that may not be the full picture...
http://craphound.com/?p=2758

Apple III
Lisa
Macintosh portable
Newton
OS9 (By far the worst OS I ever invested my money on)
Pippin
The huge clusterfuk known as Copland
IPod Hifi
Every mouse Apple ever produced (and every Apple mouse I ever owned)
AppleTV


Not so much gold in that list.


EDIT: Posted from my iMac.

i cant help wonder if appletv can still be rescued. Basically, make a version thats iphone compatible (basically iphone hardware in a box) so that iphone/ipad games can be run on it, along with other iphone apps.

They could probably make it cheaper then xbox or playstation.

I don't think iPhone/iPad games lend themselves that well for sofa+tv setting... (do they?).

But Steve has definitely smelled the blood in the gaming world and they know they can make headways into it for more $$$. Whether they plan to expand this to the (more cutthroat?) big screen console systems or not, that remains to be seen...

AppleTV can't be saved, because it would require Apple to stop making it "Apple-only" solution. They could add digital-TV tuner, Blueray drive etc, but that won't happen. Steve will keep it as it is, i.e hardware to push Apple only services.

People allready have enough boxes in their living-room. They won't add one more box and remote that will only work with Apple's solutions.

I used to accuse Nokia of doing the same thing. They never seemed to put all features into ONE device, so there wasn't any perfect device to be bought, even though collectively, all the features existed. At first I thought that maybe it would make the product too expensive, but then I started suspecting that if Nokia released "THE ULTIMATE" phone, there wouldn't be any incentive for people to buy a new version in a year or two.

Same thing for Apple. They could do a lot more, but choose not to for several reasons. One being that if they added a front facing camera from the start with APIs to control it, you wouldn't be nearly as likely to buy a new iPhone a year from now...

Just imagine when the next iPad comes out and it DOES have a front facing camera, how Steve will be frothing at the mouth, telling us how beauuutiful and amazing and awesome it is to video chat with his friend John Appleseed.

The other reason is that they don't want to release this feature until they have perfected it. That's one thing I really admire with Apple (have to admit it). They take a feature and (almost) perfect it and release it with the next product update, usually working better than all the competitors.

even the poop Job pushed out turns to gold...

That's what they did with multitasking.

id better stick my laptop on my dashboard

I could write very long list of stuff that Apple has arrived late, but implemented it perfectly once they got there. However, mobile-multitasking would never make it to that list. In fact, it would be on my Apple failure list. It took them years to get there and they managed to copy the worst impementation of it from Symbian.

Apple's recent plunders on multitasking actually remind me how far behind competion they were on that front with OS7-9 around late 80's - late 90'. Mac OS was about decade late to multitasking on desktop, but once it got there on OS X it was divinely good. IPhone OS will get there one day.