Daniel Hruska After his return to the head of Apple in 1997, Jobs ended the production of some products. These mostly did not fit into the portfolio of the Cupertino company or there was simply no demand for them from end customers. Check out five products that had no place in the world. One of them was even a creation of Jobs.
Pippin
Pippin was developed as a multimedia platform based on PowerPC Macs. Although it looked like a game console - complete with banana-shaped controllers - it was intended to serve as a multimedia station. Titles for Pippin were published on CD-ROM, on which the operating system itself was also present. The Pippin platform did not contain any internal memory.
One company that licensed Pippin was Bandai in 1994. The result was a device called Bandai Pippin @World, which you could buy in both black and white. Unfortunately, there was no longer a place on the market for the device. Consoles such as the Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn firmly held their positions, so this project was terminated in 1997. In total, 1996 devices running Pippin were sold between 1998 and 12. The price tag was $000.
Newton
The Newton platform for PDAs was introduced to the public in 1993 with the MessagePad device. According to the then head of Apple, John Sculley, similar devices were supposed to become a part of everyday life. For fear of possible cannibalization of Macs, a smaller model (9×12″) was introduced in addition to the larger model (4,5×7″).
The first MessagePad was criticized for poor handwriting recognition and poor AAA battery life. Despite these shortcomings, when distribution began, 5 units were sold within hours, costing $000 each. Although the Newton never became a flop or a sales hit, Jobs ended its existence in 800. Ten years later, Apple came up with another platform that completely changed the world of mobile devices – iOS.
20th Anniversary Mac
Overpriced - that's the word that describes this computer (TAM - Twentieth Anniversary Mac) made for the 20th anniversary of the founding of Apple. He was brought home in a limousine, the driver wearing a tuxedo and white gloves. Of course TAM unpacked it for you and set it up in the place you specified. A Bose audio system was also supplied with the TAM. The keyboard even had wrist rests.
TAM was destined for clear failure. At a price of $9, nothing else could be expected, especially when the PowerMac 995 was released a month earlier with an almost identical configuration for a fifth of the price. THERE was discounted to $6500 after a year on sale in March 1998 to dissapear from warehouses.
klony
In 1994, Apple had 7% of the personal computer market. In order to increase this number, the management decided to start licensing its system to other manufacturers such as DayStar, Motorola, Power Computing or Umax. However, after the clones entered the market, the share of the licensed OS did not increase in any way, on the contrary, sales of Apple computers decreased. Fortunately, the licensing only covered System 7 (often referred to as Mac OS 7).
Upon his return, Jobs criticized the program and did not restore it for Mac OS 8. Apple thus regained control over the hardware on which Mac OS runs. However, until recently they had a smaller problem with Psystar clones.
Cube
The previous four products were in the world before Jobs returned to Apple. The Cube was only released in July 2000, featuring a 4MHz G450 processor, 20GB hard drive, 64MB of RAM for $1. That wasn't such a terrible price, but the Cube had no PCI slots or standard audio outputs.
Customers had no reason to want a Cube, because for $1 they could buy a PowerMac G599—so they didn't have to buy an extra monitor. A $4 discount and hardware change followed. But even that didn't help, so the transparent cube designed by Jonathan Ive ended up being a flop. Cube is sometimes referred to as o Jobs's child.
Source: ArsTechnica.com
the article was nice and the cube had a G4 processor, not a G5.
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Google Chrome reports malware here…
We know, a fix is being worked on
Safari in osx too..
I think TAM didn't include Boss speakers, but Bose.
Fixed, thanks.
"Boss audio system"?
I have nothing against you, but to write about Cuba as a failure? Be that as it may, it is one of the most reliable and quietest Macs in history. And that it was not expandable? Maybe it was the reason confirmed by the reliability and Steve's idea, which most people only understood with the iPhone and iPad... Otherwise, the nine has been pedaling non-stop for 11 years at our company (continuous measurement of a few quantities from the air) and I don't know a computer that would work non-stop for that long. And that someone would drive THERE in a limousine? Nice piece of crap, SIR sold a few of them and made a nice buck for them with cash in their pocket… I don't know where you copied this nonsense from.
You can also see me in the discussion under the original article:
Pippin = AppleTV
Newton = iPad
20th year Mac = iMac.
I think it should be in the clones section: Apple thus regained control over the hardware.
And really please do something about the malware warning, thanks.
The line "The Pippin platform did not contain any internal memory" is somewhat inadequate, because the console only had some memory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Bandai_Pippin
What does the sentence mean:
Customers had no reason to want a Cube, because for $1 they could buy a PowerMac G599—so they didn't have to buy an extra monitor.
Did he get a free monitor with the PM G4?
That article is a terrible patchwork of errors.