Apple, the largest US company by market capitalisation and one of the major tech companies in the world has had a very interesting history, like most tech companies its size do.
What started out as a small company in a garage has today become one of the richest companies in the world with an almost cult like following among its millions of customers.
That journey saw the company go through a number of transitions which involved even the ousting of its own founder, Steve Jobs and then a heroic return after which the company saw a meteoric rise.
The company offers some of the most popular products and services ever like the iPhone, iPad, Macbook, and so on but it was not without some major failures along the way. I would like to talk about some of these today.
The Newton (1993)
The Newton, though a futuristic idea at the time, just couldn’t establish itself as a revolutionary product even though it was being touted as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) which was pretty much a grandfather version of the modern smartphone.
The main reason of its failure was the handwriting recognition tech which just didn’t work that properly. For a company that boasts of products that ‘just work’, it was a huge misstep.
That’s why Steve Jobs, on his return to Apple quickly killed off this product which was an important project for former CEO John Sculley who was basically the man responsible for Jobs’ ousting. Needless to say, Jobs had the last laugh.
Pippin (1995)
If there is one thing that we can all agree on, is the fact that Apple has never been about gaming. I think you are aware of the gaming situation on macs (that it doesn’t exist, for the most part).
But in 1995, Apple joined hands with Bandai, a Japanese company, to launch Pippin, a video game console. Pippin was a good product which some say, could even have been ahead of its time as it offered a modem and internet connectivity back in 1995!
What killed the Pippin was its insane price of $600, something that people were not willing to pay for the very limited number of games one could play on it. In fact there were only 18 games made for it and even they were not the A-list games.
Ping (2010)
It was not that Apple made blunders only in the absence of Steve Jobs. Even with Jobs on board and doing good with Apple, there still were major flops that the company would rather they never happened!
Ping was one such disaster. It was Apple’s first foray into the social networking landscape but instead of making a full fledged social networking site, it chose to make a social network for music which was tied to its iTunes.
That was the main problem with it. Since it was primarily a music social network, it was restricting in many ways and therefore users never quite understood what to do with it. As a result, Apple quietly discontinued it in 2012.
iPhone 4 ‘Antennagate’ (2010)
This is something that pretty much everyone would remember. The iPhone 4 was already surrounded with a lot of controversy before launch but after launch it was met with another big one.
This was to do with how Apple had redesigned the Antenna in the iPhone such that it wrapped around the device. As you can imagine, that is exactly where users hold the phone and as a result, it was causing a lot of call reception problems.
This caused Steve Jobs to infamously state on stage that users were just ‘holding it wrong’, instead of admitting the blunder, which didn’t go very well as far as PR was concerned. Apple had to give away of millions of dollars worth of cases when nothing else worked.
Maps (2012)
This one is so huge that it has even become a meme on social media and even today people do not seem to take Apple Maps seriously. First impressions are lasting, you see.
In 2012, Apple came out with its own Maps solution as a direct competitor to Google Maps but the launch was a huge disaster as the product was just not finished. There were misplaced locations, entire towns were missing, airports were showing up in fields and people were losing their way all the time!
To top all that, the graphics were simply wacky and the software looked half baked at the most. The whole thing was such a huge PR nightmare that Scott Forstall, a long standing Apple veteran was fired after he refused to sign a public apology.