006 · Hardware
iPod Hi-FiA $349 boombox dock Jobs personally championed as a high-fidelity speaker. Reviewers shrugged, buyers stayed away, and Apple discontinued it about 18 months later.MobileMe2008 · Service
MobileMeA $99-a-year cloud service that launched badly broken, with sync failures and lost mail. Jobs reportedly gathered the team and asked what MobileMe was supposed to do; when they answered, he shot back, “So why the hell doesn’t it do that?” It was later rebuilt as the free iCloud.Ping2010 · Service
PingA music social network bolted onto iTunes, pitched as “Facebook for music.” It was spam-ridden, thin on real friends, and largely ignored. Apple shut it down two years later; Eddy Cue admitted it never clicked.Apple Maps2012 · Software
Apple MapsApple replaced Google Maps with its own, which melted bridges, misplaced whole towns and routed drivers into the wilderness. The backlash was strong enough that Tim Cook published an open apology and an executive was pushed out. It has since become a solid app.U2: “Songs of Innocence”2014 · Service
U2: “Songs of Innocence”To celebrate a launch, Apple auto-added a free U2 album to 500 million iTunes libraries, uninvited. Listeners revolted at the un-asked-for music, and Apple had to publish a special tool just to let people remove it.Apple Watch Edition (Gold)2015 · Hardware
Apple Watch Edition (Gold)The original Apple Watch shipped in a solid 18-karat gold “Edition” priced from $10,000 to $17,000, running the exact same software as the $349 Sport. It was a five-figure watch that would be technologically obsolete within a year or two, and it became a widely cited example of Apple overreach. Apple dropped solid-gold models after the first generation, redefining “Edition” as ceramic and titanium.AirPower2017–2019 · Hardware
AirPowerA charge-anywhere mat promised on stage in 2017, where you could drop any device anywhere on it. The overlapping coil design overheated, and after eighteen months of silence Apple did something it rarely does: publicly cancel a product it had already announced.
The Butterfly KeyboardA wafer-thin keyboard mechanism that jammed, repeated or died from a single speck of dust, across four years of MacBooks. It triggered lawsuits and a free repair program before Apple dropped it and returned to scissor switches.
Mac Pro Wheels KitFour wheels for the Mac Pro cheese grater. They roll. They do not steer, motorize, lock, or in any other way justify their price. Optional add-on at purchase or $699 separately.
Pro Display XDR StandThe $4,999 professional reference monitor ships with a VESA mount adapter. The stand that actually holds it upright is sold separately.iPhone Pocket2025 · Accessory
iPhone PocketA 3D-knitted ribbed pouch, essentially a designer sock for your phone, made with Issey Miyake, the house behind Steve Jobs’ black turtlenecks. The short strap ran $149.95 and the crossbody version $229.95. It was widely ridiculed online as “a cut-up sock,” but it sold out within hours of its November 2025 launch.Last updated: 2026-08-11