Even Apple can get a design badly wrong, and these products are the proof. From the butterfly keyboard to the Newton MessagePad, here’s Apple’s hall of shame.
Apple is world-famous for its design success stories, from the iMac G3 to all the best iPhones. But things don’t always go according to plan, even for the most design-savvy tech firm on the planet.
No, Apple has had its fair share of design howlers over the years. Here, we’ve rounded up eight of the most egregious design sins Apple has ever committed. It’s a good reminder that no one is above dropping a few absolute clunkers — even Apple.The butterfly keyboard
For many years, Apple exalted the concept of “thin and light” above seemingly all else. In the quest to strip back its designs to their purest essence, not even the keyboard could escape the steely gaze of Jony Ive and his fellow Apple designers.
The result was the butterfly keyboard, first debuted on 2015’s 12-inch MacBook. Instead of the traditional scissor switch mechanism under each key, this keyboard bore a new design that was much thinner and permitted far less key travel than before. Sure, it allowed the laptop to be almost impossibly thin, but it came at the cost of terrible reliability (and plenty of lawsuits filed against Apple).
Even the smallest crumb could jam up your keys and render them fickle and erratic. And with almost no key travel, typing on the keyboard felt like you were tapping a solid, immovable surface, which made errors increasingly common. Apple finally ditched the butterfly keyboard in 2019 and hasn’t looked back since.Magic Mouse 2
The butterfly keyboard might have been abandoned, but this next design fail — the Magic Mouse 2 — is still with us. Buy a Magic Mouse 2 today and you’ll see it’s a real pain — quite literally.
For one thing, its low-profile shape can cause discomfort with prolonged use. I know at least one person who had to switch to a different mouse after it caused them severe wrist pain. Sure, its support for multitouch gestures is great, but is that worth the possible carpal tunnel syndrome?
That’s not the only problem. The most meme-worthy aspect of the Magic Mouse 2 is the way it charges, as Apple bafflingly located the charging port on the underside of the device. That means you can’t use it and charge it at the same time, and instead have to place it on its back like a rodent playing dead. That seems pretty appropriate, really.The iMac G3’s ‘hockey puck’ mouse
The Magic Mouse 2 wasn’t the first time Apple got a mouse badly wrong. No, over 15 years before the, Apple launched the iMac G3 and its design bomb of a mouse. While the iMac G3 is rightly celebrated as one of the best Macs of all time, its mouse is not remembered anywhere near as fondly. You certainly won’t find it on any lists of the best mice, that’s for sure.
