Gadgetory

apples had so many hits the last 15 years or so it really seems cheap and small and petty to run down their duds oh boy is it fun I'm Brian Cooley with top 5 Apple flops ranking these is real subjective so I went the way you would let's rank them by how much you can get for them on eBay here we go the number 5 Apple flop is the Newton OS message pads this is gonna raise hackles since descendants iPhone and iPad are now Apple's biggest business but Apple made like 6 models of the message pad and Motorola made some and sharp took a whack Adam 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's stores too what a mess price-wise these don't fetch a lot 30 to 50 bucks for one on eBay number for the Mac g4 cube we've never seen a computer like this and it's short time in production keeps it that way this silent fanless monolith with a toaster slot on top for CDs was real different but thanks for 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 200 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 it was damn near nothing to run on it in terms of titles and the price was like 600 bucks about 850 in today's dollars 42,000 or so were made eBay prices top out around 400 bucks or so for a really clean unit number two is the 20th 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 because this thing is so not him like all crap labeled executive it's full of form over function for $7,500 over ten thousand bucks in today's money you'd get it all in one design okay kind of cool with a small 12 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 20th anniversary Mac was star-crossed from the beginning it launched in 1997 Apple's 21st year that said you seem to be able to get about 700 bucks for a good complete one on eBay before I take you 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 size so only a raccoon could articulate it and just ugly with that bad late 90s semi translucent plastic with Jolly Rancher color accents this thing was a mess I found a basket of 20 of them on eBay for 35 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 performer 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 word integration about 10,000 were made so there's a handful of them sticking up eBay D given day at around $800 now for the brighter side of life don't miss my other companion video to this top 5 Steve Jobs Greatest Hits that's also available at top-5 cnet.com i'm brian coulis thanks for watching you