Earlier this week, at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, Allan Yogasingam disassembled two of Apple’s biggest hardware flops in the company’s history: the lesser-known gaming system, Pippin, and the oft-ridiculed PDA, the Newton.
As Forbes.com reported:
In the case of the Pippin, Apple’s attempt with the toymaker Bandai to create a hybrid PC game console for the Japanese market in 1995, Yogasingam’s dissection revealed a strange mongrel’s anatomy: the processor of a gaming machine, mixed with the networking capability, structure and layout of a small computer.Yogasingam pried off a heat sink to reveal Pippin’s processor, a Motorola 603PowerPC that was already three years old when the console was released. That outdated technology meant CD ROM games took as long as three minutes to load. The device’s modem, designed to make Pippin the first Internet-connected gaming machine, transmitted data at a laughable 14.4 kilobytes per second. Using the Pippin to send a message to someone in Japan and receive a response, for instance, took around 10 minutes.
Now I’m not sure whether or not this was bad reporting on Forbes.com’s part, or whether or not Yogasingam made this claim himself, but I’m not really sure why even at 14.4 kbps that you couldn’t have an instant message chat with Japan. I mean, I used to do text chats on a 2400 baud modem.
But the main thing that kept the Pippin down was its price — selling for about $600 at the time — compared with the $200 Nintendo 64.
Just two years beforehand, Yogasingam reminded the crowd, Apple released the Newton, the first major PDA.
The entry-level model sold for $700 and was pretty huge (I should know, I still have one), at 8 inches long and about 4.5 inches wide. While its handwriting recognition was often ridiculed, it actually was ahead of its time. That is to say, if you used the Newton enough it would actually learn your handwriting, instead of your having to learn its handwriting, which was the innovation that Palm figured out with its Graffiti software soon after.
Still, it’s pretty clear that Apple’s learned from those painful days to create some pretty awesome hardware since.
Some of us still think the old newton, especially the 2100 is a pretty awesome machine. I still miss it.
BTW, anyone want some Newton Development Kits? You'll have to run it under classic. ;)
I still have a 120 and an OMP (100) sitting around.
Well, I guess Pippin is now a reality. Game consuls with computer like capability with online gaming are now everywhere - PS3, NIntendo Wii, Xbox 360.
You might say Pippin blazed the trail.
MrPhelps does have a good point. Pippin, while a flop in 1995, is really just an underpowered variant of what we see today. Internet-based connectivity provides today's consoles with multiplayer gaming and downloadable content. Chat/social interaction. Pippin tried it first.
And look at the iPhone or iPod Touch! Newton 15+ years later if you do the comparisons.
Apple has always had awesome ideas but sometimes they come up with them before the level of technology can achieve them effectively.
Looking at that Pippin photo, I see a remarkable resemblence between the Pippin controllers and the xbox 360 controllers. I Wonder if any consoles prior to the pippin used the boomerang shape?