This is a guest post by Marc Evans. He blogs regularly and is on Twitter as @marcaevans
In the weeks before new year I hosted a live stream on vokle and one of the questions asked was what have I got planned for after new year. At first I had to admit that I did not have much planned for new year after writing my first few articles for the website. I knew that it was important to plan ahead and attempted to work out what I would be writing in the weeks that followed. I quickly had an inspiration for a series of articles from a news story in Mac Format, a UK-based Apple magazine. This series will be looking at the products that helped make Apple going right the way back to 1976 which saw the release of the Apple 1.
The news story that actually gave me inspiration looked at Apple’s first attempt at developing and producing a games console. I thought this was an appropriate article to start with since its one of many areas that Apple are yet to fully develop in to, yet its one of the areas that has been the product of many rumours. Those who follow Apple as actively as I do will know that the major prediction/rumor is that Apple will begin working on a television that will incorporate many of its current services. The other rumor currently circulating is that Apple are yet to produce a challenge to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo the companies currently commanding the gaming market. I believe that is enough of an introduction, let us get started!
In March 1995, Apple released a product alongside Japaneese toymaker Bandai which would be known as the Apple Bandai Pippin. It did not reach North America until early September of the same year. The product was seen primarily as a multimedia player rather than just a traditional games console and was based on a 66 MHz PowerPC 603 processor with a 14.4 kbit/s modem. The Pippin also run a stripped down version of system 7 which subsiquently the final operating system before Apple changed the name to Mac OS X.X. An interesting fact before we continue with the technical specifications, the name Pippin came about as it was a smaller Apple than the McIntosh which had given the Macintosh its name. The reason behind basing it on system 7 as well as bringing in a powerPC processor was to allow the product to optimise media playback as well as allowing for a minimal memory footprint. The Pippin did not include a traditional hard-drive as seen in Apple’s Macintosh, instead Apple had installed a 128 KB of nonvolatile RAM with the added possibility of a floppy disk. The Pippin had support for 8-bit and 16-bit video as well as holding support for NTSC and PAL composite. The audio for the unit was Stereo 16-bit 44 KHz sampled input and output with an headphone output jack with individual volume controls.
It was disovered that Apple had not looked at fully releasing the Pippin as a fully Apple product, instead they looked at gaining third party companies to licence the product to for mass production. In the early 90′s Bandai had been looking at entering the video game market to take on Sony’s playstation which was released a year earlier, The Sega Saturn also released a year earlier and the newly introduced Nintendo 64. The Pippin was officially licenced to Bandai in December of 1994.
The Pippin recieved an extensive development programme whilst the console was still licenced primarily to Apple. The developer test drive programme was operated to allow developers to get their hands on the hardware quickly. This programme lasted until September 1st 1996, after this point Bandai took over the production and shipment of the pippin. It was at this point Bandai renamed all future units as @world multimedia players which was first released in 1995 after recieving the licencing from Apple. The @world players were first introduced in the United States in 1996 and were made avaliable for $599 alongside a range of periphiral devices such as a 4 MB expansion card which cost an additional $120, a keyboard adapter cable costing $12 and an AppleJack controller costing $45. The unit itself was avaliable in black or white although the white Atmark models were subsequently only avaliable in Japan.
There was inital hope for the Apple Bandai Pippin/@world player in the United Kingdom through a company called Katz media from Norway. They looked at selling the players for about £550 although the dissapointing sales in Japan and North America saw Bandai kill off any further opportunities for the player to land in Europe. In 1997 Bandai called a halt to the production of the Pippin/@world players after selling less than 42,000 units in the USA, Canada and Japan combined. It was discovered that less that 12,000 units were sold in the US with only about 5,000 reaching customers. In May 2006 the final nail in the coffin was delivered, Apple Bandai Pippin listed 22nd in PC World’s magazine for the 25 worst tech products of all time.
Creating Apple (2) : Apple Macintosh 128k (1984) February 1st 2012
[Image: PCMag]
About Jonny Rowntree
Jonny Rowntree is an 17 year old blogger sharing the tricks of the blogging trade on JonnyRowntree.com and interviewing entrepreneurs who are going to change Startups & Silicon Valley. Follow me on Twitter →
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Apple is always innovating. The Apple Bandai Pippin is just one of the many technologies of the company.