The irony is, I'm a designer by profession. So I suppose the stereotype should be that I would veer toward forgiving Apple's excesses of design—the OP bought a Turbine Mac and enjoyed it for many years. That it was a failure for its intended audience is inconsequential, right?
I have a hard time accepting that. Design, to me, is all about audience. It is a gift to the audience you're creating for, like the literal efforts you put into making your presentations functional and enjoyable. Audience first, design second. Especially when we're talking about devices that have a functional purpose, versus just an object to be admired, I think failing to address the needs of your audience is design sin, like when Apple has careened into design as a means to an end. Not just reversing audience -> design, but audience disappears altogether.
You mention the Sunflower Mac, which is actually among my favorite products Apple ever produced. It made me smile, it was a delightful home computer. No one would mistake it for a professional's tool. It neither promised, no offered, the specific functional affordances that a professional audience might demand, but offered a whimsical form that made it easy, approachable and non-threatening, while still delivering the baseline of functional flexibility that its audience would need (even an optical drive!) Brilliant.
So who was the Turbine Mac's audience, then? It was pretty and clever, but not functional. As has been dissected over and over again, its "clever" design did not serve the needs of the hardware inside of it, nor did it give it a long enough runway to be iterated in the future to match the needs of evolving technology. It was positioned as a pretty, clever, appliance for work. It succeeded at two of those, and left the most important factor, audience, in the dust.
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