Ten things Apple killed, and why it was right

As Apple lives to see its 40th birthday, what better time is there to remember the technology which it left by the wayside. The company has never been averse to doing away with technology that’s gone past its sell-by date – and often it’s been brave enough to make those changes long before the other big-name manufacturers dared to do the same. 

A case in point: rumours that the next iPhone will finally do away with the analogue headphone jack are so persistent that they might even be true. Users seem unimpressed at the prospect of having to switch to wireless or Lightning headphones or pay £25 for a fiddly adaptor. Tsk, Luddites.

The analogue jack dates back to 1878, though, so it might just possibly be time to move on. Apple, especially under Steve Jobs, has a proud history of being first to ditch tech that’s passed its prime – regardless of the howls of “but I was using that!” from industry partners, customers and other irrelevant recalcitrants.

These are our favourite examples.

1. The floppy drive

Used both to load software from and to save files to, the removable floppy disk was the sole storage medium of early PCs, and survived into the age of hard disks as a handy file transfer and archive medium.

And there it stayed until Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and launched the dramatically streamlined iMac. Aimed at the internet and entertainment, it had a DVD tray, but nowhere to put floppies. What the what?

It turned out this really was the future and, when Wi-Fi came along a year later, we missed removable disks even less. A floppy wouldn’t be a lot of use now anyway, being too small to store a single image from your phone camera.

2. The parallel port

For years, printers connected to PCs via the “Centronics” interface. Back then, an interface was often called a “bus” because the plug was roughly as big as one of those red things that drive around London.

If you’ve ever watched a 1980s movie and giggled at a skyscraper labelled “Wang”, credit goes to computer company founder Dr An Wang. In 1970, he had 20,000 spare ribbon cables lying around, so he based the interface for the Centronics Model 101 printer on their specification.

Naturally, we were still using the same pile of junk 28 years later when Steve Jobs decided the iMac didn’t need it.

Replacing all the existing ports with USB, he not only marked out the new computer as a groundbreaker, but also managed to make USB, invented by a group including Intel and Microsoft, look like Apple’s idea.

3. The serial port

Still used by specialist equipment manufacturers and electronics hobbyists today, RS-232 was one of the most versatile interfaces in computing.

Embodied in the same DB25 connector as the Centronics, it was more commonly encountered in the less cumbersome DB9 format, enabling PC users to endlessly confuse it with the VGA port instead of the parallel port.

Long story short, the iMac ditched it, everyone else ditched it, people moaned for about five minutes and then moved to USB. Good call, Apple. You still didn’t invent USB, though.

4. The stylus

From some of the earliest prototypes, tablet devices always had styluses, including Apple’s Newton – championed by John Sculley, the man who ousted Steve Jobs – and the rival PDAs that emerged in the 1990s. In 2002, the first Microsoft-based tablet PCs appeared with styluses.

By total coincidence, Steve Jobs had a personal hatred of styluses, commenting soon after the launch of the stylus-free iPad: “If you see a stylus, they blew it.” By refining multi-touch capacitive displays to the point where they could form the basis of a mobile device – the iPhone – Apple killed the stylus by making it unnecessary.

Nobody at Apple was ever brave enough to mention styluses to Steve Jobs again, but even he might grudgingly admit that the iPad Pro’s Pencil makes styluses interesting after all.

The list continues on page two

5. The button-based phone

Talking of the iPhone, it also killed the mobile phone as we’d known it until 2007: a long brick, pebble-dashed with buttons. Overnight, mobile phones that looked like that were replaced by mobile phones that looked exactly like the iPhone. A bit too exactly with some of Samsung’s, eh m’lud?

The only people who missed the old-school mobiles were people who liked to text fast without looking. Over-represented among corporate executives and rioters, these are the people who kept BlackBerry alive until… well, best Google the latest news when you read this.

6. Software in boxes

Having killed the floppy, Apple went on to remove the DVD drive, simply because its laptops – and, finally, even its desktops – became too thin to accommodate it. That left no medium from which to install software, hastening the industry’s shift to downloads.

When the App Store was launched for the iPhone in 2008, it was pretty much all over for boxed software. It survives, however, in the games market, where charging for a physical disk helps to reduce the need for the game or the vendor’s servers to actually work.

7. iWeb

Introduced in 2006, iWeb was Apple’s way of helping non-techies design and host a website. Lots of people took it up. Then, in 2011, Apple replaced all of its internet-related services with iCloud. iWeb was not among its features.

Given moves towards clean code, responsive web design and content management platforms, iWeb had begun to seem dated. But users understandably felt let down.

One of them emailed Steve Jobs asking if it was really true that all their time and effort would now be wasted. His reply, in full: “Yep.”

8. The hard disk-based iPod

It wasn’t quite the first device of its kind, but when Apple launched the iPod in 2001, it had one amazing advantage over other “MP3 players”, as your granny called them.

Instead of a flash memory chip with room for a few dozen songs, it had a miniature hard disk with room for a thousand.

Of course, nobody really wanted an iPod because it could store more tracks – they wanted it because it looked cool and gave them a reason to say the word “iPod” like they were in the future. But the 1,000-song thing justified the price.

So iconic was the iPod that Apple preserved it in carbonite as the iPod Classic while flash memory evolved to let smaller, lighter and cheaper iPods store plenty of music, and later video and apps.

Eventually, it started to look embarrassing and, in 2014, Apple shouted “look, it’s the iPhone 6!” while putting the iPod Classic in a bin behind its back. We shall not see its like again. But the iPod touch is way better, to be honest.

9. The 30-pin dock connector

During the launch of the iPhone 5 in September 2012, Apple’s Phil Schiller announced a brand new connector to replace the 30-pin dock that had “served us well for almost a decade”.

Fibber. With its sharp edges, fussy spring-grip lugs and USB-like ability to always be the wrong way round, the 30-pin plug had actually been a nine-year experiment in cognitive dissonance.

Even so, Schiller was met with the worst reaction from an Apple keynote crowd: total silence. Nobody wanted a new connector. We wanted all our old accessories to keep working.

But Lightning was a huge improvement, which will make it all the more gutting if the iPhone 8 ends up replacing it with USB Type-C after we’ve all paid £200 for new headphones.

10. OpenDoc

Remember OpenDoc? Probably not, unless you were closely following Apple during the 1990s.

OpenDoc was a framework to store content in common formats. If that sounds boring, you weren’t closely following Apple during the 1990s. You don’t even know boring.

For years, every time Apple partnered with anyone, it would end up trying to shoehorn OpenDoc into the project, which would then die horribly. It was the tech collaboration equivalent of “feat. Iggy Azalea”.

One of Steve Jobs’ first acts after returning to Apple in 1997 was to kill OpenDoc, fire most of the employees involved with it, burn their desks, salt the earth and nuke the facility from orbit.

This meant third-party apps that depended on it were also doomed. At the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, one of their makers took issue with Jobs.

Steve memorably responded with a riff on how Apple had become “a farm with all these animals going in different directions”. “Focusing is about saying no,” he concluded. “When you say no, you piss off people. [But] the result of that focus is great products.”

OpenDoc developers still thought he was a dick, but it was a great speech.

Steve Jobs earned something of a reputation for speaking his mind. Click here to watch a video of the time he decided to slap down Michael Dell.