6 Products I Wish Apple Made
A few they did in the past & they should bring ’em back
Apple makes a lot of stuff. They also stopped making a lot of stuff.
And there are a few things they never made that I wish they would. But never will. Probably.
Most of these categories are dominated by companies that don’t care about design, don’t care about privacy, don’t really care about usability, even. They care about margins. Which Apple does, too, but not just that.
Apple is one of the few big tech that do design, usability, and margins well.
So here’s my wish list. Six things.
1. A printer that doesn’t suck
Every printer I have ever owned was a small disaster. Loud. Ugly. Refuses to print black because cyan is “low.” Wants me to install a 400 MB driver in 2026. And has software that occasionally works.
Apple should make a printer.
Minimal box. White or space gray. One button. AirPrint baked in at the silicon level, no driver download. Refillable fluid ink that lasts for years of normal household printing.
Reasonable pricing. Replacement ink at a fair price, not the printer-cartridge scam where the ink costs more than the printer.
Good scanning baked in.
I don’t need fax. I don’t need a (bad) touchscreen on the printer. I need it to print when I press print on any device.
Will Apple ever make this? Probably not.
The printer business is too messy and low margin, I guess. But I’d buy one immediately. Because that product is something many of us need. All the time.
2. AirPort comeback
Apple made routers. They were great. White, simple, fast for their time, no cloud login that watched your traffic. They killed the AirPort line in 2018.
Since then, routers have been a parade of plastic spider-looking things from Netgear, TP-Link, and Asus. I use a German Fritzbox. It works. Good company. But not aesthetic at all.
Bring back AirPort. Routers and mesh relays. Beautiful objects. Private by default. Set up from your iPhone in 10 seconds. No app account, no firmware that phones home, no “premium” subscription to enable basic features.
Mesh networking is a solved problem now. Wi-Fi 7 is here. The hardware is cheap. Apple just needs to want to.
I wish…
3. HomePod with a display
This one keeps almost happening. The rumor has been floating for years.
HomePod, but with a screen on the front. Kitchen device. Nightstand device. FaceTime, timers, recipes, photo frame, Apple TV interface, Siri that can show you what it found.
I guess this product relies on a better Siri / AI. Otherwise, I don’t see any reason not to make it.
The HomePod mini is great audio. The current Echo Show line is the closest thing on the market, and it’s an Amazon ad machine. There is a real gap here for a private, quiet, well-designed display speaker.
I’m pretty sure this one will eventually ship. Once Siri and Apple Intelligence are good.
4. AirPower (for real this time)
Remember AirPower? The wireless charging mat Apple announced in 2017 and then killed in 2019 because they couldn’t get it to work without overheating.
My God…
That was seven years ago. The technology has moved on. Qi2. MagSafe.
I want the original promise. A flat mat. Drop your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch anywhere on it. Charges all three. No alignment, no fiddling.
Most third-party versions are plasticky, finicky, and have three little raised circles you have to hit exactly.
Try that one again, Apple. Would be cool.
5. An outdoor Bluetooth speaker
I love my HomePod and HomePod mini. But they’re wired and wifi. I also love my backyard, and listening to tunes outside.
So, I bought a cheap Bluetooth speaker of Amazon last summer. It sounds fine. It looks like a piece of gym equipment. And it broke a few months in.
The current outdoor speaker market is split between mostly ugly rugged plastic (JBL, Sonos Roam, Bose) and beautiful things that aren’t entirely waterproof.
Almost nobody does both (well).
Apple should. Aluminum body. IP67. Battery that lasts a full weekend at the lake. AirPlay 2 when you’re near Wi-Fi, regular Bluetooth when you’re not. Stereo pairing with a second one. A handle that looks like it was designed by someone who has held… a thing before.
Could even be premium price. I’d still get it. Or two.
6. The Mac Mini NEO
Lastly, a little cheat entry.
This one isn’t really a product I need. It’s a product I have written about because it should exist.
A small, cheap, colorful desktop Mac. A18 Pro chip. Around $399. The cheap PC market killer.
It’s not on the roadmap. Probably won’t happen. But of all the products on this list, it’s the one Apple is most capable of shipping tomorrow. Because they have everything they need for it already. From the MacBook Neo, from iPhone, from Mac Mini, even the form factor from an Apple TV box.
Would be a cool device for kids, companies that only need a tiny machine to run some web apps with a good big display, or even schools or universities that only use basic office software and learning apps.
Will They?
Most of these products will never happen. Unfortunately.
Apple doesn’t enter low-margin commodity categories. Usually. Maybe the new CEO changes that. But I doubt it.
Printers, routers, charging mats, these are all races to the bottom dominated by companies willing to ship plastic junk for $40 on Amazon.
Apple won’t play that game.
And when Apple does enter a category late, they sometimes get it wrong.
The HomePod was almost discontinued. The original AirPort eventually fell behind. AirPower never shipped at all.
So this list is probably more wish than prediction. They should still try more. Again.
The Bottom Line
The categories where Apple doesn’t compete are the categories where I’m forced to buy ugly, plastic, privacy-unfriendly things from companies I don’t want to buy from.
I’d happily pay an Apple premium for any of these. Many people I know would too.
Bring ’em back. Or build them for the first time. We’d love it.