Apple’s 12 Most Embarrassing Product Failures

The Pippin had a brief however fascinating historical past, beginning as a manner for Apple to develop into the multimedia market and ending as a failed gaming console created by Bandai.

Let’s soar again to the early ‘90s, a few years after Steve Jobs was ousted and during a particularly tough phase in Apple’s historical past. Looking to develop into extra households, Apple created an open {hardware} platform based mostly on the Macintosh working system. It was described at the time as a “trimmed-down Macintosh” operating traditional Mac OS and powered by a PowerPC processor. This was not a retail product, however a platform Apple supposed to license out to completely different firms that might make it their very own with modifications. It might be used for training, as a house PC, or as a multimedia hub.

Leading toy maker and recreation developer Bandai stepped as much as the plate, evolving Apple’s “Pippin Power Player” prototype into the Pippin Atmark recreation console in Japan and Pippin @World within the US. Running on a PowerPC 603 32-bit processor with 6MB of RAM, the Pippin Atmark/@World wasn’t essentially the most highly effective system, but it surely did have some modern options, together with an NTSC/PAL swap, a boomerang-shaped controller, video games that might be run on a Mac desktop, and assist for a full-size keyboard.

The console flopped, and other than a small license cope with Norweigan firm Katz, Apple discovered no different suitors. There had been three fundamental explanation why the Pippin failed: it launched at $600 (greater than $1,000 immediately!), there have been few compelling video games to play (particularly within the US), and Sony, Sega, and Nintendo already had a stranglehold available on the market.