Other than the watch, all the products you mentioned are before 2002. Anything in the past 20 years that have been huge misses in delivering up to expectation?

Also how is the 1st gen watch a failure? It sold millions immediately, and was a huge commercial success. It pretty much started a gold rush for digital watches again.

I think it's fair to say the new "Apple" (last 15 years or so), has been pretty good with exceeding expectations and breaking through barriers that other companies just couldn't.

In what sense did the iMac G4 fail to live up to the hype? That was my first Mac, I still have it. Thought it was an incredible computer for the time--the iMac + OS X 10.1 Puma was absolutely magical coming from Windows 98 on a beige Dell.

The design still looks incredible too, 20+ years later.

I will grant that the Newton failed. In the Apple hardware category, I'd also add the iPod Hi-Fi, the butterfly keyboard, and the touch bar.

That said, Apple's failures are rare and their multi-decade track record of delivering on hype is unsurpassed.

The sales of iMac G4 failed so badly that there was a three-month period in 2004 when it was simply unavailable. It was discontinued without a successor on store shelves.

It was too expensive to manufacture and Apple wasn't sure they could sell it, so they just didn't make any. Hard to believe that could happen to a Mac model today.

Except for the Apple Watch I had all these products. They were some of the best of their time and even hold up today in terms of design and usability.

Your definition of success seems extraordinarily high, if these products were failures. Maybe measured by items sold. But then each of them stands in nearly every single design museum like MoMA, history books, and were clear stepping stones to the Mac mini (cube, sunflower without display), and ipod/phone (newton). So bottom line they were a clear success to Apple’s enormous brand value.

The NeXT Cube was considered a failure.

... except ... when I write iOS software (for the most successful product of all time), I am frequently using types that have "NS" prefixes.

I wonder where they came from?

IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job, to get a new OS base. As NeXT was his company, I'm pretty sure it was a decision based on bias and urgency and not because NextStep was the best there was. But yeah it's an interesting legacy for sure :)

You recall that incorrectly :) The NeXT purchase came first, Jobs as CEO came after that. But yeah, it was a bit of a reverse takeover in a way.

More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s.

A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X).

Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.

NextStep was easily the best there was. Nothing else was remotely suitable. The only contender people like to fantasize about is BeOS, which was nice (I used it as a daily driver for a year), but a toy compared to NextStep and OSX.

> IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job

No, Apple bought NeXT after the failure of Copland to birth a replacement for the creaky and leaky MacOS (BeOS was the big alternative, but Apple thought they were asking for too much).

And NeXT proceeded to take over: Apple bought NeXT in February 1997 keeping Jobs back as an advisor, Jobs staged a boardroom coup to remove Amelio in July, and was then named interim CEO.

Following that he started cutting into the existing product lines and placing NeXT people (Tevanian , Forstall), promoting people he was interested in (Ive), or hiring them from outside (Cook). Basically reshaping the company.

Yes, sales failures is what I'm talking about.

It's already clear the Vision Pro is a milestone for VR and Apple. I'm not sure if that can translate to market success for several years at least.

> iMac G4 "Sunflower"

What was a failure about that? It looked good and worked well.

> solid gold first-gen Apple Watch

In what way did the gold watch fail? It was the first gen watch, the same hardware as the rest, just made of gold for rich people. It didn’t fail any more than any other color did.

Both failed badly to live up to Apple's sales expectations.

The Sunflower iMac was discontinued even before its successor shipped.

The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.

The AWE strategy failed, yet now the AW (like the iPad) define the category they are in. AV could be similar. Apple doesn't know which use case will take off, but it has to get it out there to find out. Leading with the best hardware they have right now lets developers go wild.

Have you looked at the revenue from their wearables category? If the Watch is a failure then the Mac is an abject failure.

You need to seriously read what you’re actually replying to instead of what you think you are because you keep bringing up that the AW is not a failure when nobody said it was.

> Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype.

No one seriously thought that the Apple Watch was going to be an iPhone size hit. It’s a complete straw man argument.

Do you understand what "solid gold first-gen Apple Watch" means? Or, in the other comment, "Apple Watch Edition"?

It does not mean what you clearly think it means.

It was a pet project for Ives. Do you really think that Apple didn’t know their target market well enough to think that they wouldn’t be selling millions of $10K watches?

That would be a perfectly acceptable comment... 3 comments ago.

Instead, you pretended as if they said AW as an entire category was a failure.

Next time, reply to what is written in the comment, not what is easier to argue against.

It’s a perfectly acceptable comment now. No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches. It was a straw man argument that I really didn’t think that people took seriously

> No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches

This is not and has never been the bar for "failure". Stop pretending it is just because it makes your argument easier.

The comment you replied to states:

> The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.

Show how this specific thing is untrue, not your own definition of failure. Was that not Apple's play with the AWE? Was it not a failure, almost immediately discontinued? What exact part of that statement is false?

This is the real strawman and your projection is plainly obvious.

There was no world where a few $10K Apple Watch was going to “expand Apple’s margins” meaningfully compared to the number of iPhones Apple sells. Apple knew this. Anyone who knows anything about finance or simple math knows this.

Got it, so you're just making it up and moving goalposts along the way.

At least you make it plainly obvious.

The Apple Watch is not a failure by any objective measure. It’s very profitable and by far the biggest in the industry. Everything else you name was pre-iPhone.

They didn’t say the AW was a failure and your obvious cherry-picking of the comment is showing.