Apple’s Pippin console launched 30 years ago today — shunned by the public as too expensive and too slow, only 42,000 units were sold

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Apple’s Pippin console launched 30 years ago today — shunned by the public as too expensive and too slow, only 42,000 units were sold

PowerPC-era entertainment platform was discontinued shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the helm.

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Initial marketing pitched the Pippin as “an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment.” Interestingly, Apple didn’t want to be the sole brand behind Pippins, and the devices were ultimately made by Bandai and Katz Media.

You may like The Apple Mac turned 42 this weekend Apple turns 50 — one of the world's biggest tech companies started with hobbyist computers 27 years after launch, Apple's decades-old iBook lineup can still get legacy updates from the company's servers Perhaps Apple thought its transition from Motorola 680X0 to PowerPC chips gave its new hardware an unbeatable console performance profile for the time. But despite its computing performance, the early PowerPC chips would be outmaneuvered and outclassed by the broad swing to 3D gaming in 1995/96, which the Sony PlayStation , Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64 all successfully capitalized on and grew.

Compared to those rivals, the Pippin looked like a rehashed version of the old guard. Like a CPU-accelerated version of the 3DO or CD32 machines that had already slid by the wayside. Thus, the Pippin definitely failed to catch the coattails of the mid-1990s zeitgeist.

Other key specs of the Pippin were its 6MB of shared memory, 128KB SRAM for saves (no HDD), and its 4x CD-ROM. There were no custom chips to offload graphics or audio processing; the single-core PPC would have to do everything.

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