Steve Jobs ordered no fan in the Apple III — chips fell out of their sockets

The Apple III was announced in May 1980 and released that November as Apple's first business-class computer. It was designed to succeed the wildly successful Apple II. However, Steve Jobs insisted the machine have no cooling fan — wanting it to run silently. Without a fan, engineers relied on the computer's heavy cast aluminum base as a passive heat sink. The Apple III used an external power supply to reduce internal heat, but it was insufficient.

The result was a thermal disaster. The machine ran so hot that chips began to dislodge from their sockets, causing garbled displays, system crashes, and even melted floppy disks. The first 14,000 units were recalled and replaced. Apple's unofficial fix for the chip-seating problem was to lift the front of the machine six inches off the desk and drop it — a technique that only worked temporarily.

Sales never recovered. The Apple III sold approximately 65,000–75,000 units of the original model, and about 120,000 including the III Plus revision — a fraction of the Apple II's millions. The machine was discontinued in April 1984 (original model) and September 1985 (III Plus). Steve Wozniak later estimated Apple spent $100 million on advertising, promotion, and R&D for the Apple III.

The Apple III failure taught Apple a brutal lesson about design mandates overriding engineering reality. It was the first major product flop in Apple's history, coming between the Apple II's triumph and the Macintosh's launch.