50 years of Apple
We’re celebrating Apple’s 50th birthday with a week of content about the tech giant. It covers everything from personal recollections from our writers to the greatest — and worst — Apple gadgets as voted by you, and you can read it all on our 50 years of Apple page.
Apple might be responsible for some of the most famous and successful products in human history, but not everything the company touches turns to gold.
While billions of iPhones and millions of iPods and iPads have been sold, there’s a rogues’ gallery of Apple creations that had far less impact and ended up being consigned to the footnotes of tech history.
Some you might have heard hushed mentions of, while others barely exist on the margins of the internet, but there’s a good chance you’ve never seen any in the flesh. How many do you remember?
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1. Apple Silentype (1980)
Apple’s image has changed so much since it launched the iPod that it’s hard to imagine it making something as prosaic as a printer, but the Silentype wasn’t really an Apple invention at all.
It has become a bit of a cliché that Apple just takes existing products and packages them up in a more appealing way, but that is quite literally what happened with the Silentype.
Most printers at the time were big, noisy and expensive, but a company called Trendcom had a thermal printer that was much smaller, quieter and more affordable. Apple took the Trendcom 200, made some internal tweaks that offloaded some of the work to software inside the Apple II, and stuck an Apple logo on the front.
The company stopped making printers at the end of the nineties when Steve Jobs returned and it began the move towards more glamorous products, which explains why people have forgotten about the Silentype and its successors, but it was an early example of Apple’s ‘think different’ ethos in action.
2. Apple PowerCD (1993)
The PowerCD was a bit like a supercharged Sony Discman, but significantly less successful.
Essentially just a rebadged Philips CDF-100, the back of the box promised three separate uses. Plug it into a Mac and it would function as an external CD-ROM drive; connect it to your TV and you could use it to view your holiday snaps from a disc on the big screen; or plug in a pair of headphones or speakers and it could play music CDs.
The PowerCD could also run off six AA batteries, which technically meant you could take it out and about, but with its bulky frame and pointed corners you’d have to be wearing clown trousers for it to qualify as pocketable.
Its lack of a singular focus seemed to make it a hard sell, though, and it suffered from being a jack of all trades but master of none. A couple of years later it was discontinued.
3. Apple QuickTake 100 (1994)
Back in the early ‘90s, Apple was not the world-conquering tech behemoth it is now, so taking a punt on an entirely new product was a brave move. The QuickTake 100 was one of the first digital cameras aimed at Joe Public and if it doesn’t look very typically Apple to you that’s because Kodak was responsible for the binoculars-meets-projector design.
With a 0.3MP CCD sensor and only enough storage for eight photos at the highest resolution (640×480), the convenience offered by the QuickTake didn’t make up for the lack of quality in comparison to a traditional film camera.
Still, Apple released three different models in the QuickTake range before Steve Jobs culled it in 1997. Work on the iPod project began shortly after, which was the start of the long road to the iPhone — a product that has arguably contributed to the downfall of the compact camera more than any other, even if the indestructible compact is still making a comeback of sorts.
Did you also know Apple’s forgotten digicam secretly lives in your iPhone today? A feature called QuickTake is built into the phone’s shutter button, and let’s you quickly shoot both videos and a burst of photos.
4. Apple Bandai Pippin (1996)
Another one of Apple’s mid-nineties punts before Steve Jobs came back to steady the ship, the Pippin was designed by Apple but actually released by Japanese toy giant Bandai (of Tamagotchi fame).
Based on a Macintosh Classic II, Apple tweaked the fundamental hardware and Bandai packaged it in a very nineties-looking chassis. In some ways the Pippin was ahead of its time, with internet connectivity and a wireless controller called the Applejack.
But with competition from the Nintendo N64 and original Sony Playstation, plus a significantly higher asking price than both, and fewer games to play on it, the Pippin was always facing an uphill battle.
It’s said that only 42,000 Pippins were sold worldwide, mainly in Japan, so it’s no surprise that Bandai was the first and last company to license its tech from Apple, and even less surprising that most people don’t even know it ever existed.
5. Apple eMate 300 (1997)
Rumors of a touchscreen MacBook have been circulating for ages, and may finally come to fruition this year, but did you know Apple has already made a touchscreen laptop of sorts?
Over a decade before the first keyboard accessory was released for the iPad, Apple launched the eMate 300 — a cross between a PDA (that’s a Personal Digital Assistant, not a Public Display of Affection) and a notebook that was designed by Jony Ive. It had a 6.8-inch greyscale screen, ran the same operating system as the Newton, and could last a whopping 28 hours on a single charge. Those were the days, eh?
The eMate 300 lasted less than a year, another victim of the great Jobs purge, but you might recognize its translucent shell from the iMac G3, which was released just a year later and had a huge influence on tech aesthetics, helping to turn Apple’s fortunes around in the process.
5. Apple iPod+HP (2004)
You’d have to have been living under a Microsoft Zune for the past 25 years to not know what an iPod was, but did you know that it was briefly possible to buy one with an Hewlett-Packard logo on it?
HP was known for making PCs, printers, scanners and other boring office stuff, but at CES in 2004 CEO Carly Fiorina announced that the company would be launching a range of branded iPods with an exclusive blue finish.
In return, HP would pre-install iTunes on all of its desktops and laptops. The blue version never made it to market, although you could download and print your own ‘tattoos’ for it from the HP website instead. No, we didn’t do that either.
The partnership was short-lived, with HP announcing it was over just 18 months later, but if the reaction to U2’s 2014 album Songs of Innocence being added to all iTunes libraries is anything to go by, a lot of people would probably rather own an HP-branded iPod than one with the names of Bono and co inscribed on the back.
6. Apple iPod Hi-Fi (2006)
There’s an old urban myth in the UK that you’re never more than six feet away from a rat — and back in 2006 it felt like you could say the same about iPod docks.
Apple released one of its own in February of that year and promised to “redefine the home stereo system”, with Steve Jobs even claiming he was ditching his actual hi-fi in favor of one.
The iPod Hi-Fi was certainly striking to look at, although once somebody points out that it looks like a milk crate it’s hard to shake that image. Still, as our three-star review pointed out, there was “no way that any sensible person would mistake this for even a budget hi-fi or mini system.”
It was discontinued about 18 months later and Apple didn’t make another speaker until the HomePod in 2018.
7. Apple Macintosh TV (1993)
The ugliest Apple product ever made? The Macintosh TV certainly has a strong case for that title — this monstrosity was effectively a 14-inch Sony Trinitron CRT mashed together with a Performa 520 and it was the first Mac that could display a TV / VCR signal.
Unfortunately, the Macintosh TV came with a number of drawbacks that explain why only around 10,000 were ever made in its five-month lifespan. Firstly, you couldn’t sneakily watch TV in another window while you worked. Sadly, you also couldn’t record any of the shows or movies you watched, as it only came with a CD-ROM drive alongside its 160MB hard drive.
It was another case of Apple’s ambitions exceeding the tech of the time, then, but at least it laid the foundations for the Apple TV — and as the first black Mac, it’s also the distant ancestor of the iconic, matte-black MacBook which lived from 2006-2008.
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