7 products where reality didn't live up to Apple's hype

UR3IRS / Wikimedia Commons

Apple introduced the Lightning connector along with the iPhone 5 as a replacement to its previous 30 pin proprietary connector. Apple promised faster speeds and greater ease of use (it touted the new cable’s ability to be inserted into a device with either side facing up). But in reality the device wasn’t backwards compatible or as capable as more open standards. It came out that the adapter provided by Apple for connecting it to HD TV’s wasn’t capable of outputting true HD video, instead down-sampling it and degrading quality. Click through the slideshow for six other products that weren't quite as good as Apple promised.

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Jon Xavier: Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google

For a company so given to superlatives in describing its own products, Apple doesn't screw up very much. Yes, it promotes every new phone or tablet using words like "magical" and "revolutionary," but when the device hits the market, it's usually at least kind of a magical revolution.
Rare are those times when the product falls flat, and the emperor is revealed to have no clothes.
Yet it does happen.
Take the Lightning connector, the newest cable that connects new Apple products to PCs, TVs or anything else. Apple billed it as a next-generation replacement for the previous connector in every way. But users grumbled because they needed adapters for their older Apple models, and it was revealed today that the cable didn't even give the experience Apple advertised.
Although the company sells an adapter that it says will enable the Lightning cable to output high definition video to HD TVs, an investigation by Ars Technica revealed that the adapter wasn't capable of transmitting true HD, and the resulting image was of lower quality.
Click through the slideshow to the right for six other products that didn't quite live up to the hype.