Why Did the iPhone 5c Release Flop? A Look Back At Other Apple Failures

With the news that Apple is cutting back on iPhone 5c manufacturing and ramping up the iPhone 5s, due to iPhone 5c sales being far below expectations, the question remains: Why? Let's take a look at some of Apple's historic flops for clues.

Lisa

Probably the most famous Apple disaster was the Apple Lisa, considered one of the predecessors to the Macintosh. Despite, or perhaps because of , the Lisa's high-end hardware for the time, the desktop computer was considered a huge commercial failure.

The Lisa was considered to be the most advanced of Apple's desktops at the time, combining an advanced hard disk-based operating system with a built-in screensaver and data corruption protection software with an all-in-one desktop computer with a high-resolution display, up to 2MB of RAM (huge for the time), expansion slots, and a new, fast CPU (which was still not fast enough to keep up with the complex OS and applications).

The 1983 launch of Lisa was a disaster. It cost almost $10,000 at launch, after several delays in its release date, making it far more expensive than IBM competitors on the market.

But the Lisa failed because it was trying to do too much, too early - and perhaps because the market wasn't ready for it. A lot of its advancements are considered before their time, and many of its features eventually became standard in subsequent versions of Mac OS and Windows. Working Lisas are now considered a collectors item.

The iPhone 5c is certainly not a Lisa. If anything, Apple - in repackaging the iPhone 5 for a cheaper product a year later - is pulling a "Lisa 2" move, selling a repackaged good product at a time when people want the next, more advanced, machine.

Pippin

Apple Pippin was in many ways a predecessor to Valve's Steam OS initiative - creating a standard for gaming and multimedia that would be carried out by third-party hardware manufacturers. Apple's Pippin was designed to be an internet networked TV-entertainment standard, with various boxes running Pippin made by companies like Katz Media and Bandai.

But mostly, Pippin looked like an unfocused Apple video gaming system, which would be released into a market already dominated by Sega and the Sony Playstation.

To make matters worse, the Bandai Pippin cost about $600 on its release date in 1995 - far too much - and Apple put none of its own money behind marketing the platform, instead making Bandai and Katz Media advertise the hardware on their own.

So why was Pippin a failure? Mostly bad timing, bad strategy, high pricing and a little dash of trying to do too much (again).

The iPhone 5c might be chalked up to bad timing or bad strategy - it's still unclear if Apple was trying to get into the lower-priced market with the "cheap" iPhone, but immediately observers knew it wasn't cheap enough for that - but definitely not trying to do too much.

Apple In The 90s

If you just glance at the Wikipedia page for Apple's products of the 90s, you'll see a profusion of different models released year after year: the same product name such as "Macintosh LC" or "PowerBook" or "Power Macintosh" followed by myriad numbers and letters (coincidentally, there were "c" variants of some of Apple's laptops).

Then, when you look at the early 2000's, when Steve Jobs was back and on a roll, the superabundance of Apple models and variants ends. You get the iMac, iBook, and eventually the MacBook, iPod, and iPhone.

The iPhone 5c's failure may not be as spectacular as the Lisa or as pitiful as the Pippin (and the device itself isn't one of those low-selling collectors' list oddities like the Newton or G4 Cube), but it's more of a failure akin to Apple's slow, pointless slog through the 1990s: incremental updates and variants that don't excite anyone, while the company struggles against a bloated field of competitors. It's just this time the competitors are Google and Samsung, not Microsoft and IBM.

The iPhone 5c obviously isn't the end of the world for Apple. But it's an eerie reminder of time when the company also didn't have Steve Jobs at the helm, and it evokes Larry Ellison's recent take on Apple, when asked by Charlie Rose, "So what happens to Apple without Steve?"

"Well we already know," replied Ellison. "We conducted the experiment. It's been done," he continued, alluding to Apple in the 1990s. "We saw Apple with Steve Jobs," said Ellison, raising a finger to the sky, "We saw Apple without Steve Jobs," he continued, bringing his finger back down.

"And now, we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs."