Apple III (or apple ///)
The Apple III (styled as apple ///) was a commercial failure that put Apple in a difficult position in its early days. Following the massively successful Apple II, this third-gen model was built primarily for businesses as a way for Apple to gain a foothold in the market before the arrival of the IBM PC a year later. Rather than build off the previous model, Apple chose to create an entirely new system with a full keyboard, a display with 80-column text, and an enhanced operating system. It also needed to run existing Apple II software.
The goal was to win over the commercial sector and gain 90% of the market, effectively phasing out the Apple II. Unfortunately, the computer suffered from severe reliability issues. The motherboards reportedly overheated due to the lack of a cooling fan (something Steve Jobs supposedly removed for aesthetic reasons). As a result of engineering and product management woes, the computer had “100% hardware failure,” according to a Steve Wozniak interview featured in Byte magazine. Revisions were made but the damage was done, and Apple would go on to sell an estimated 65,000 units.
The Apple III was the first computer not built by Wozniak, who wrote in his 2007 book iWoz that the Apple III failed because it was “not developed by a single engineer or a couple of engineers working together. It was developed by committee, by the marketing department.”
