Expensive iPhone for the poor

According to tradition, it is customary to remember good things over the body of a dying person and cheer him up. But this does not apply to large

companies that aim to collect the latestthousand US dollars from the pockets of buyers. Therefore, according to the already worked out scheme, we will go through the previous epic failures of the company, which did not ruin it only by a miracle, but each time inevitably immersed its reputation in a vat of disgusting organic matter, and only then we move on to fresh information. This will show us that Apple's behavior is not just chaos, but a system with its own laws. It also serves as a good lesson for those companies that trust the development of new devices (not products) to marketers, not engineers.

Apple III, 1980

There was a time when Apple successfullysold inexpensive personal computers for businesses of any size, and not for the most major companies, which are “statutory”. The super-successful second series of Apple computers ended in failure with the release of the Apple III PC.

Instead of improving the performance of the oldmodels, remove bugs from software, and streamline production, the company saw the Apple III as a fundamentally new device with a completely new operating system and features, which, however, had to be compatible with Apple II applications. The goal was simple - to take up to 90% of the corporate PC market within the United States. Alas, these plans were not destined to come true, the computer turned out to be extremely unreliable due to constant overheating and failure of components. According to rumors, Steve Jobs personally had a hand in this disgrace, who, for the sake of a positive perception of the “product”, removed the cooling fans from the motherboard. His opinion is understandable, the old coolers had a tiny radius and worked at very high speeds, overcoming the bone of the skull and delivering a pig squeal directly to the user's brain without loss of quality. In an interview with Byte magazine, Steve Wozniak acknowledged that every one of the 65,000 Apple IIIs sold was guaranteed to fail due to design features. Apple made an attempt to remedy the situation by modifying the cooling system for faulty PCs in its factories and directly in offices, but the reputation was again in a vat of substance. In 1981, the IBM PC entered the mass market, and the Apple III was discontinued and forgotten like a nightmare.

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Apple Newton MessagePad, 1993

Despite the fact that the Newton MessagePad eventually went down the drain, like almost every second Apple "invention", its appearance was accompanied by two significant phenomena.

This is the first officially recognized pocket computer (PDA), and not an electronic organizer of those years.
For its production, Apple invested 3million US dollars to Acorn, which, thanks to this huge injection (huge money for 1993), together with its partner VLSI, founded a new company called Advanced RISC Machines, today we all know as the ARM Corporation.

For Newton, they created the ARM610 processor, whichcharacterized by low power consumption and heating. The Newton MessagePad (H1000) will go on sale in 1993 with basic functions such as a calculator and calendar and notoriously poor handwriting recognition. Handwriting Newton MessagePad entered the annals of American culture in the form of jokes and other mockery.

Devices bought at a level belowself-sufficiency, and finished off the entire Newton line by Steve Jobs, who returned to the company in 1998 and in absentia hated the Newton MessagePad because of entering information with a stylus.

Macintosh TV, 1993

Apple has always been US-centriccompany, and thus supported the electronic culture of Americans, in which the television is central. "Makintoshtelevizor" had to combine "2 in one" without compromising the functionality of the TV and PC.

Inside the gray dull box was a Macintosh LC 520with Motorola 68030 (32 MHz) processor, 5 MB RAM (expandable to 8 MB) and 160 MB hard drive. The screen worked on CRT technology, and its resolution was 640x480 pixels. Switching between the two modes was done with a small remote supplied by Sony, no window-in-window modes.

Macintosh TV was discontinued after4 months after launch, but the hybrid was killed by its price, because for adding a TV tuner to the Macintosh case, the buyer paid an incredible (for that time) $ 500 extra.

Apple Pippin Power Player, 1994

Apple Pippin is the result of the company's effortsApple enter every home or workplace on the planet. The company has developed an open platform Pippin Power Player, the most suitable for the definition of "stripped down Macintosh". According to the strategic plan, the rights to manufacture devices based on this platform were to be acquired by third-party companies that were free to make whatever they wanted out of it. From multimedia players to school computers, from a home computer to a centralized civil defense warning system, as an option. This product was equipped with a 32-bit PowePC 603 processor with 6 MB of RAM, at that time a very mediocre performance solution.

For all the time I pecked at the universal platformonly a company from the gaming industry Bandai, which in 1996 at the COMDEX exhibition showed the Pippin game console. For the Japanese market, the prefix was called Pippin Atmark, and for the American market Pippin @ World. A year later, Bandai resold the production rights to the Norwegian company Katz, which also failed in the gaming field.

Almost all known games for Pippin

Among the advantages of the Pippin platform, it is worth noting four innovative solutions at that time:

Pippin games could be run on a Mac.
The prefix supported a full keyboard.
A video output controller was installed on the body of the set-top box for quick switching between PAL and NTSC standards, which made the set-top box universal.
Convenient game controller in the form of "banana".

But there were two factors that, instead of a bright future in the dreams of marketers, materialized a complete kaput for the whole direction. Here they are:

A small number of games, especially for the US market.
600 US dollars (adjusted for inflation, today it is 1,000) is an insanely high price at the start of sales for that time. By comparison, the Sony PS1 retailed for $299.
The absence of any significant advantages over competitors in the face of Sony, Sega and Nintendo, who have already put their hands into the pockets of gamers up to their elbows and do not let anyone in.

A year after the launch, when it turned outBecause Pippins are rarely bought, Bandai decided to convert the game console into a server for corporate intranets. A year later, in 1998, Bandai permanently closed its Pippin Power Player division, leaving over 2,000 unsold devices in stock. The Norwegian company Katz did the same with sales of the KMP 2000 clone. The unsold consoles were disposed of by DayStar Digital, which, being a full licensee of Apple (up to the permission to clone Macs under its own brand), pulled off a truly Jesuit trick. By changing the stickers on set-top boxes released for the US and Europe to Japanese ones, the company began to sell them in Japan as very rare, incredibly collectible black versions (light plastic was used for Japan).

This is where the story of the Apple Pippin Power Player platform ended.

Copland (Apple System 8), 1996

By 1994, the Apple System 7 OS was obsolete, it did notthere was full-fledged multitasking, and running applications took up space in RAM based on a pre-written hard rule, the allocation of RAM was not dynamic, as it is today. At the same time, the specialized media were looking forward to the release of Windows 95, where all this was promised. Apple had nowhere to go, circumstances forced it to start developing a new operating system that was supposed to surpass the yet unreleased OS from Microsoft. The working title of the never released OS is Copland, but it was ruined by a phenomenon called “Feature creep” among developers. In practice, this means that the Copland OS swelled like a behemoth, and only its performance, without additional running software, was hardly supported by the processors of those years.

As a result, this OS never left the stagedevelopment. We wouldn't have known about this epic failure if Apple hadn't mentioned it at WWDC 1996 with the promise of introducing it to third-party software developers within a few months. As a result, the real Apple System 8 became the NeXTSTEP OS, written on the basis of Unix (like Linux), for which Apple had to buy NeXT. This trend was followed further, unable to develop something on its own, Apple simply bought the right developer company, promising and in straitened conditions. Business is business. I believe that it was Apple that taught other IT giants this approach, remember Microsoft's buyout of Skype and Nokia, which are on the verge of bankruptcy. For enthusiasts and fans of Apple products, people who deeply believe in its continued success, Copland's failure was another act of dipping the company's reputation in a vat of sewage.

Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM), 1997

In 1997, to mark 20 years since Apple's inception, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh workstation, better known overseas as TAM, was released.

Unusual appearance and not bad for that timeiron could not justify the insane price tag of $9,000, which was announced at Macworld Expo 97. Despite the fact that TAM entered the market already at a price of $7,499, there were almost no people who wanted to buy it. If we compare the performance characteristics of TAM and the top PCs of that time, it comes to the understanding that for $ 5,000 you can take a gaming computer two heads higher.

Apple USB mouse, 1998

Also known as the "hockey puck," Apple's wired USB mouse featured a single button on the top.

Mouse production, not having time to start, was quickly discontinued. I wonder why? I would venture to suggest that due to the impossibility of its use in real life.

Apple Power Mac G4 Cube, 2000

The futuristic-looking Power Mac G4 Cube was designed by Apple Chief Designer Jonathan Ive.

Performance and modern technology have beensacrificed to fashion. The Apple Cube was quiet (using passive cooling) and looked great, but had mid-range hardware from 1997 onboard, which in 2000 turned into the performance and speed of a device like the Intel Atom in 2022. So-so fun.

Looking at the facts, I really want to translate "thinkdifferrent” not as “think differently” (in the context, probably, “think original”, “don’t be like everyone else”), but as “this is different”. The Cube hit the market for between $1,499 and $1,799, which was an unforgivable lot just for the design. No more than 30% of the minimum planned was sold, and production ceased completely a year later.

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Apple iPod Hi-Fi, 2006

It is unlikely that most of us even remember this thing.

If the iPod was an undoubted success for Apple, then the docking station for it, combined with a powerful speaker system, has sunk into oblivion.

What ruined this wonderful station-column foriPod? The answer is very simple, when the iPod Hi-Fi started selling for $349, by then third-party manufacturers were already actively selling similar or better devices at a lower price. Another reason was the name of the station with a claim to sound like Hi-Fi. True music lovers were outraged by the intrusion of a mass "pop" product into their closed world of elite expensive devices, which led to ridicule on their part and belittling the merits of the iPod Hi-Fi. And, finally, only the iPod line and only select generations of the iPod Nano, iPod Touch and iPhone (3GS, for example, did not charge) could be charged from the docking station with a guarantee. The iPod Hi-Fi was late, was not without problems, and was unforgivably expensive.

iTunes Ping, 2010

In 2010, Apple decided to launch its ownsocial network Ping as part of iTunes 10, focused on the exchange of music and interaction with artists. Everything was like people's - news feed, posts, subscribers, etc. Steve Jobs succinctly described it as "kind of like Facebook and Twitter meeting iTunes."

The people did not enter for various reasons, where the main,in my opinion, was the lack of linking the Ping account to Facebook, which made it difficult to register and communicate if you are an American. Probably because the average US user was not even able (for various reasons) to activate the new iPhone, in most cases it was done for him by the consultant in the salon. I don't want to call most Americans stupid, not at all, but their technical literacy is akin to a banana island. Another very important reason for the failure was that buyers were promised “interactions with the stars”, only these stars from 2010 were not very willing to interact with the public for free. Imagine a world famous rapper who would have to carry guns every day and not leave the image of the "bottom of society" in order to communicate with subscribers. Did he need it in the 2010s? No. Let me remind you that before the beginning of the era of stellar "instasams" and other cults of electronic personalities, it was still oh how far away.

As usual, Apple announcedattracting a million users in the first 24 hours after the launch of iTunes Ping. After two years of dead hanging of these same subscribers, the Ping social network was closed and forgotten.

Keyboard Butterfly, 2015

This is perhaps the biggest modern failureApple company. Created in 2015 for the 12-inch MacBook, the butterfly keyboard has rattled generations of users. Its appearance was explained as a suitable design solution for ultra-thin devices, which in practice resulted in breakdowns of the pressure mechanism even from such trifles as bread crumbs. Don't believe? Here's a typical Apple Support call made from a MacBook keyboard of the period: "W and T ys s t t d d u b p s s ing , sam as min." At first glance, it seems that a drunken user did this, but in fact, the dust clogged in the “butterfly” mechanism is to blame. The problem grew to such an extent that the WSJ published an article written entirely on failed MacBook butterflies.

We have no data on the financial losses incurred by Apple due to the mass warranty repair of butterflies, but the reputation was definitely damaged again.

Apple Air Power, 2017

During the presentation of the iPhone 8 and other things in 2017Apple promised to make a wireless charger capable of simultaneously charging multiple branded devices. Even then, questions arose about how to simultaneously combine Qi standards and Apple's proprietary one (the magnetic puck in the Apple Watch, for example).

Years of chatter ended just likea typical womanizer's promise to marry - an Apple user deceived in hopes smeared tears on his cheeks with a fist and cursed fate. The AirPower memory was never made, and in 2019 it was officially canceled altogether. Until all Apple wearables switch to a single wireless charging standard, nothing will change.

Buy iPhone 13 for the price of iPhone 14

Friends, you must have seen peppy old men or grandmothers cheerfully trudging to the bakery in fashionable youth merchandise.

There are not many of them, but they are in every city.Something similar seems to happen with the new iPhone lineup. We are used to the fact that in one generation all smartphones have the same platform with the same chipset, and the difference between just an iPhone and an iPhone Pro lies only in screens and similar details. For example, the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 are built around the Apple A15 Bionic chip and offer comparable performance and user comfort. However, a supply chain report produced by the famous (and almost always accurate) Tianfeng international securities group analyst named Ming-Chi Kuo (郭明錤) unequivocally points to the following events:

The latest Apple Bionic 16 chip will be installed only in Hi-End smartphones of the Apple iPhone 14 Pro series.
All other Apple 14 smartphones (including Max) will be content with the old Apple Bionic 15 chip.
New generation photomodules will receive only the iPhone 14 Pro.
iPhone not Pro will receive old photomodules from the 13th series.
The number of released iPhone 14 Pro relative to non-Pro will increase significantly.

What awaits a simple user?Allow me to suggest that the club of apple growers is waiting for a split. After all, what will happen? The expression “no matter what iPhone, the main thing is iPhone” will lose all meaning, a normal iPhone and a rogue iPhone “for the poor” will appear, obviously inferior to its older brother in all aspects. I don’t know why Apple needs this, apparently, for the sake of profit in difficult times, it is ready for anything, even for shaking its own foundations. Will this approach ruin Apple? Of course not, it's just that there will be more unhappy people on the planet, which they absolutely do not care about.

Conclusion

There have been many failures in the history of Apple,but as long as the app store is alive, it has a kind of lifeline. Indeed, there is nothing more profitable than selling digital copies of the same someone else's product. This is very reminiscent of the principle of sales in the ancient profession: "you sold the goods, but the goods still remained with you." And as long as this rule is in place, Apple will stand firm on its feet. However, if you look at the situation from the outside, then the question arises: who pays for all these costs? The cost of unsold physical devices caused by the fact that no one stopped some marketer or designer when he came up with a humpback battery in a frenzy or removed the 3.5 mm music output. The answer is simple - the buyer of the next generation product pays the costs. This is very similar to the modern stock exchange with its futures, constantly producing world inflation. As a matter of fact, the constant rise in prices for electronics is caused by such accumulated debts on past promises, as it seems to me.

Friends, are you ready to buy the iPhone 14 at a higher price, knowing that this is a refurbished iPhone 13?