…iFailed

6th Feb 2010

Jude Hill looks at rot­ten apples

APPLE has become a house­hold name in the past 10 years, bring­ing us the Ipod, the Iphone, Mac­books, Imacs and count­less other tech­no­log­i­cal feats com­bin­ing prac­ti­cal­ity and beauty.

They have not how­ever always been the gad­get fiend’s wet dream. The mid 90s were not a good time for apple. Although they did have some suc­cess, it pails in com­par­i­son to that found after 2000.

The fol­low­ing are some of the failed gad­gets that Apple have tried to force down our throats in the past. There is no chance of walk­ing into a room and find­ing that 90 per­cent of the occu­pants have these prod­ucts glued to their palms.

The Apple Walt

Apples first real ven­ture into mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions saw the apple W.A.L.T (Wizzy Active Lifestyle Tele­phone). It was designed in con­junc­tion with Bell­south com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and was designed to be a portable com­mu­ni­ca­tions device. It could even send and receive faxes!

Dis­con­tin­ued in: 1993

The Apple Penlite

This would have almost been the pre­cur­sor to the Ipad. Described as a ‘flatscreen tablet’. It had a sty­lus to type mes­sages and access fea­tures. It hit the heady heights of being able to run floppy disks. The project was can­celled in 1994 after Apple intro­duced the New­ton which was seen as another pen dri­ven tablet device.

Dis­con­tin­ued: 1994

Apple inter­ac­tive television

Orig­i­nally made in con­junc­tion with BT, the inter­ac­tive TV box was designed to give view­ers the chance to have inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion, some­thing that in the mid 90s had never been heard of. After hav­ing a trial of 2,500 homes in the UK, as well as tri­als in Bel­gium and in five states in Amer­ica the idea was shelved after it became obvi­ous that it was not com­mer­cially viable.

Discontinued:1995