Considering the breakout success Microsoft has had in the gaming sector, both with the rise of PC gaming and its own Xbox series of consoles, it’d make sense to wonder if its archrival Apple could pull off the same thing. Apple has, after all, been on the scene for about as long and targets similar audiences with home electronics, and some of the industry’s earliest hits were either made on, or sold for, the Mac. So why hasn’t it made a traditional game console? Well, the company actually did back in the mid-90s, called the Apple Pippin.
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The Pippin was a collaborative effort between Apple and toy manufacturer Bandai, originally released in 1996 in an effort to broaden the presence of Apple products in the consumer household. The console itself was fine, and even had a nifty controller with a built-in trackball, but it was foiled by a couple of major problems. Firstly, the Pippin didn’t have a large enough game library, and the majority of games it did have were already available to play on Mac and PC. Secondly, the Pippin retailed for $600 USD, more than twice of its contemporaries, the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation, were asking. The Pippin is a good example of a product that should work on paper, but was done in by marketing decisions.
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Apple eventually did release a popular game console though: The iPhone, which with Google’s Android software, helped create a mobile gaming boom that reshaped the industry.
