The Most Useless Apple Products Available Today That You Should Avoid

Price: SGD 29.50

Nobody believed their eyes when they saw Apple releasing a cleaning cloth with an exorbitant price tag! Advertised as the best way to clean your Apple device, the Apple Polishing Cloth is essentially a regular microfibre hankie stamped with an Apple logo. You can get good quality microfibre cleaning cloth for one-fourth of what Apple charges!

There’s no doubt that the Apple Polishing Cloth might be the best cleaning cloth for your prized Apple products. However, it is pointless to pay such a premium for a piece of cloth that costs a lot less without an Apple logo. 

Price: SGD 1,916

The iMac established Apple as we know it today. In its latest guise, it has become a powerhouse for someone seeking a home/office desktop setup. However, it is quite pointless as a personal computer in 2024. 

While it appears to be a big and mighty computer, the iMac is essentially a MacBook Air with a massive 24-inch display stuck on a desk stand and a power cable. Having a desktop PC based on a laptop’s architecture is pointless since you pay for the inconvenience of a stuck machine to gain a lot of performance. A much lower-priced MacBook Air can function better as a home/work machine. With a great battery life, it can even work when there’s no power. The ability to cast itself to a better quality high-resolution display makes the MacBook Air a superior all-rounder all-in-one PC.

Even if you insist on having a desktop setup made by Apple, what’s wrong with the Mac Mini? With the same processor as the iMac, you experience no loss in performance. The lower unit price lets you invest in better-quality monitors and peripherals, thereby helping you amp up the experience.  

Price: SGD 131.40

The Magic Mouse has been around for years and we still wonder what’s so magical about it! 

While it looks pretty on the desk for a wireless mouse, the Magic Mouse is inconvenient in most ways. The sleek profile of the mouse makes it difficult to grip and the lack of clicky buttons denies any satisfactory feedback. The underbelly Lightning charging port makes it useless while you are charging the device. The rechargeable battery is good as a concept but once it dies, you have to ditch the mouse and buy a new one. 

Other than looking pretty on the desk, the Magic Mouse is another useless Apple product.  

Price: SGD 202.70

The Apple TV 4K is currently one of the most useless products that the company makes. It holds a lot of potential but in an age of smart TVs, this small and pricey TV box hardly makes sense. Apple advertises it as a one-stop solution for accessing all your Apple multimedia subscription services like Apple TV+, Apple Music and Apple Arcade. It even offers AirPlay for iPhones to easily stream content from their screens. 

However, the Apple TV+ app is now available to download for free on Google, Samsung, Amazon and LG’s TV operating systems. This means you can have the Apple TV 4K’s primary feature available on most new TVs. The same can be said for Apple Music. A lot of smart TVs from Samsung and a few other brands now support AirPlay streaming as standard. You do miss out on Apple Arcade and Health+ features but how many people buy a 4K TV streaming box for these?

We don’t!

Price: SGD 9.9 per month

The Apple Arcade subscription is another useless Apple offering that should be retired gracefully. Introduced as Apple’s unique take on the growing mobile gaming industry a few years ago, the Apple Arcade service has barely managed to produce any memorable video games. Whether you try it on your iPhone or Mac, the games are far from impressive and barely give any incentives to come back.

With console games now being ported to high-end iPhones and Macs directly, the need to pay for Apple Arcade’s disappointing collection of video games diminishes. 

Price: SGD 263.80

Everybody knows that Apple’s AirPods are among the most overpriced true wireless earbuds in the industry today. The AirPods Pro 2nd Gen sort of justifies the premium with its impeccable audio tuning and a class-leading Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) system. The dated AirPods 2nd Gen, however, are poor value compared to what the competition sells. As for the AirPods 3rd Gen, it gets worse.

Apple assumes that paying SGD 263.80 for a pair of TWS earbuds is still not enough to pamper your ears with ANC and any form of passion noise isolation – features that are now standard in entry-level TWS earbuds costing less than half of the AirPods 3rd Gen’s price! You don’t even get the MagSafe wireless charging as standard! All Apple’s marketing team does is sell a basic pair of TWS earbuds at an exorbitant price.

If you are determined to get a new pair of AirPods, we recommend spending more for the AirPods Pro 2nd Gen.

Price: SGD 45.40

Can you pinpoint a single human who has benefitted from an Apple AirTag? Stalkers and car thieves need not raise their hands.

Jokes aside, the AirTag from Apple made big promises but over its lifespan, created more troubles for Apple CEO Tim Cook and his team of geniuses. The ‘stalking capability’ made the AirTag a seriously flawed product in an age where digital privacy is largely a myth. Despite Apple’s efforts to patch the gaping holes by partnering with Google for universal stray AirTag detection, this button-shaped tracker hasn’t done most people good. You may argue about its usefulness for people having a knack for losing things but this is a big price to pay for compromising privacy.

Price: SGD 432.95

The HomePod in its second generation evolved as a smart speaker and yet, it continues to be a pointless product in Apple’s arsenal. 

While the aural capabilities of the HomePod are great, its Achilles heel continues to be Siri. Despite its evolving intelligence, Siri is simply not as good a voice assistant as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. The arrival of Apple Intelligence isn’t going to affect the HomePod in any way and that makes it useless in an already dying industry. 

If you have to have a HomePod, try the more affordable HomePod Mini and save money for a few extra years of Apple Music subscription. 

Price: From SGD 705.45

You didn’t see an iPhone making it to this list, did you? 

As much as we like an affordable and compact iPhone, we believe there are better ways to milk money from this formula than the current generation iPhone SE. Not only is it useless in 2024, but the higher price Apple commands for this relic of the past is criminal!

The iPhone SE 3rd Gen has a paltry LCD display with humongous bezels, an average rear camera, terrible battery life and a user experience that leaves a foul taste. For similar prices, we have Android phones with cutting-edge displays, lightning-fast charging speeds, better battery life and nicer designs. 

What’s contradicting even more is the endless deals raining on older flagship iPhones. You can often get factory-fresh iPhone 12 or iPhone 13 for the price of an iPhone SE from third-party vendors. Now we don’t need to justify how an iPhone 13 (or even an iPhone 12) is better on any given day than the iPhone SE, do we?