The HP iPod? 7 forgotten Apple products you didn’t even know existed
They're gone, but not completely forgotten
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/tom-wiggins · TechRadarFeatures By Tom Wiggins published 5 April 2026
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We're celebrating Apple's 50th birthday with a week of content about the tech giant. It covers everything from personal recollections from our writers to the greatest — and worst — Apple gadgets as voted by you, and you can read it all on our 50 years of Apple page.
Apple might be responsible for some of the most famous and successful products in human history, but not everything the company touches turns to gold.
While billions of iPhones and millions of iPods and iPads have been sold, there’s a rogues’ gallery of Apple creations that had far less impact and ended up being consigned to the footnotes of tech history.
Some you might have heard hushed mentions of, while others barely exist on the margins of the internet, but there’s a good chance you’ve never seen any in the flesh. How many do you remember?
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1. Apple Silentype (1980)
Apple’s image has changed so much since it launched the iPod that it’s hard to imagine it making something as prosaic as a printer, but the Silentype wasn’t really an Apple invention at all.
It has become a bit of a cliché that Apple just takes existing products and packages them up in a more appealing way, but that is quite literally what happened with the Silentype.
Most printers at the time were big, noisy and expensive, but a company called Trendcom had a thermal printer that was much smaller, quieter and more affordable. Apple took the Trendcom 200, made some internal tweaks that offloaded some of the work to software inside the Apple II, and stuck an Apple logo on the front.
The company stopped making printers at the end of the nineties when Steve Jobs returned and it began the move towards more glamorous products, which explains why people have forgotten about the Silentype and its successors, but it was an early example of Apple’s ‘think different’ ethos in action.
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