It wasn’t all home runs
Sour Apple
Apple has had its share of recalls, keyboards that died from dust, and a $999 stand that held nothing. Here are the moments when it tested everyone’s patience.
Apple III
RecalledSteve 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 Lisa
Buried in a landfillA 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 TV
~10,000 madeAn 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 MessagePad
Killed by Jobs, 1998A 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.
eWorld
Shut down 1996Apple’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 Pippin
~42,000 soldApple 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 Mac
Fire-saled $7,499 → $1,995A 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” Mouse
Quietly replacedThe 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 Cube
Discontinued in 1 yearA 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-Fi
Gone in 18 monthsA $349 boombox dock Jobs personally championed as a high-fidelity speaker. Reviewers shrugged, buyers stayed away, and Apple discontinued it about 18 months later.
MobileMe
Rebuilt as iCloudA $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.
Ping
Shut down 2012A 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 Maps
Public apologyApple 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”
Apple built a delete toolTo 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)
Up to $17,000The 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.
AirPower
Cancelled before launchA 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 Keyboard
Class-action + repair programA 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 Kit
$699Four 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 Stand
$999The $4,999 professional reference monitor ships with a VESA mount adapter. The stand that actually holds it upright is sold separately.
iPhone Pocket
$149.95–$229.95A 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.
Magic Mouse: Charging Port Placement
Charges upside downThe 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.
Apple Polishing Cloth
$19A microfiber cloth. Branded. Ships in a box.
The Dongle Era
Adapters requiredThe 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.
App Store Commission
30%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.
Last updated: 2026-08-13