The Top 5 Things Apple Wishes We’d Forget About

My house has a handful of iPods, and as many as four Macs (if any of the regular readers moonlight as cat burglars, you should know most of them are really old). So, I guess I would qualify as a fairly rabid Apple fan. That said, the company has scored far from a perfect track record. Apple’s successes are almost as grandiose as their failures. To see the worst of them brought to life again, read on:

5. Apple USB “hockey puck” Mouse

I can remember the joy of ditching our newsroom’s Quadra 700s with monochrome screens for new, hot-list blue G3s. These things were screamers, and the morning that I came in to sit down to the new technology was one of the biggest technological leaps I ever experienced.

And then I tried the mouse. The cool, round form factor looked sleek, but the shape meant that you could never entirely hold it the right way. You’d grab the mouse, and move it up, only to find the cursor careen drunkenly to the side.

The mice were so awful that my co-workers were buying their own mice; the newsroom finally relented, and got us these awful snap-on jobs that would have worked great if I had an NBA-sized grip.

Product that (barely) redeemed it: The Mighty Mouse. I mean, sure, I’m all for buttonless minimalism. But the second I try to right click and the mouse left clicks, that design philosophy becomes bunk.

4. Apple Pippin

Ever since 1993’s Macintosh TV (basically a black Mac with a TV tuner card), Apple has tried to break out of the den and into the living room. The trend of busts continued with the Apple Pippin, a game machine based around Apple/IBM’s PowerPC processor. The machine hit an apex of little more than a dozen games, and was sorely underpowered due to the PlayStation dominated landscape. The controller, however, deserves mention: It eschewed the analog thumbstick for a curiously cool trackball.

Product that (barely) redeemed it: The AppleTV. It’s a great idea, but out of the box, the AppleTV is lacking in functionality and potential, and requires a hacker’s ideology to make the machine everything it should be.

3. Apple eMate

Is it an underpowered laptop? A giant PDA? Nobody really knew, and Apple wasn’t saying. The eMate was designed to squeeze the last bit of use out of their innovative-but-poorly-timed Newton. The machine featured the clamshell-styled design, which would later be used for the iBook, but the similarity ended there. The eMate featured a 16-shade black-and-white screen with a backlight. Unfortunately, despite the full-size keyboard and stylus, the eMate couldn’t really DO much of anything, other than keep track of your appointments and serve as a rudimentary text editor. The plus side: You could use your hobbled eMate for 28 hours on its batteries — try getting that life out of your MacBook.

Product that (barely) redeemed it: The iPod touch. After years of trying to get into the PDA market, Apple finally scored a hit with this dumbed down phoneless iPhone.

2. Macintosh Portable

The Mac Portable was a notable effort. Apple’s attempt to cram the power of a desktop computer into a mobile machine performed admirably in all of the tests. The machine was designed well from a user’s standpoint — the keyboard would slide to either side in order to accommodate right- or left-handed trackball users, and the screen used then-new active matrix technology to really pop. It was easily customizable, and even included a monitor out port. The unforgivable sin that puts it on this list, though, is the inability to run the machine once the batteries were fully charged. The machine could run off batteries, and run off of a wall outlet, but not both, basically. Confused? Take a number.

Product that (barely) redeemed it: The Powerbook 100 series, Apple’s first line of “real” laptops, incorporated a bunch of features that are now pretty commonplace in laptops.

1. Apple III

Anyone who grew up in the 80s logged some time on Apple IIs. Whether it was digging holes in Apple Panic, or schooling Mavis Beacon in typing, those green-and-black screens were a mainstay of computer labs.

But Apple got greedy, and tried to break out of the warm-and-fuzzy educational market with a serious business computer to rival IBM’s new beige beauties.

The result was the poorly-designed Apple III. Jobs, even then supporting a hatred for fans and white noise, demanded the machine run quietly. As a result, the motherboard would overhead, causing chips to literally fly out of their sockets. One day, a frustrated engineer at Apple picked up the computer and dropped it a few inches, causing it to start working again, spawning the best tech support hotfix ever created. Apple actually endorsed this method, telling users to pick up and drop the machine to reseat the chips.

Product that (barely) redeemed it: The Intel Aluminum MacBook Pro has a pair of cooling fans, but suffered from legendary heat problems. The machine’s base was reportedly hot enough to induce thigh burns, forcing Apple to make sure people called the machines “notebooks” instead of “laptops.”