The products that have not seen a second generation

Nov 30, 2015 21:50 GMT  ·  By

Who says Apple doesn't make mistakes? For a start, they certainly think they don't. For every 10 great choices on different matters, they might have one that proves to be bad. I'm talking about products or services that have been abandoned over time right after Apple has released them.

That shouldn't be an issue. If it proves to be a bad choice, they just forget it and do not iterate on the same idea. Problems appear when the choices that came from Cupertino linger on affecting users.

Beautifully, unapologetically plastic

Remember iPhone 5c. Oh, how Jony Ive must have hated the commercial where he says their phone is made of plastic. The idea of a cheap iPhone was so bad that Apple... apologized for it when they released the iPhone 6. The 5c didn't have any followers, and the Apple "Crocs" case disappeared from the face of the earth.

Sure enough, the idea seemed like a great one: an iPhone that comes in many colors looks like iOS 7 and has the internals of an iPhone 5. Apple does not break down their sales by iPhone models, but we know for sure that the device was not a flop. It actually sold in greater numbers than Blackberry, Windows Phone and even Samsung, but that was not enough for Apple. Fortunately, it did not have a successor.

iPod touch, the way of the future iPhone

The iPod touch fell out of grace for some time now. This is not necessarily an Apple one-off, but a product that was replaced by its own competitor within Apple's line: the iPhone 6, followed by the iPhone 6s.

We know Apple has their products designed years in advance, and sometimes they just wait for the new technologies to catch up. The iPod touch was always a great example of what the iPhone will look like in the future: a thin device with rounded corners. There is no need for a music and games device anymore when you can get the same form factor in an iPhone and have higher profit margins.

Low-end iMac, the way of... the past

Check out the new iMac. It's only $1,099. Now that's a price to get you through the doors of the Apple store, right?

For someone who knows and reads a little bit about technology, the new iMac belongs to 2010, not 2016. The 21.5-inch diagonal display is not Retina, the processor clocks at 1.6GHz, and the onboard RAM is only 8GB.

Now if this is not bad enough, go ahead and check out the storage. For that price, you get a 5400-rpm hard drive. Yes, that is a spinning disk drive that has the same speed as the one in your 2001 computer running a glorious Windows XP.

Sure, you can get the same computer with a 1TB Fusion Drive or a 256GB Solid State Drive, so the decision to include such an outdated technology would only be meant to get you on apple.com and show you the wonders of a cheaper Mac.

This is just like getting to a car dealer because they advertise a $5,000 car, but when you step inside the dealership, you realize nobody would want the cheaper car, and you quickly upgrade to a better equipped one.

Space. The final frontier

Did you know that in 2016 iPhones still sport a 16GB model? With an iOS that takes two-thirds of that, users are not happy. Sure enough, iOS 9 comes with "app slicing," so developers only deliver the custom parts of their apps leaving the rest to iCloud.

And talking about iCloud, the lowest (free) tier Apple offers is still 5GB. When you have a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad on the same iCloud account, the storage goes down pretty fast. An acceptable idea would be to offer users at least 5GB for every device they bring to the same account or to match the available space on the mobile devices: when you buy a 16GB device, you get 5GB of cloud storage, when you get the 64GB iPhone, you get 4 times the amount of cloud storage.

Simple is not always better

Back when Apple got rid of the floppy drive, everyone thought they were crazy. When the first MacBook Air came out, Apple was criticized for releasing a machine that did not have an optical drive and fewer connections. That computer has won awards and sold millions over the years because users understood that this is the future.

A 5400-rpm hard disk drive or RAM soldered to the mainboard is not a good choice. The first one belongs to the past and the second is not giving users a choice to upgrade an essential part of their machines.

Sure enough, this ensures Apple they always have high profit margins on their products. If you don't like the iPhone 5c, you get the 5s. If you believe the 5400-rpm is too low, you spend more and get the SSD model.

Apple used to have a label that said their products were expensive. In 2015, we can finally see the occasional cheaper products and guess what? Nobody wants a cheaper product from Apple. Everybody wants to get the best technology from Cupertino, even if that means you need to pay more.