Apple's five worst products ever | Hacker News Reader

Apple's five worst products ever

wired.com

11 pointssabon29 comments

I don't know, it seems this is more a list of products that didn't happen to strike the writer's fancy — rather than canonical failures. Whether something is a success or failure is not a whole lot about personal opinion — it's about observable, measurable fact.

For instance, the white earbuds, whatever you may think of them — had a pretty important role in popularizing the iPod, as they stood out from the rest. iPod users, in spite of having the actual devices hidden in their pockets, could be identified from afar (among users of other unidentifiable brands of mp3 players). Look at the iPod commercials with the black silhouette people wearing white earbuds. I'd say Apple's earbuds, regardless of audio quality, has been a phenomenal success. They're not failures by any stretch of the imagination. You may think they suck, and you may be right, but they're not a failure.

About the same thing goes for iTunes. You may think it suck, and you might be right. But it's not a failure. It is a resounding success. iTunes has become the leader in music organization (second only to manual "organization" in ad-hoc folders). iTunes has been essential to making the organization, synchronization and purchasing of music an overall smooth experience.

While I agree with most of the points brought forth; iTunes is becoming increasingly bloated, being responsible for many things that has absolutely nothing to do with music — it maintaining that role has also made it easier for users already familiar with iTunes to start buying apps for the iPhone, synchronizing their calendar and contacts, etc.

I agree iTunes needs a bit of an overhaul, everything not related to music organization should be moved into separate apps dedicated to just doing that. So yeah, iTunes sucks. But it is not a failure — it is an enormous success.

Having the opinion that something sucks does not magically make it a failure.

I'd say Apple's earbuds, regardless of audio quality, has been a phenomenal success.

Also, the author is so quick to forget what the world of personal audio devices was like before the iPod. They all came with terrible headphones. The iPod upped the ante by including a set of halfway decent earbuds and now everybody forgets what a huge step up it was.

Apple is a great company with many great products, but fanboyism irks me to no end. The article isn't about market failures, it's about bad products from a user standpoint. For the ones that I've used, I agree wholeheartedly:

Hockey Puck Mouse: I could never feel how it was oriented. I know I'm not the only person who had this problem.

Earbuds: They fall out of my ears if I'm not completely still. I know I'm not the only person who has this problem.

iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries well, has terrible error messages (or none at all), movie rentals don't work, sync'ing works weird, the list goes on and on and on. I know I'm not the only person, again.

I would add OS X to the list in terms of usability as well. Take, for example, the 7-year long thread on Jeremy Zawodny's blog about focus-follows-mouse. Why couldn't they put an option in the mouse settings to allow focus-follows-mouse?

^ iTunes: Great in 2001. Now it's bloated, slow, doesn't handle large libraries well,

What is considered a large library? I have about 3500 songs, and I am not having problems.

I have about 16k and it's almost unusable. From what I hear the PC version performance is much worse than the Mac version though.

Ok, that is much larger than mine. :-) I'm just curious of the point that iTunes becomes unusable.

So far, no problems in either XP or OS X for me

14k. OSX. MacBook. No problems.

I have 52k, usage is fine on iMac late 2007, but at times a little bit slow when scrolling through the cover art.

60k or so, enough to actually need a music manager :)

You only get to add OS X if you can make a case for Linux or Windows being more usable.

Sure, here goes: the mouse moves the way I expect it to in Linux and Windows. On Mac, it feels like I'm dragging it through sand. I can't find combination of settings to fix it. The OS also has so many cute animations that if feels sluggish. For example, when I log in, I type the first letter of my name, and a password box animates into place over the course of about a second. I can't find a way to turn the frills off. I get the feeling that Apple products are designed to make users feel good, while Linux is focused on letting people work. I think Apple is doing the right thing, I just wish they paid more attention to the power user rather than forcing arbitrary UI decisions on them.

Oh, please. iTunes is not a music manager. It's a simplistic, slow and badly built jukebox app.

AmaroK is a music manager. Windows Media Player is a music manager. But not iTunes.

The only thing I've been missing on OS X is a good music manager that can take care of the gigabytes of MP3s I have lying around on my disk.

There are iPod owners out there with tens of gigs of music (the biggest iPod has room for 120 gigs of music). To say that iTunes can't handle that is to ignore this observable fact.

It not striking your fancy is not the same thing as it not being a music manager. It is one, it is even the most popular one, regardless of your personal opinion of how good it is.

iTunes can easily handle tens of gigs of music, but putting them all in one big list is not my idea of music management.

If I wanted a big list of songs, I could put all my MP3s in a single folder and use VLC to play them. Search is easy with Spotlight. This is hardly "organization". For someone who can't purchase music from iTMS, what's the point of iTunes, then?

WMP, AmaroK and even WinAmp allow me to do much more with my music, and they aren't 80megs in size.

As someone who's pretty happy with iTunes, I'm genuinely interested to find out what I'm missing out on. What do these other management applications do that can't be done using the tools in iTunes?

I admit, my usage isn't particularly sophisticated. I typically use the browser (with genre, artist and album columns) to drill down to music, or the full text search to quickly dig out something specific. I also have quite a few manual and smart playlists.

They say of the Mighty Mouse: "inexplicably copying the ThinkPad’s red nipple instead of using a scroll wheel"

That's completely incorrect. The Mighty Mouse has a mini trackball, the trackpoint is a pressure-sensitive stick.

Indeed. And it the scroll-ball were larger, I’d probably like it. Just do that, and make the 2 buttons physically distinct, then it would be a halfway decent mouse.

"Anything we missed? While these failures are big, we have restricted them to the modern-day Apple, and ignored the Jobs-less wilderness years of beige boxes and overpriced printers."

Didn't I see the Quick Take somewhere in the list ? As a matter of fact Steve Jobs "steved" (as we used to say at the time) those when he came back to Apple, with all the printers, the Newton, and everything that was not, well, a Macintosh (or the softwares running on it).

ahem

Newton / Cube / Lisa / Pippin / 20th Anniversary Mac

I must stand up in defense of the Newton. It was way ahead of its time when it came to user experience. Version 1.0 was like most version 1.0s not quite ready and its handwriting recognition took a lot of criticism (even getting Doonesbury to riff on it). By version 2.0, that problem was completely fixed. Alas, 2.0 came 2 1/2 years after 1.0 and was too little too late. In addition, NewtonScript was an excellent language to program in (able to create apps quickly with a minimum of effort).

The Palm Pilot wouldn't have been what it was without Newton having tested the ground first and finding the mines.

I have one of the iHiFi's

I dunno, it's a pretty good speaker and it's nice that it's good for plugging into a computer, sticking the iPod in, and bringing outside.

The biggest problem with the damn thing is that the iPhone has always been ridiculously flaky with it, and I don't mean the cellular noise.

I think the author just doesn't like iTunes. So he picked four other products which he believes everyone dislikes, and which did not have so much market success, and says that iTunes should be disliked by everyone too. But as far as I know, iTunes is quite successful.

They missed the worst one: the Mighty Mouse with the scrollball that you cannot clean.

In fairness, it's given an aside in the Hockey Puck Mouse section.

If you turn it upside down, press down hard and roll it usually get's unstuck. I'm pretty sure this won't work forever but it's kept the mouse alive for now.

I'd take these 'failures' any day! While the ipod had an innovative design for scrolling through a long list of music, it was the decision to make white earbuds that was so mind bending. Now people knew you had an ipod even if it was concealed. Brilliant.

There are lots of ideas at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200602101154178... (first hit from http://www.google.com/search?q=Mighty+Mouse+with+the+scrollb...). Most of them seem pretty close to Apple's suggestions at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1537 - sometimes with alcohol instead of water.

Mine hasn't needed cleaning yet, but it's less than 12 months old.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_...

There have been actual failures, and then there is this list, seemingly chosen at random. Wired would do well to separate those categories.

This is pretty shortsighted for being a "worst ever" list. What about the Pippin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com