Sour Apple

Steve 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.

A brilliant, mouse-driven GUI machine — for $9,995, a year before the cheaper Macintosh ate its lunch. It sold poorly, and around 2,700 unsold units were literally buried in a Utah landfill in 1989 for a tax write-off.

An 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, now prized oddities.

A PDA a decade ahead of its time, undone by handwriting recognition that mangled words — 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.

Apple’s cheerful, cartoon-town online service — pricier than AOL and walled off just as the open web exploded. It never passed ~150,000 users and was shut down on March 31, 1996.

Apple 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.

A flat-panel luxury concept Mac with Bose speakers and a tuxedoed concierge delivery — for $7,499. Almost nobody bit, and Apple slashed it to under $2,000 to clear stock.

The round USB mouse that shipped with the iMac G3 looked adorable and felt awful — perfectly circular, so you could never tell by feel which way was up. An ergonomic punchline Apple swapped out within a couple of years.

A fanless 8-inch cube suspended in clear acrylic — gorgeous enough for MoMA, but pricier than a tower while offering less, with hairline “mold line” cracks in the case. Discontinued after a single year, it’s the rare product that flopped and became a design icon at once.

A $349 boombox dock Jobs personally championed as a high-fidelity speaker. Reviewers shrugged, buyers stayed away, and Apple discontinued it about 18 months later — a reminder that even Jobs misjudged the room sometimes.

A $99-a-year cloud service that launched badly broken — sync failures, 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 reborn as the free iCloud.

A music social network bolted onto iTunes — “Facebook for music.” Spam-ridden, thin on real friends, and ignored. Apple quietly killed it two years later; even Eddy Cue admitted it never clicked.

Apple dumped Google Maps for its own — which melted bridges, misplaced whole towns and routed drivers into the wilderness. The backlash was so fierce that Tim Cook published an open apology and an executive was pushed out. It has since quietly become excellent.

To celebrate a launch, Apple auto-added a free U2 album to 500 million iTunes libraries — uninvited. The internet revolted at the un-asked-for music, and Apple had to publish a special tool just to let people remove it.

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. A five-figure luxury watch guaranteed to be obsolete within a year or two, it became shorthand for peak Apple hubris. Apple abandoned solid-gold models after the first generation, quietly redefining “Edition” as ceramic and titanium.

A charge-anywhere mat promised on stage in 2017 — drop any device, anywhere on it. The overlapping coil design overheated, and after eighteen months of silence Apple did something it almost never does: publicly cancelled a product it had already announced.

A wafer-thin keyboard mechanism that jammed, repeated or died on a single speck of dust — across four years of MacBooks. It triggered lawsuits and a free repair program before Apple admitted defeat and returned to reliable scissor switches.

Four 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.

The $4,999 professional reference monitor ships with a VESA mount adapter. The stand that actually holds it upright is sold separately.

A 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. Widely ridiculed online as “a cut-up sock,” it still sold out within hours of its November 2025 launch.

The Lightning port is on the underside. Using the mouse while it charges is physically impossible. Apple has shipped every generation of Magic Mouse this way, including the USB-C version in 2024.

A microfiber cloth. Branded. Ships in a box.

The 2016 MacBook Pro shipped with four USB-C ports and no USB-A, SD card slot, or MagSafe. Every existing Apple peripheral — including the ones Apple sold at the same keynote — required an adapter to connect.

Apple takes 30% of every app sale and in-app purchase on iOS. Developers have no alternative distribution channel on iPhone. Antitrust investigations have been opened in the EU, US, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Some have resulted in legislative action.