The story of the Pippin videogame console takes quite a different route. Developed in 1994 and introduced in Japan in 1995 to compete with consoles from Sega, Nintendo, and Sony, it never made it to the U.S. Its equivalent price of $599 was much higher than any competitive unit, a sure sign of problems to come. Under Apple CEO Gil Amelio, Apple created the system and operating system, and hoped to license it to game developers, especially Bandai, who had the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers as their main game asset.

The back of the console has an array of connectors. In addition to the TV/monitor interface connectors, it had connections for its 14.4 kbps modem, a printer port for the Pippin printer, and an S-video output. The PCB was housed in a metal enclose within the outer plastic housing, for RFI shielding. ICs included a 32-bit Motorola 603 PowerPC clocked at 66 MHz, already relatively underperforming compared with other available processors; a Brooktree (then sold to Rockwell, then Conexant) digital video encoder, and RGB to NTSC/PAL encoder, Samsung DRAM, an audio codec from Crystal Semiconductor (now part of Cirrus Logic), a Zilog SC controller, AMD Flash ROM, a Texas Instruments I/O controller, and two I/O controllers from VLSI--a fairly large and costly BOM and associated assembly.

There was also a slot for expansion memory, but users would, in theory, need to have this installed by a dealer, since access was difficult, with lots of screws and parts to remove, as Yogasingam and Bitten struggled to find and remove the many impediments to disassembly. The failure of the Apple-Bandai console came quickly:

• The $599 price, compared with $300 to $400 for competitor's products
• Other game developers never came on board
• Apple never really asked what gamers wanted in a console
• Boot-up as well as operating speed were slow
• The modem was too slow for any sort of interactive, online activities, such as the promoted virtual chat room, forums, or even "instant" chat
• And perhaps most damaging: it was marketed as an all-in-one game system and home computer, to replace your existing PC or Mac, instead of solely as a game console

As with the Newton and John Scully, the Pippin cost Gil Amelio his job and paved the way for the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. The rest of the Apple story is, as they say, where they are today.

Bill Schweber is the site editor of Planet Analog. You may contact Bill at bschweber@techinsights.com.