Pippin (useful notes)



The Pippin was an attempt by Apple in the mid-1990s to create a low-cost computer for playing multimedia CDs and browsing the Internet. It was a severely stripped-down Macintosh with TV-compatible video output which Apple intended to be manufactured by third parties, and Bandai chose it as a way to (re-)enter the game console market.

But the fact that it was seen and marketed mainly as a console and not a computer, put it into a bad spot. The $599 pricetag, more suitable for an entry-level PC, was just too expensive for the console market. Remember the outrage that the same price for PlayStation 3 caused in 2006? Ten years before it was even worse: 1996's $600 corresponded to 2006's $800, if corrected for inflation. To add insult to injury, its hardware, unlike PlayStation 3 one, was not really better than that of contemporary consoles, and it was too weak to run the normal Mac software of the day. It was very short of RAM and lacked any storage whatsoever, except for a tiny 128K Flash chip mainly used for system settings. Unsurprisingly, it bombed, with just 42,000 units sold.

Processors

 * CPU: PowerPC 603, 66 Mhz.
 * GPU: Custom "Taos".

Memory

 * 6 MB, 1 MB taken by the GPU as VRAM.

Display

 * 640×480 resolution.
 * 65,536 out of 16 million colors.

Sound

 * 16-bit stereo, 44 KHz input and output.