Apple, a maker of video game consoles, the idea may seem far-fetched, yet. The Apple brand did partner with Bandai to launch the Pippin, a hybrid device sold just over 40,000 units worldwide. Its failure had little to do with the competition of the era.
- The Pippin, born from the Apple-Bandai alliance, was actually a Mac OS computer lacking a dedicated graphics processor or dedicated audio hardware, making it unsuitable for gaming compared to dedicated consoles.
- Of the 100,000 units ordered, only 42,000 were sold (30,000 in Japan, 12,000 in the United States), far from Bandai’s hoped-for 500,000 sales.
- This failure plunged Bandai into a loss of 9 billion yen, led to the cancellation of a merger with Sega, and prompted the resignation of its president Makoto Yamashina.
- When Apple dreamed of conquering living rooms with Bandai
- A Mac computer dressed as a console: the Pippin’s failed bet
- The real culprit of the failure isn’t who you think
When Apple dreamed of conquering living rooms with Bandai
In the mid-1990s, Apple was traversing a period of turbulence. The company sought new growth drivers beyond its traditional computers, and the living-room market appeared to be a promising path. To realize this ambition, the Cupertino firm teamed up with Bandai, the Japanese toy giant known for licenses such as Power Rangers and, later, Dragon Ball.
The fruit of this collaboration was named Pippin. In Japan, it launched as Pippin Atmark, in a light gray hue, at the equivalent of about $700 at the time. Bandai then harbored grand commercial ambitions: targeting 200,000 sales on its national soil in the first year alone.
The American version, called Pippin @World, wore a black casing this time and carried a more affordable price tag of $600. Yet the North American debut was chaotic: scheduled for September 1996, the release was pushed back to December, and many stores did not receive units until after Christmas, in January 1997. A disastrous timeline for a console meant to capitalize on the holiday season.
A Mac computer dressed as a console: the Pippin’s failed bet
To understand the Pippin’s failure, one must look under the hood. The device housed a PowerPC 603 processor running at 66 MHz, paired with an operating system derived from System 7.5.2, the same one that powered the Macintosh computers of that era. A 14.4 kbps modem completed the package, designed to connect the machine to early online services.
Bandai’s Pippin, marketed as a multimedia computer under Mac OS, found only about 42,000 buyers before Steve Jobs halted production in 1997. This figure alone captures the scale of the fiasco: 30,000 units sold in Japan, 12,000 in the United States, and only 500 to 1,000 units produced for Europe, with no certainty that all found buyers.
The problem was that this computer architecture was ill-suited for a game console. Unlike its direct rivals, the Pippin lacked any dedicated graphics or sound processor. As a result, its gaming performance lagged far behind what specialized consoles on the market could offer.
The real culprit of the failure isn’t who you think
One might assume that Sony with its PlayStation, or Nintendo with its Nintendo 64, dealt the Pippin a fatal blow through massive sales. In reality, the Apple-Bandai device never truly existed in gamers’ minds as a credible competitor. Its real enemy was its own flawed positioning, stuck between a home computer and a living-room console.
The numbers speak for themselves. Bandai had ordered 100,000 units from its supplier Mitsubishi Electric, hoping to reach 300,000 sales in the United States and 200,000 in Japan. With only 42,000 units sold in total, the gap between ambition and commercial reality was such that no marketing strategy could have bridged it.
Financial consequences followed quickly. In January 1997, Bandai announced a loss of 9 billion yen, largely attributed to the slump in game sales and the chilly reception of the Pippin. A merger with Sega, valued at about a billion dollars in the form of a stock swap, was even announced in the same month in an attempt to turn things around.
But this industrial marriage fizzled. The deal, planned for October 1997, was ultimately canceled in May of that year. The day after the announcement, Bandai’s president, Makoto Yamashina, resigned. The company would eventually wind down its Bandai Digital Entertainment subsidiary in 1998, burying the Pippin venture once and for all.
In the end, the Pippin wasn’t killed by a better-armed competitor, but by a strategic design misstep. Trying to turn a Mac OS computer into a credible living-room console was a risky bet, and that bet never paid off. An obscure chapter in Apple’s history, it reminds us that even tech giants are not immune to a resounding misstep.
