
Apple's Folly: Long before the iPhone, the Pippin console flopped hard (2013) - Hooke
http://gameological.com/2013/06/apples-folly/index.html
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oflannabhra
Apple collector and commentator Stephen Hackett has a video [0] opening a mint
Pippin. He also has a succinct article on the history and hardware of the
Pippin [1].

[0] - [https://youtu.be/y9pwX-j6dfw](https://youtu.be/y9pwX-j6dfw)

[1] -
[https://512pixels.net/2012/11/pippin/](https://512pixels.net/2012/11/pippin/)

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kar1181
There's a nice video from The Obsolete Geek on the Pippin too

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz05U67NecI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz05U67NecI)

Shame he's really stopped making any new videos, between him and the 8-bit guy
I think I have lost months in nostalgia.

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brian_herman__
Yeah, that was the dark time when Steve Jobs wasn't working at apple. Thank
god he killed it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin)

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/08/five-apple-
products-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/08/five-apple-products-
steve-jobs-killed-for-the-good-of-the-company/)

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dahart
The title immediately made me think long before the iPhone, the Newton also
flopped, and Newton was actually trying to do what iPhone later did.

But this is a pretty interesting story of a failed collaboration between Apple
and Bandai. It makes me wonder if or how much this event contributed to
Apple’s current culture of product secrecy and increasing control over every
bit of tech and manufacturing in their entire stack.

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Anechoic
_increasing control over every bit of tech and manufacturing in their entire
stack._

Bandai might be a part of it, but it was also do to Adobe, Microsoft and
Metrowerks basically forcing Apple into the directions that Apple didn't
necessarily want to go -- Those companies could use the dominance of their
tools to limit things that Apple may have wanted to do.

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HHalvi
Barely a few hours ago at Apple's iPad Pro keynote the presenters compared to
Xbox One S and they showed off a games playing at 60 FPS and pitted it against
Console Quality Gaming. I won't really be surprised if they end up pulling off
a Apple TV powered by the same specs to enable the same kind of gaming power?
Or maybe have something like Switch Dock with the iPad pro itself.

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Tiktaalik
The game industry has been waiting and expecting Apple to do something like
this for years, ever since the Apple TV was announced, but it appears that
Apple has little interest in the traditional games space.

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jrs95
If I weren't a gamer I'd use Apple for everything. But I am, so my desktop is
a PC because I couldn't buy a Mac with competitive specs. And then I chose
Spotify over Apple Music because it works better with my PC. Why not buy
AirPods? They don't work well with my PC. Apple might dislike gaming for
whatever reason, maybe they think gamers have a bad image that will dilute
their brand value or something, but in my opinion ignoring that market puts a
real dent in their ecosystem. I have a Mac provided to me for work and that's
the only Apple device I even have at this point which is a shame.

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morkfromork
I remember walking by the Apple booth at a Consumer Electronics Show and
watching people frantically trying to get Netscape Navigator to run on it.

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rasz
first paragraph is full of BS, is it even worth reading the rest?

>In terms of processing power and speed, the Pippin was a Ferrari compared to
the lumbering Pintos of other game consoles at the time.

Pipping bare 66MHz CPU with no GPU, no blitter, nothing but a frame buffer.
PSX 33MHz CPU, but powerful GPU. N64 90MHz CPU and powerful GPU.

>Sony PlayStation hitting stores in Japan shortly before the Pippin was
launched

PlayStation Release date JP: 3 December 1994 N64 Release date JP: June 23,
1996 Pippin Release date‎ ‎JP: March 28, 1996

>fullscreen picture of Bungie released Marathon

while in reality it ran in a tiny 1/4 screen window

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m_mueller
Interesting:
[https://support.apple.com/kb/TA34386?locale=en_US](https://support.apple.com/kb/TA34386?locale=en_US)

Published in Feb 2012 - I guess that was the last migration date of their KB
documents? I was surprised they've kept this page still around.

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just_myles
I remember there being a Dragonball Z Pippin choose your own adventure game.
Wonder if that was ever released.

