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Dead End: The Apple Pippin

Abstract

In 1996, Apple entered the video game console market, and sold 42,000 units worldwide. The Pippin, built and marketed by Japanese toy maker Bandai under license from Apple, was a stripped-down Macintosh in a living-room box: a PowerPC processor, a CD-ROM drive, a modem for this new thing called the internet, and a price tag of $599, double the PlayStation’s. It had almost no games, no clear identity, and no chance. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed the company’s licensing strategy in 1997, the Pippin died with it, leaving Bandai with tens of thousands of unsold units and one of the most complete failures in console history.

Origins: A Platform for Rent

The Pippin was a child of Apple’s darkest strategic period. In the mid-1990s, under CEOs Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, Apple tried to escape its shrinking market share by licensing its technology, the era of Mac clones. The Pippin, announced in late 1994, applied the same logic to the living room: Apple would not build a console itself but license a reference platform (PowerPC hardware plus a stripped-down Mac OS) to consumer electronics companies, who would pay Apple royalties on every box and disc.

Apple imagined a family of licensees. Only one of consequence ever signed: Bandai, the Japanese toy giant behind Power Rangers and Tamagotchi, which was looking for a way into the booming CD-ROM game market. Bandai manufactured, marketed, and distributed the machines; a Norwegian licensee, Katz Media, planned a European variant that barely shipped before the company went bankrupt in 1998.

The concept was deliberately not (only) a game console. Apple and Bandai pitched the Pippin as a “multimedia player” and internet terminal, an affordable computer-like appliance for households that did not own a computer. That positioning would prove fatal.

The Hardware

The Pippin was, essentially, a Macintosh Performa reduced to an appliance. It ran a PowerPC 603 at 66 MHz with 6 MB of combined RAM, a 4× CD-ROM drive, and a cut-down version of Mac OS 7.5 that booted from each software CD rather than living on internal storage, the machine had no hard disk. Video output went to an ordinary television (with S-Video and VGA options), and a 14.4 kbps modem handled the internet ambitions. The distinctive boomerang-shaped AppleJack controller combined a game pad with a trackball; a keyboard was optional.

Crucially, the Pippin had no dedicated 3D graphics hardware, in the year of Super Mario 64 and a maturing PlayStation, it rendered games on a CPU slower than a mid-range desktop Mac.

Bandai launched the Pippin Atmark in Japan in spring 1996 at ¥64,800 (roughly $600–700), and the Pippin @World in the United States in late 1996 at $599.

The Failure

Every variable was wrong at once:

  • Price. The PlayStation cost $299 at launch in 1995 and was cheaper by 1996; the Nintendo 64 launched at $199. The Pippin cost $599, positioned as a cheap computer, it was compared to consoles and looked absurd.
  • Power. Despite the price, its CPU-only rendering could not approach the dedicated 3D hardware of the PlayStation, Saturn, or Nintendo 64.
  • Software. The library never exceeded a few dozen titles, most of them edutainment and multimedia discs converted from Mac CD-ROMs; heise counts only around 21 actual games, with the Mac shooter port Super Marathon (a Bungie title) as the closest thing to a system seller. No Final Fantasy, no Mario, nothing exclusive worth buying the box for.
  • Identity. Too weak and closed to be a computer, too expensive and empty to be a console, and an internet appliance sold to households years before mass-market internet adoption in its target markets.

The result: roughly 30,000 units sold in Japan and 12,000 in the United States, about 42,000 worldwide, against production runs that left Bandai holding an estimated 50,000 unsold machines. Bandai booked a loss of over $200 million in fiscal 1997 (having spent $93 million on marketing alone) and halted Pippin production during its early-1997 merger talks with Sega (a merger that itself collapsed in May 1997). When Steve Jobs returned to Apple and terminated the Macintosh licensing program in 1997, the Pippin’s reason to exist vanished for good, though Bandai dutifully honored support obligations until the end of 2002.

A Perfect Storm, Not Bad Luck

The Pippin routinely appears on “worst tech products” lists, but its failure was structural rather than accidental. A platform business lives or dies by its software ecosystem, and Apple’s licensing model gave nobody responsibility for building one. Apple provided the technology but did not market the machine; Bandai marketed the machine but could not command third-party developers; developers saw a $599 box with 42,000 owners and stayed away. Compare Nintendo and Sony, who understood platform-building as their core competence; see The Video Game Console Wars.

Legacy

The Pippin remains Apple’s only video game console, and its lesson echoed for decades: Apple never again shipped hardware whose success depended on someone else’s commitment to the platform. Jobs’s post-1997 Apple built everything vertically, hardware, software, and eventually the store that sold the content.

The ambitions the Pippin bundled prematurely were each realized later, separately, by more focused products: the living-room internet appliance became the Apple TV (2007), casual game distribution became the App Store (2008) and Apple Arcade (2019). Like the Newton, the Pippin was less a wrong idea than a bundle of right ideas shipped by the wrong Apple at the wrong time, though unlike the Newton, it left no technological legacy, only a cautionary tale. The console market it failed to enter is chronicled in The Video Game Industry.

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