Top 10 worst Apple products of all time

2. 20th Anniversary Mac
Iain Thomson: This was very nearly a contender for the number one spot on the list. In 1997 you could buy a pretty decent PC system for a couple of thousand dollars. You could buy a top of the range system for a few thousand dollars more, and a fantastic monitor to use it with.

So why Apple thought people would be willing to spend $9,000 on an average system in a pretty casing is beyond me, and everyone else as it turned out.

Apple dropped the price on launch, and kept dropping it much to the annoyance of early adopters who protested at paying such a heavy geek tax. The price fell and fell and Apple was reduced to selling the final units off at a loss just to shift stock.

I'm sure the marketing department thought the idea of producing a 20th Anniversary product was a wonderful one. But they should have talked to the engineers. Based on the specifications of the computer, and the state of the competition, the management must have been using a bit too much Bolivian marching powder if they thought this one was a goer.

Shaun Nichols: I don't necessarily have issues with the 20th Anniversary Mac in itself, my problem is the time and circumstances in which it was released.

1997 was a time of outright crisis for Apple. The company was struggling to stay afloat and facing major budget issues. With many people seriously doubting the future of the company, the executives chose to occupy precious engineering, marketing and retail efforts on what amounted to a vanity project.

The company is staring down the barrel of bankruptcy and the execs roll out a $9,000 luxury system that is delivered by limo? Seriously not cool. No wonder one of Jobs' first actions on taking over was to clean house.

I know that the 20th Anniversary Mac had nothing to do with the company's financial troubles, and it was just a little side project to celebrate a milestone, but given the timing and setting of the move, it sent a signal that the people running Apple paid more attention to what happened over the past 20 years than what would happen over the next five.

1. Apple III
Shaun Nichols: As we've seen a few times on this list, Apple's brass sometimes lets aesthetics override practicality. Never was this more apparent than with the infamous Apple III.

To keep the system compact and the operation quiet, the Apple III eschewed pesky things like fans and heat sinks, while chips were crammed in together tightly. The result was a system that ran just a wee bit warm.

In fact, the Apple III ran so warm that it had a nasty tendency to cause heat damage in floppy disks and warp the motherboard. The extreme temperatures also tended to cause chips to come loose from the board, prompting one of the strangest repair techniques ever. Users were advised to lift the computer a few inches off the ground and then drop it, hopefully jostling the chips back into position.

The Apple III only lasted a few years, and the targeted business market went largely to IBM and the PC platform.

Iain Thomson: It's a measure of the temperance of Apple users that buyers of the Apple III didn't storm the gates of Cupertino and strangle Steve Jobs with a power cable.

As Shaun has said, the Apple III gave rise to the most infamous tech support advice in the history of the industry. If I'd spent nearly $8,000 on a computer I'd expect advice a tad more reassuring than dropping the system, and Apple ended up replacing the first 14,000 Apple III's after howls of protest..

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak described the Apple III as designed by the marketing, not engineering, department. That may be true, but the design wasn't the only problem. The software emulation on the Apple III was dire and crippled the system, quality control was poor and the system was oversold. All in all a thoroughly bad egg.