Apple's had so manyhits the last fifteen years or so it really seems cheap and small and petty to run down their duds but boy is it fun I'm Brian cooley with top five apple flops Ranking these is real subjective so I went the way you would Let's rank 'em by how much you can get for 'em on ebay Here we go .
The number five Apple flop is the newton OS Message Pads this is gonna raise hackles since descendents iPhone and iPad are now Apple's biggest business But Apple made like six models of the message Pad and Motorola made some and Sharp took a whack at 'em and nobody could get it right It was just this slow motion disaster I recall when these were new and they were scorned everywhere And didn't they have Newton stores too What a mess Price wise these don't fetch a lot thirty to fifty bucks for one on ebay .
Number four the Mac G4 cube We'd never seen a computer like this and its short time in production keeps it that way This silent fan-less monolith with a toaster slot on top for CDs was real different But thanks to that odd shape you couldn't really put any expansion cards in it back at a time when you actually cared about such things and it was pricey about two hundred bucks more than a conventionally shaped Mac that had similar performance Oh and the cases often cracked which is really annoying on a machine you pay top dollar for for its looks They made about a hundred and fifty thousand of these so they aren't real hard to find on eBay and they seem to fetch about a hundred or two hundred bucks .
number two the pippin Recall this one It was produced with Bandai of japan rolled out around '96 as a game console with a light version of System 7 on it as its OS It was gutless there was damn near nothing to run on it in terms of titles and the price was like six hundred bucks about eight fifty in today's dollars Forty-two thousand or so were made eBay prices top out around four hundred bucks or so for a really clean unit .
Number two is the Twentieth anniversary Mac It was one of the first things Steve Jobs killed when he came back to the company and I suspect he did it standing inside a pentagram cause this thing is so not him Like all crap labeled executive it's full of form over function For seventy-five hundred dollars over ten thousand bucks in today's money you'd get an all in one design OK kinda cool with a small twelve-inch display and beyond that not much interesting Oh there was a joey pouch disc tray in front and buttons on the front panel arranged for looks instead of works The whole thing came off like Sharper Image had a one-night stand with Bang Olufsen and the Twentieth Anniversary mac was star-crossed from the beginning It launched in 1997 Apple's twenty-first year That said you seem to be able to get about seven hundred bucks for a good complete one on ebay .
Before I take you to the number one Apple flop ranked by eBay price let's consider one so awful and so unimportant it doesn't even deserve a true spot on the list that damn round USB puck mouse from the original iMac Totally round so you never knew which way to point it sized so only a raccoon could articulate it and just ugly with that bad late 90's semi-translucent plastic with Jolly Rancher color accents This thing was a mess I found a basket of twenty of 'em on ebay for thirty-five bucks overpriced .
My number one Apple flop macintosh TV I'd actually forgotten about this this was the first black Mac It was basically a Mac Performa that had a Sony Trinitron television bolted to it and a cable tuner inside You could use it as a computer or switch to watching TV but you couldn't watch TV in a window or anything cool like that It made a mockery of the world integration About ten thousand were made so there's a handful of 'em stinking up ebay any given day at around eight hundred dollars .
now for the brighter side of life don't miss my other companion video to this top five Steve Jobs greatest hits That's also available at top5 .cnet .com I'm brian Cooley Thanks for watching
