Apple's 10 worst products ever

Technology giant Apple, which has seen huge success with iPhone, iPad and iPod, recently unveiled its latest products: iOS 5, OS X Lion and iCloud. However, no company is immune to failure, and strange as it may seem, Apple has had its fair share of failures. 

Click on the slideshow to see the 10 worst products ever launched by Apple that were doomed for failure:

Also Read: Apple iCloud vs. Existing players: Meet the top 5 rivals

Japanese game company Bandai and Apple made this multimedia and game product in 1996. It came with a CD-ROM drive and could play games for Pippin and Macintosh. It was also able to connect to the Internet. However not many people were Internet-savvy at the time. Only 42,000 units of product were sold and only 18 software titles were ever made.

Apple's USB Mouse was released in 1998. It was designed to look like a “hockey puck.' The location of the USB port on the iMac G3 was changed from the center to the left side. Right-handed users found the mouse difficult to use. It was eventually replaced with Apple Pro Mouse in 2000.

The G4 Cube was an Apple computer that was sold between 2000 and 2001. It had an upgradable video card in a standard AGP slot but there was not enough space for full-length cards. It had less expandability options than the Power Mac G4. As a result many customers who wanted high-end features selected the Power Mac G4 instead of G4 Cube. G4 Cube died a natural death as sales of Mac Mini, which was relatively inexpensive, grew. The G4 cube can now only be found in Museum of Modern Art in New York because of its innovative design.

Mobile Me is an online service by Apple for individual users to store email, contact lists, calendars, photos, files and websites. It also has a phone tracking feature. Mobile Me was launched in 2000 but its web application did not allow access to users who used Microsoft Internet Explorer until June of 2010. There was upgrade in 2008 but problems persisted. There were users who could not access email. Some users had syncing problems too. MobileMe inadvertently charged the credit cards of some European and Australian users and Apple was forced to refund the money. Apple plans to end the service in June 2012.

Apple III was launched in 1980 as a business focused personal computer. The product attempted to succeed Apple II but failed due to the poor quality of its hardware and software. On top of that, the price was more than $4000 despite lacking beefy specs. Though Apple II was very popular, Apple tried to make users upgrade into Apple III by force. Users drew back and Apple III disappeared in 1984.

Motorola cooperated with Apple to make Motorola ROKR E1 - the first iTunes integrated smartphone in 2005. It allowed users to transfer 100 tracks of music. It had endless nested menus which made music transferring slow. As a result, users selected iPod Nano instead. After that, new versions of the phone - Motorola E2 and E6 - did not integrate with iTunes but other software such as iRadio and RealPlayer.

Apple Lisa was sold for around $10,000 in 1983 as a personal computer for business use. Sales failed because it was too expensive and lacked speed. Apple destroyed 2700 Lisa computers and made a landfill to obtain a tax deduction from unsold products. Lisa computers were taken off the shelves and the Lisa line was finally discontinued in 1985. It was replaced by the Macintosh computer.

Apple launched the QuickTake camera in 1994 after Steve Jobs was ousted from the company and it vanished when he returned in 1997. Quicktake raked in poor sales. It could only take 8 pictures on high resolution and 32 pictures on low resolution. QuickTake died a natural death after failing to keep up with rivals.

iTunes was released in 2001 as a music player-cum-management software. It included new features such as buying music tracks from iTunes store. However, users could not store their music to cloud servers with this software even as rivals such as Spotify provided this function. In addition, iTunes did not provide a wireless syncing function that Zune offered. Moreover, it worked quickly in Mac but was relatively slower in Windows.

Apple TV was launched in 2006 as a set-top box without a TV tuner or a personal video recorder. Users needed to connect it with their computers to enable these features. The Front Row interface did not have some of the functionality of iTunes such as rating items, synchronizing from more than one computer, full internet radio support and games. It also did not have a CD or DVD drive. Most importantly, it did not allow users to connect to popular video services such as Hulu and Last.fm.