News that Apple is charging between $150 and $230 for a shoulder sock (the iPhone Pocket) designed to hold your iPhone—insecurely, I might add, since there’s no zipper or button for the opening—got me thinking about other famously silly products Apple has offered in the past, and what a rabbit hole I went down.
Rather than looking strictly at commercial failures, such as the Apple MessagePad, an iPad predecessor from 1993, or the Apple Pippin, a 1996 video game console that took on Sony’s PlayStation, I wanted to look strictly at past products that Apple introduced to rooms full of immediate huhs and whaaas, rather than oohs and ahhs.
the hall of shame
First up on our list is a glorified sock that has now returned to the limelight in the form of the iPhone Pocket. Introduced in 2004, Apple’s iPod Socks were just colorful fabric sleeves meant to hold an iPod.
Oh, and they were made out of the same sort of knit cotton that most socks are made from. You got all six colors in a pack for $29, and of course, you had to take the iPod out of its protective sweater in order to use it.
The Apple Bluetooth Headset beat the AirPods to market, but didn’t do a particularly good job in its rush to join the booming Bluetooth headset market. Aside from its boring name, it cost $129 when it debuted and could only be used for phone calls, not for listening to music.
It also lacked basic physical controls on the headset itself, such as mute and volume. At least it looked good in the ear of some asshole tailgating you on the freeway in his BMW.
Before becoming a joke, America Online (AOL) was the service that got all the normies online and crashed the clubhouse that’d been the internet for hardcore computer types previously. AOL’s push into the household market began in earnest in 1993, and Apple followed with its own service in 1994, called eWorld.
You had to use a Mac to access eWorld, and Apple kept the price too high. It was cute, but it didn’t do what AOL did—make internet use accessible to the masses. It shut down in 1996.
Actually, I take part of that back, because just look at how charming that home screen is? Each service is designated as a building in an idyllic, cartoon town. That’s peak 1990s computer experience, right there. I miss that internet. It wasn’t objectively good, you know? But it felt good.
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