10 Weird Apple Products From the Past

Many of Apple's most interesting products are no longer around. Some of these devices pioneered entire classes of computers and peripherals.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at some Apple products from the past. 
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So Apple's product line wasn't always as refined as it is today. There was a period Apple went through where they came out with all sorts of different types of Macs and also all sorts of different types of peripherals for Macs. Let's start by looking at the Macintosh Portable. Before the very first laptops there were these portable computers. This one came out before the very first powerbook which would have been the Powerbook 100 a few years later. In 1989 Apple basically took the Mac SE and put it into this portable case with a large battery. If you take a look at the design you could see it was pretty big and heavy and used a trackball as a pointing device. The thing got maybe an hour of battery time. I used one for a little bit and it pretty much felt like using a Mac SE but one that you could kind of carry with you like a briefcase. 
Apple also came out with a Mac that was a TV. It was just called the Macintosh TV and was basically a form of Mac from that era around 1993 but you could plug in a cable wire to the back and get TV stations on it in a predigital cable TV era. It never really found a market. There really wasn't much use for being able to use your Mac as a tiny cable television. 
Then in 1997, twenty years after the first Apple computer, they came out with the 20th Anniversary Macintosh. It actually was one of the first computers to have an LCD screen built into it. That large square area at the bottom was a CD drive. So it had that built-in as well though it was a weird vertical orientation. This was a limited edition Mac and it was one of the most expensive Macs ever released if you adjust for inflation. It costs $7500 for the base model. Now in addition to producing the original Apple computer and the Mac Apple tried to come out with other products. We see now they have been very successful with the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV but some earlier products weren't as successful. 
Most well known of those is the Apple Pippin. This came out in 1996 and was basically like a set top box version of a Mac. A lot of people claimed that this was Apple's attempt at a game console and it did kind of have a game controller with it. But, in fact, Apple was really going for a multimedia machine that you could plug into a TV. Something less expensive than a computer that you could use to run a popular CD-ROM that were coming out at the time. A lot of the software produced for it were in fact these multimedia interactive presentations. Not actually games. Apple hardly sold any of these. They were a complete failure. But they were a precursor to the current set top box. As a matter of fact today's Apple TV is everything that the Pippin was and way more. 
Of course another device that Apple came out with was the Newton MessagePad. This was Apple's early attempt at an iPad. But, of course, this was before wireless internet. WiFi just didn't really exist then. So this was a completely off-line device. Image carrying this around, heavier than an iPad, and only being able to do off-line things with it. It tried really hard at handwriting recognition so you would just write with handwriting on it and it would try to translate that to text. But in practice it didn't really work very well. But the method used by its competitor, the Palm Pilot, that was a lighter, smaller, and less expensive device, was much better. It had you write the characters in a special way. It turns out that that method worked a lot better for entering data into a PDA, a personal digital assistant, in the pre-WiFi era.
Now Apple also came out with a lot of peripherals for the Mac that are no longer around. Apple came out with a webcam back in 2003. I had several of these. They were really cool devices. They were just called iSight which is still a term Apple uses to describe some of its built-in cameras. They look like this. You mounted them on top of your MacBook or iMac and they added a camera to it. 
Now when CDs first came out computers didn't have CD drives in them so you had to get an external one. Apple had one called the PowerCD. I had one of these. It sat in this weird way on your desk taking up a ton of space and the disk was held at an angle. You plugged it into your Mac and you were able to read data off of a CD-ROM. You used it to play some of those early multimedia CD-ROMs on your Mac. A lot of these were sold basically so people could play games like Mist and pretty soon Apple was putting the optical drive into the Macs themselves so an external one wasn't needed anymore.
Here's a peripheral that isn't for a Mac. It's for an iPod. Apple actually produced a speaker set that you put your iPod into the top of. It was a precursor to the Home Pod. It was just completely off-line. You had to plug the iPod into the top and then you controlled the iPod as normal. It would just play through the speakers. Now those three peripherals could be seen as pioneers in their individual classes. Apple was either first or near the first to come out with them. For some other peripherals Apple actually really did change the industry. These next three are examples. 
The first is the Apple LaserWriter. If you think of which companies pioneered laser printing you're probably thinking of printer companies like HP. But, in fact, Apple had one of the very first laser printers out there. I mean this thing was out in 1985. But the LaserWriter 2, this model here, that was quite a machine. I used one of these for years. They worked really well and without much trouble. Using one of these you were able to replace much more expensive machinery. I bet there's still some LaserWriter 2 out there that work just perfectly. 
Apple also pioneered the digital camera. When you think of digital cameras you probably think of big camera companies. But Apple was actually one of the first companies with a digital camera out. Now check this out! This thing took pictures at the resolution of 640 by 480. That's it. It only had enough memory to store eight of those pictures at a time. But it was still quite a revolution. At the company I was working for at the time we used to have a polaroid camera, take a polaroid of something we needed a picture of, and then scan it in with a scanner. This thing made that process a whole lot simpler. You just take the picture. Transfer it to your computer and you had a digital photo right away. 
Apple was also pretty early in with scanners. It looked like this and  like the laserwriter it was really solidly built. It was built to be used everyday over and over again in business settings. 
Now all these products are long gone now. Only collectors really have them. But a lot of these really pioneered their individual product categories. After all it really was in Apple's interest to come out with new ways to use computers so they could sell more of them. Apple really doesn't really come out with these kinds of things anymore. One reason may be because there are so many startup companies out there that Apple really doesn't need to pioneer these anymore. Another company will do it. But another reason may be that Apple still actually comes out with products like this. They just are hugely successful. I mean things like the iPhone, the iPad, Apple TV, AirPods, and the AppleWatch are products quite like these. The difference is that they're so hugely successful we don't consider them sideshows. They are central products. So it may not be that Apple doesn't come out with products like this anymore. They just come out with products that are so good that they stick around. 
Hope you found this interesting. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Weird Apple Products From the Past”

Dean

3 years ago

I had a bunch of Newtons.

Bart Pulverman

This was by far one of the most interesting videos I have seen on MacMost.

Laraine

I had the LaserWriter Plus (1986). It was awesome for its time.

Diana

I ran a small business doing computer services from 1984-1989—early DTP era. We had 2 MacSE 20s (the first Mac with a 20GB hard drive) and a LaserWriter printer. We did everything from typing term papers, resumés, and flyers to publishing personalized books. Dot-matrix printers were the norm for home use. As school Tech Coordinator I bought a few Macintosh 5200 computers with the TV card. During the the 9/11 crash in NYC I used a 5200 Mac to find info as it was happening. No TVs in schools then.

John Atkinson

Very interesting video, Gary. I've been working with computers professionally since 1974 and there were a few products in your lineup that I'd never heard of. I was surprised the Lisa didn't make it on the list, but then, it really did succeed, just under a different name and form factor. The most interesting feature was the mouse. No one at General Dynamics had ever seen one before that $10,000 Lisa showed up. Thanks for your consistently engaging content.

Ellen L

interesting history.

Comments Closed.

10 Weird Apple Products From the Past

Comments: 6 Responses to “10 Weird Apple Products From the Past”

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