5 Of The Worst Apple Products Ever Made, According To Redditors

Apple is pretty well known for releasing outstanding products. This has been true since the very first iPhone, which is largely credited with bringing smartphones to the mainstream, and continues to this day with the excellent iPhone 17 (sans the whole Scratchgate thing). It's also true with most non-smartphone Apple products, including its handsome MacBook line, iPads, AirPods, and more. There are even some unique devices in Apple's history that many don't know exist, like the original 1998 iPhone that was meant to be the end-all-be-all of desk phones. 

However, not all that glitters is gold. There are many examples, several of which are listed below, but suffice it to say that sometimes Apple doesn't always put its best foot forward. In many cases, customers don't even know it until way later in the product cycle, as was the case with the iPhone 14 and its rapidly depleting battery health after just one year or the famous Antennagate issue where the iPhone 4 could lose signal just by holding it the wrong way. 

When such products exist, people are quick to point it out and talk about it, and Reddit is one of the best places for that. You can often find out whether a product is bad just by how people talk about it there. So, here are some Apple products that folks on Reddit were particularly unhappy about for one reason or another. 

Apple introduced the butterfly keyboard in 2015, and it initially went unnoticed, as fans were a little more concerned about how it had started reducing ports in a big way with later models of the MacBook. However, as the keyboard aged and was included in more MacBooks, a pattern started to emerge. These keyboards broke down way sooner than is typical of a conventionally designed keyboard, and resulted in expensive repairs. Users attempted all manner of repair ideas from canned air to obsessive cleaning, but nothing seemed to help. 

Reddit eventually became flooded with posts about broken butterfly keyboards and the tech eventually gained a widespread reputation for being unreliable. It became bad enough that some experts stopped recommending the butterfly keyboard altogether, citing its fragile nature. The story was almost always the same. Even people who kept their keyboards pristinely clean would eventually break a key, necessitating a repair of some sort. In some cases, people would break their keyboards trying to keep them clean, which compounded the issue further. 

Apple eventually had to deal with a class action lawsuit concerning the problem, which resulted in it paying out $50 million to affected users. The company finally put the keyboard to bed in 2020 with the release of its Magic Keyboard, which went back to a more traditional and reliable scissor switch style, and that's what its devices still use today. Apple would continue to repair butterfly keyboards until it ended the program in 2024. 

Google Maps has been a mainstay in the navigation space for a couple decades now, having just celebrated its 20th anniversary in February 2025. Apple wanted to compete in this space and eventually did so with the release of Apple Maps in 2012. The idea was simple enough: Provide iOS users with an alternative to Google Maps that Apple could integrate directly with Siri and other apps, something Apple would not allow Google Maps to do. It's been 13 years, so some folks may not remember, but the first few years of Apple Maps were pretty bad. 

Rather than be outright angry about it, most users simply enjoyed making memes about how bad it was, and sharing stories about the ridiculous navigation instructions the app gave them. Redditors often cite Apple Maps as being one of the worst products in Apple's history, mostly due to the weird navigation glitches that would send the user somewhere other than where they wanted to go. Apple Maps is still far from perfect, but it is worlds better than it was a decade ago. Apple has even given the app some genuinely useful features. 

I'll never forget when making fun of Apple Maps hit the mainstream while watching an episode of "Silicon Valley." While conducting market research for the fictional Hooli phone, Gavin Belson (played by Matt Ross) asked an employee if the phone was "Zune bad" to which the employee replied, "I'm sorry Gavin, it's Apple Maps bad." 

As previously stated, not all of Apple's products started out bad, and the iPhone 6 and iPhone 7 are two great examples of this. Initially, these phones were everything you'd want a new iPhone to be. They were bigger, stronger, faster, and had excellent camera performance. The iPhone 7 even added water resistance, a new feature for the iPhone lineup. The big problem didn't come until the release of iOS 10.2.1, an update that was meant to solve a sudden shutdown issue. It solved the problem... by making the iPhone 6 slower. 

People on Reddit noticed this almost immediately, and began many threads with the working theory that Apple was intentionally slowing down its devices. These threads led to many people going to Apple stores for fixes. Genius Bar employees were also posting on Reddit about it. Apple eventually admitted that it was slowing down the aging phone to preserve the rapidly aging batteries, but because the company didn't expressly tell users that it was doing that, it was eventually hit with several lawsuits, most of which Apple lost. 

Most of the above drama didn't happen until more than a year after the phone launched. But before then, Redditors were already pretty angry about the fact that the iPhone 6 could be bent fairly easily. That means the iPhone 6 was not only a major player in "bendgate" but also "batterygate," both of which were pretty large topics of discussion on Reddit back then. 

In terms of hardware, Redditors have made it quite clear that the third-generation iPad was among the worst devices that Apple has ever made. At launch, the then new iPad offered plenty to be excited about. It had better specs, excellent battery life, and like most Apple products, it just worked. However, the cracks started to show almost immediately. The iPad omitted some big refinements that other Apple products enjoyed. For starters, it looked just like a second-generation iPad, and it still used Apple's ancient 30-pin charger instead of the new Lightning port. Things didn't end there.

As the tablet made it onto the market, users began to point out that the third-generation iPad couldn't keep up with typical demands. It featured Apple's new Retina display, and the hardware under the hood didn't seem to be up to the task of running all of those pixels. Even so, the device was generally well received for about half a year. 

Then, just eight months later, Apple launched the fourth-generation iPad, which appeared to be everything the third-generation iPad should have been. It had the new Lightning port, upgraded internals to handle the new Retina display, and basically fixed everything wrong with the prior generation. Thus, you can go onto any Reddit thread about Apple's worst products and see the third-generation iPad prominently discussed there. Redditors were also not too pleased with the iPad mini 3, and for many of the same reasons.

Of all of the Apple products that have made their way through the Reddit hate train, few have had the longevity and consistency of Siri. Apple launched Siri to the App Store in 2007, and over the years, the Cupertino company has added all sorts of improvements and features. And Siri is set to change again with the introduction of Apple Intelligence, though that's not coming until 2026. However, over the last 18 years, Siri has seen its fair share of stumbles and bugs, and you can view them almost like a roadmap on Reddit if you look long enough. 

For the most part, complaints about Siri are about the same from person to person. There is some task or command that Siri just can't handle consistently for a long time, and it bothers people. It doesn't matter which version of iOS, or which generation of iPhone you talk about. The number of stories about Siri getting a command wrong or not being able to do things that the other virtual assistants can do is quite massive, to the point where we could probably link every individual word in this section with a different complaint or story without repeating a single time. 

With that said, nearly every major company is switching to AI over the prior generation of assistants. That includes Google switching Assistant to Gemini, and soon, Apple will be beefing up Siri with Apple Intelligence along with some extra features to make it smarter. We'll have to wait and see if that improves people's opinions.