Certain products related to computing, such as hardware, software, and smartphones, were mass-marketed and highly anticipated ahead of their launch, but are known to have failed commercially. Reasons for their failure include the products failing consumer expectations upon launch, the first round of units suffering defects, a controversy negatively affecting sales, or being the result of poor marketing, regardless of reception. In any case, these products failed to meet their companies' expectations needed to be considered successful, typically due to them failing on average to break even, resulting in the companies losing money. These high-profile items tend to appear on computer- and hardware-related "worst" lists or lists of failures (e.g., "tech fails").
Hardware Components and peripherals
CueCat (2000–2001)
The CueCat is a cat-shaped barcode reader created by Dallas-based Digital Convergence Corporation amid the dot-com bubble and distributed from 2000 until the company's bankruptcy in 2001. Invented by Jovan Hutton Pulitzer (then named Jeffry Jovan Philyaw) intended to make accessing the websites of advertisers from newspapers, magazines, and catalogs easier, the device was plugged into a computer through its PS/2 port (later a USB port) and, along with regular barcodes, could read specialized barcodes on printed advertisements, which would then take the user to the target web page. The company heavily promoted the CueCat as it aimed to sell 50 million units by the end of 2001. The product's sponsors included The Coca-Cola Company, RadioShack, NBC, and Belo Corporation. It also mailed hundreds of thousands to subscribers of newspapers and magazines; Forbes distributed about 830,000 units and Wired about 500,000.
The CueCat's concept of replacing typing in a URL with scanning barcodes for convenience was met with criticism and derision. Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal lampooned the need to have a computer nearby when scanning, calling it "unnatural and ridiculous". He also found that the majority of the special barcodes did not match the printed URLs, instead linking to general web pages, for which he asserted he could have typed them in faster. In addition, Digital Convergence received criticism for using the devices to send personally identifiable information of their users back to the company. The security concerns were amplified when, in late 2000, the CueCat website was subject to a breach that exposed the users' personal names and email addresses. Digital Convergence ended up giving out four million units in the United States—far short of its 50 million goal—with six million left unsold, and the company folded in 2001. The CueCat was ranked No. 20 on PC Worlds list of "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time". It also landed on Times list of "The 50 Worst Inventions", calling it "little more than a high-tech paperweight". Despite its poor showing, the CueCat has been viewed as a precursor to QR codes, which have become ubiquitous.
Itanium (2001–2020)
Itanium was a brand of 64-bit Intel microprocessors first announced in 1994 and released in 2001, after long delays. It was born in December 1988 as a secret Hewlett-Packard research project to succeed the company's PA-RISC instruction set architecture. Intel had its own processor in development, which would have extended its own x86 architecture to 64 bits while still retaining x86 compatibility, but dropped all work on the chip's design by June 8, 1994, when it announced a collaboration with Hewlett-Packard to develop a new 64-bit architecture called IA-64.
Intel announced the Itanium in 1997 with considerable fanfare, with International Data Group initially projecting sales to reach $38 billion by 2001. However, the first Itanium processor, codenamed Merced, suffered development delays, leading Silicon Graphics to cancel its first-generation Itanium system and Sun Microsystems to abandon the Itanium version of its Solaris operating system. Merced garnered a negative reception upon its May 2001 release for its sluggish performance and software incompatibility with x86-based processors. Meanwhile, in 2003, Advanced Micro Devices announced the first fully x86-compatible 64-bit processor, AMD64-based Opteron, and Intel faced a new challenger to its dominance in the office and home user markets. Intel was also forced to lower its ambitions for the struggling Itanium to being only a niche product for high-end systems, or what Pat Gelsinger called "the biggest iron". Further trouble was spelled in 2005, when Microsoft canceled Windows for Itanium-based workstations and IBM and Dell dropped Itanium servers, with HP being the only top server manufacturer to sell them. When in 2019 Intel announced that it would accept orders up until January 30, 2020, and ship the last microprocessors by July 29, 2021, the only systems that were powered by an Itanium 9700-based chip, the last of the Itanium chips sold, were HPE Integrity Superdome computers. Far short of IDG's original projections, the Itanium line of processors generated sales worth only $1.4 billion, against an estimated billions invested into the project, and ultimately failed to replace the x86 architecture. The Itanium was soon recognized as a failure, for which the computer industry dubbed it "Itanic", after the ill-fated ocean liner.
Personal computers
TI-99/4 (1979–1981)
The TI-99/4 was the first mass-marketed home computer with a 16-bit microprocessor, which in this case was the TMS9900—the same processor used by TI-990 minicomputers. Manufactured by Texas Instruments, the TI-99/4 was born from two separate projects for a low-end video game console and a hobbyist-oriented personal computer, which were merged into one as a result of the two teams competing for the same company resources. The computer first retailed for $1,150 () in 1979 and, due to the Federal Communications Commission's strict RFI emissions regulations, shipped with a custom color TV monitor.
The TI-99/4, intended to serve both the video game and home computer markets, was received negatively. The chiclet keyboard was widely criticized, which, according to Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, "became the symbol for everything that was wrong" with the computer. A dearth of third-party software was also noted, due to both the hurdles of writing programs imposed by the TMS9900 processor and Texas Instruments' insistence that it make a profit from third-party software. The computer was referred to by The New York Times as "an embarrassing failure". The high cost of the TMS9900's nonstandard packaging precluded the company from earning a profit for each machine sold, and various reports estimate that only between 20,000 and 100,000 units were ever sold. Two editors for Creative Computing voted the TI-99/4 as one of the world's worst computers, ranked No. 6 on PC Magazines list of "The 12 Biggest PC Duds Ever", and PC World ranked the machine No. 6 on its list of "The 10 Worst PCs of All Time", both criticizing the chiclet keyboard and the latter magazine also citing the need to connect to the computer's own display as one of the reasons for its failure. The computer was supplanted in 1981 by an upgrade, the TI-99/4A, Texas Instruments' only other home computer before abandoning the market.
Apple III (1980–1984)
The Apple III, released in November 1980 as the successor to Apple II, was the first Apple computer not designed by Steve Wozniak, but rather by a committee of engineers led by Steve Jobs. The Apple III was sold as a business computer and housed a 1.8 MHz Synertek 6502A or 6502B processor and 128 KB of dynamic RAM. The Apple III was capable of resolutions of up to 560 × 192 pixels in black and white and up to 280 × 192 in up to 16 simultaneous colors, as well as displaying 80 columns and 24 rows of text, both capital and lowercase.
The Apple III failed commercially for multiple reasons. The computer, initially priced between $4,340 () and $7,800 depending on options, was deemed "absurdly" high even for professional users. In addition, the internal structure of the first batch of units, described as "a disaster" by The Daily Telegraph, used an aluminum enclosure inside the plastic case as the heat sink instead of a cooling fan, reputedly to meet Steve Jobs' demands for a silent computer and reduce RFI emissions, a severe problem affecting the Apple II. The result was that the Apple III would overheat, with the components lacking airflow, the motherboard being distorted by the heat and some chips slipping out of their sockets. 20 percent of the units failed to work as a result of the chips slipping during their shipment. Apple's public relations department later suggested that users lift the front of their units and drop them six inches off the desktop in hopes of re-seating the chips. A revised edition, launched in December 1981 for $3,495, addressed the overheating problem. Lastly, the Apple III shipped with an emulator mode that nominally ensured compatibility with Apple II software. However, many Apple II programs directly wrote on memory using PEEK and POKE commands, which did not align with the Apple III's memory structure. InfoCorp, a research firm, estimated that Apple sold only 75,000 units in December 1983, when the company was forced to redesign the Apple III to meet the Federal Communications Commission's requirements for low RFI emissions. The new computer, Apple III Plus, at a price of $2,995, brought the figure to an estimated 120,000 units sold, but the brand's reputation remained poor, and it was discontinued in April 1984. The original Apple III has been described as one of the worst computers of all time by PC World and Maximum PC, as well as one of the "20 spectacular failures" according to Byte and one of "the 10 greatest flops in computer history" according to The Daily Telegraph.
Apple Lisa (1983–1986)
Lisa is a home computer created and launched by Apple Computer on January 19, 1983, succeeding the company's best-selling computer, the Apple II. Lisa was the first commercialized personal computer with a graphical user interface, as opposed to a command-line interface. Lisa began development in 1978 and was to be a business computer with a built-in green phosphor display, keyboard, and command-line interface due to ship in March 1981 and retail for $2,000. However, it was discovered that designing a computer around a bit-slice microprocessor would be too expensive, so the idea was abandoned. Jef Raskin's visit to Xerox PARC, known among the American computer industry for the Xerox Alto, in the early 1970s also changed the course of Lisa's development. Raskin would have his student at University of California, San Diego, software engineer Bill Atkinson, convince Steve Jobs to visit PARC, and Jobs would recognize the value of GUIs in personal computers. Lisa's original project manager, Ken Rothmuller, who had complained that Trip Hawkins's market requirements document's specifications for a GUI, a mouse, a local area network, file servers, and innovative applications would take too long and be too costly to incorporate into the machine, was replaced with John Couch. The Lisa team demanded more than a computer with a Xerox Alto-inspired GUI, which it had reinvented to include novelties such as the menu bar, pull-down menus, the one-button mouse, cutting and pasting with the clipboard, and the Trash can. Ultimately, the computer's release date was pushed back to 1983, retailing for $9,995 () as it shipped with a Motorola 68000, 1 MB of RAM, two 5¼-inch floppy drives, a 5 MB hard disk drive, a built-in monochrome display, and seven applications.