My favorite part of the 'worlds worst tech products' was the huge picture (ad) on the right for Microsoft's mobile technology. At first, I thought they were listing the Palm 700w as part of the world worst tech.

I can think of at least 2 things on the Honorable Mention list by Apple that would better replace the 2 things they put on the list (Puck Mouse, 20th Mac.) 1) Pippen was never Apples. it was Bandai's machine. It USED Apple tech much like 3DO did with theirs, but Apple themselves never released one. Also remember, for it's time it was a decent machine, but Bandai didnt release it until the internet guts where well beyond the current gen systems nor did they line up any third partys. Technologically, for its time, it was in EXACTLY the same position the Xbox was, but Apple didnt want to push it like Microsoft did. Even if they had, the project would likely have gone the way of Newton when Jobs came back. 2) The Mac portable sucked yes, but people forget ALL portables sucked. I still have portables from 2 years after that one was released that had almost the same form factor and weight as the Mac Portable, but ran Dos and where JUST AS BAD. I also dont get why the Newton is up on there for honorable mention because people are so quick to dismiss its handwriting recognition software but forget there was NOTHING LIKE IT then and nothing close to what it tried to do for another 10 years (actual handwriting recognition, not making you relearn the alphabet.) Also I wouldnt diss Zip drives cause again it came at a time when there was no decent alternative to not using disks (which are just a bad, if not worse.) There where no thumb drives, portable hard drives where huge expensive and notorious buggy, burners where still very expensive. Sure there was a fault, but it was still a small percentage of users who ever had the problem. And Im sick of the amount of AOL bashing that goes on. Yes they have long outlived their business model, but people are too quick to forget that there was a time when the internet DIDNT EXIST. Services like AOL and Prodigy (which if you though AOL had a bad interface you should have SEEN prodigy) where for the long time the easiest way to communicate and trade files with multiple computers across the country. Yes it sucks now, but for a long time it didnt because the only alternative was much harder to use and not ment for the social interaction AOL was ment for.

funny that chiclet keyboard looks a lot like the new macbook keyboards... old is new again.... again.

They should add "Javascript pop-up ads, like the one's used at PC World" to that list.

Hey wow, I just realized what the MacBook keyboard reminded me of!

I didn't know that the OQO 1 was so bad. oh well. Guess I had the only Zip drives that weren't ticking time bombs. Too bad, but before portable HDDs affordable CD-Rs and Flash drives those were the cats pajamas.

I agree w/ Falconfire. AOL was very useful & helped millions of people get into this whole internet thing. I used up many of those free month offers. Newton & Zip helped bust open consumer market segments. Remember that the alternativs to zip disks were floppies & expensive magneto-optical disks.

One more thing. Do you really think OQO Model 1 belongs on that list?

Yeah, that list is definitely funny. Newton was in no way one of the worst tech products. Say what you will about the first ones (the 100) but the later ones were pretty great and really opened doors in the PDA market. Not to mention that the handwriting recognition on the later models still hasn't been beat. Same for the Zip - no way was the Zip one of the worst products. At all. There's plenty of things that they're not mentioning, two off the top of my head are: - the Modo. The device was great, I loved the idea, but the service was shut down only 48 hours after launch - leaving buyers with an expensive, pretty, well-designed piece of vaporware history. - Iomega's HipZip MP3 player. Used 40MB miniZip (aka Clik!) disks, slow as hell, heavy as hell, and sucked batteries like a newborn sucks a booby. Anyone else have some stuff that should have been on that list?

yeah, they missed the netpliance iopener fiasco

I think that the Mac Portable doesn't deserve to be on there. It was a logical transition between something like the Osborne I or the Kaypro and later PowerBooks. It mostly looks bad compared to the PowerBook 100, which for the time was pretty sweet. If they're going to put an Apple computer on there (besides the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, which really was a dog), they should include the Apple III--or Apple ///, if you prefer--which was plagued with all sorts of problems and cost the company buckets of money. At one point, users were told to fix a recurring problem with the computer by picking it up three inches, then dropping it. I also agree with the idea that the Newton has gotten an unjustly bad rap--plenty of people are still using them.

the Newton still has active development. I still think it was the best all-around computer I ever used...

First of all, trust me, guys, the Pippin really was terrible, even for its time, and even ignoring the pricetag. As one of the ~5 people in the states who actually experienced the thing first-hand, I can positively say I felt embarrased for the guy that owned it. Like the 3DO, but with even fewer games, if that's possible, and without even a smidge of the (reputedly) cutting-edge technology. When it was DESIGNED by Apple, it was somewhat ahead of its time, and may have even been a good deal had it been made and released right then (though it would have still been a hard-sell to a public that didn't recognize it as a economy-class computer, but a underpowered gaming console). Secondly, anybody who defends AOL by claiming it was the only available internet provider (or that the others were just as bad) must have a foggy memory. Dialup providers have always been a little too willing to nag their customers in the name of lower prices, but there have always been (local) companies who offer you nothing but a phone number and a password, and leave you the frak alone. Hell, give me 15 bucks a month and I'll give you *my* phone number. It never goes down, and my broadband should be able to spare 56000 baud. Who needs a land-line nowadays anyway? Come to think of it, that isn't a bad idea... As to the overall benefit to humanity of educating millions of "n00bs" about the wondars of teh intarweb--an education, by the way, that AOL crippled more than any other ISP before or since--I'll let you be the judge. My parents still don't like to use actual URLs. And finally, there was a very serious alternative to Iomega's ZipDisks: the Imation SuperDisks. The drives were backward-compatible with floppies, people! I'm still peeved that Zips won out. You can even use them to over-burn a regular 1.44 MB floppy to (as I recall) double capacity. Think about it: all those useless floppy drives sleeping eternally in all those business PC's could actually still be getting used, and at capacities which are still relevent. SuperDisks are up there with MiniDiscs and the Sega Dreamcast as the three products whose unjust failures I mourn the greatest.

I remember the Zip drives as being a miracle at a time when the best storage devices were (gasp!) 80 MB SyQuest disks. Out comes the smaller, more compact 150 MB Zips. It was like a dream. Every piece of technology will have its' share of faulty products, and I really don't believe Zip Drives should be on this list. The benefits it offered, compared to the SyQuest standard that was used back then really made the expensive price of each disk worth it.

The Zip was a great solution for a while when there was little else. However, the 1 time the drive mech failed, it destroyed enough data to make the whole thing a net loss for me. Damn You Iomega; Go Scratch! The compaq portable was pretty sucky, too. http://oldcomputers.net/compaqi.html

Superdisks came after Zip was out for a while which is why Iomega won Not to mention they too where VERY buggy my district bought them, within a year and a half they had all broke and refused to read floppys. I never said AOL was the only available internet provider, infact I was speaking of AOL at a time before the internet was even available to non-educational users. I used AOL before you could even get onto the internet using AOL's software. Back then Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy where very important, but we are talking over 16-18 years ago.