Where’s Apple’s Gadget Explosion?

Those attending college in the in Bay Area during the early-seventies stood a decent chance of being hit up by a scruffy guy offering to sell them a miraculous device known as a “blue box.” The box cost $150 but provided those who laid out the cash the ability to make free, unlimited, long-distance telephone calls. The downside was that the calls were illegal.

One is forced to wonder how many people were able to reject the door-to-door salesman’s pitch, after all they were being sold by none other than Steve Jobs. The blue box Steve was peddling was built by the great Woz and represented the pair’s first business venture. The two would go on to form Apple Computer so it seems fair to say that the blue box also represents Apple’s first foray into the non-computer gadgetry market.

At this point, most people will be thinking of Apple’s surprisingly small in size, yet large in market share, miracle: the iPod. The iPod is clearly a huge success and the darling of investor’s eyes, but it is far from Apple’s first foray into the non-computer gadget market, just the company’s most successful.

The truth is that Apple has been plodding, Frankenstein like, into the gadget market for years. The reason people don’t remember Apple’s other attempts is because the earlier efforts to make non-computer items failed miserably.

Apple’s biggest gambit in the gadget market was, without a doubt, the Newton. Then Apple President Sculley saw the PDA as the future of Apple, a future that Sculley was sure would need something to replace dwindling Mac revenue. In large part, he was right, the Newton could have been the future of Apple, but it was executed poorly. The Newton touted handwriting recognition but the software wasn’t very precise. The unit was also simply too big for many people, and (in classic Apple style) the Newton was expensive.

The failure of the Newton may have been fortuitous for Apple. While PDAs enjoyed a brief surge in popularity they aren’t the indispensable everyman devices Apple had hoped they would become. Imagine Apple enjoying initial Palm-like success with the Newton only to find the market eroding in favor of cell phones, Blackberries, and pads of paper. Why, they’d have to jump to Intel or something.

The Newton was a forward-looking machine, it glimpsed the future, made it to market before any legitimate competitors but, when it really counted, whiffed. Others took a look at the Newton, saw its obvious disadvantages and improved on the concept.

The Newton wasn’t Apple’s only cutting edge release. While digital cameras are ubiquitous now, in 1994 they were relatively unknown. Film companies were rolling in cash from their chemically-activated, scene-capturing strips of cellulose. Apple realized that a digital camera would, some day, render the old way of photo taking and processing obsolete so the company jumped in to the market with the Apple Quicktake.

The Quicktake should have been a huge hit for Apple, but it had a few strikes against it. Apple’s marketing efforts revolved around the camera’s ease of use, seemingly a good idea, but one that failed to address the problem that consumers associated other companies much more closely with camera production. Secondly, Windows support for the camera came a full year after the camera was released. Finally, Apple made the error of simply reselling a Fuji camera as an Apple product. Nothing says, “We didn’t put a whole lot of thought into this,” more than a blatantly rebranded hunk of plastic. Another effort to grab the brass ring, another wild miss. Those wondering if it was even possible for a computer company to compete in the digital camera market with established camera makers need only to turn their attention to Hewlett-Packard.

Apple’s lamest attempt in the gadgetry exploration market wasn’t undertaken by Apple, rather the project was left to a licensee. Bandai, under an Apple license, produced the hardly noticed Pippin. The Pippin was regarded as a game console by consumers but could also function as a networked computer. Unfortunately, the price reflected the computer capabilities. Bandai cranked out a few of the machines, offered them to Japanese and US customers and decided. when the sales numbers rolled in, that people much preferred consoles with actual games and such, even if the console could double as a network computer.

Predictably, there have been other attempts by Apple to get into the consumer gadgetry market, the PowerCD and iPod Hi Fi are two more examples. Pre iPod one would be hard pressed to imagine why Apple kept going down the gadget road with such a dismal track record. Post iPod, the answer is obvious, keep swinging and sooner or later you’ll knock one out of the park…unless you’re a member of the Kansas City Royals.

With the success of the iPod people aren’t wondering why Apple keeps testing the gadget market, they are wondering why Apple doesn’t make more gadgets, why Apple isn’t trying to take the mantel as the premiere producer of consumer gadgetry. Where, pundits wonder, is the iPhone? Where is the Apple PVR? The reason that consumers aren’t seeing Apple gadgets littering the shelves can be explained by Apple’s experience with gadgets. Apple learned the hard way that merely slapping something together and hoping people will buy it because of the Apple logo simply doesn’t work when the product is exposed to the larger market. With that in mind, don’t expect to see any Apple gadgetry targeted at the wider world that doesn’t include a big dose of the ethereal Apple “specialness.” The school of hard knocks has taught Apple not to produce a product simply because they can.