Ars Technica:
Apple and Bandai soon entered into an agreement. Sirkin returned to Cupertino and put a team of engineers onto the project to help him design the device internals. They codenamed the project Pippin, after the type of apple, because the name was already registered by Apple and it hadn’t been used yet.
The core technology would come from the Macintosh—specifically the new PowerPC line. To keep costs down, they opted for the low-end PowerPC 603 rather than the more powerful but much more expensive 604 processor. The Pippin, then, would be a low-cost Macintosh designed for the living room. A clone by a different name, for a different purpose.
Immediately, things got complicated.
I remember when this was announced thinking, “Well, that’s never going to work…” We’ve posted about this before and both pieces give a good overview of what happened and why the Pippin failed. The Pippin went along with the proposed “Apple Internet Cafes” around the same time as projects that showed the dysfunction of the company just before Jobs came back.
Hell, people forgot about it at the time.
I was a Mac user and console gamer in 1996, and I don’t think I ever even heard of the Pippin until a decade later.
(“AppleJack” is the best name for a port, ever, though.)
What’s the opposite of “laser focused”? That’s what mid-90s Apple was.
Pippin, MessagePad, eMate, Taligent, Performa, OpenDoc, Copland/Gershwin, Apple Dylan, A/UX…
That’s a real laundry list of failure, isn’t it? And it’s not even *complete*. 🙁
The Performas were market successes, though, no?
(I mean, for the time, for Apple.)
(Of that list, I’ve owned a MessagePad [still have it!] and I think I have a Performa 575 lying around.
OpenDoc … man, that was kind of a hot mess. Cyberdog was impressive at the time, though.)
I liked its logo. [shrug] Reminded me of NeXT’s.