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Domain: macgeek.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to macgeek.org.

Comments · 10

  1. Re:Times have changed. by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Apple Designer Honoured By British Crown
    Revisionist bullshit. Computers were not all ugly off-white boxes "back in the day", and Apple has made some damn ugly hardware over the years.

    First, I am not an Apple fan and most especially I am not a Steve Jobs fan. Not only did I program for the original Mac back in the early eighties, I had the deep joy of administering some NeXT boxes in the nineties. They were always, at least from a software point of view, a triumph of surface gloss over good engineering. I've never spent my own money on an Apple box, and I've never advised a customer to do so.

    But.

    OK, it's true that there have been very occasional ugly Apples. OK, it's true that there have been very occasional attractive case designs by other makers (I particularly like some of the mid 90s Silicon Graphics case designs, and, of course, the NeXT cubes were fantastically good to look at). But - and I say this with a very expensive designer PC case sitting under my desk - I've never seen a PC case design that didn't look awful, whereas by contrast some of the Apple case designs (Lisa; PowerMac G4 and G4 cube; Mac Mini) have been really excellent.

    So no. Steve Jobs has excellent visual taste, has a history of employing good industrial designers, and generally of producing better looking products (and often better physically engineered products) than anyone else in the consumer computer industry.

    It's just a shame about the software engineering.

  2. Re:What about Apple's Video Game System.. by SPF22 · · Score: 1 · on Apple's First Flops
    The system was called the Apple Pippin. It was released in '95 and released approximately 40,000 units world wide (don't know how many actually made it to homes). A lot of this system appears to have been the inspiration for much of the Dreamcast. This is just speculation on my part, but considering that both companies had a strong association with Bandai at the time, it just makes sense. And hey, they also look very similar.

    One of my friends bought a complete system, still in the box a few months ago on eBay. It was the Japanese version, but still really neat to see.

    This system was marketed as a cheap computer, however, it was only cheap compared to other Apple computers. The graphics were sub-par compared to other consoles at the time, such as Nintendo, and Apple really didn't have any support for this system. Here is the technical breakdown:

    Hardware
    • 66MHz PowerPC 603 RISC Microprocessor
    • Superscaler, 3 instructions per clock cycle
    • 8 kByte data and 8 kByte instruction caches
    • IEEE standard Single & Double Precision Floating Point Unit
    • 6 MB combined System & Video Memory, advanced architecture
    • 4X CDROM drive
    • 64 kbyte SRAM Store/Restore Backup
    • Aftermarket easy memory expansion cards 2, 4 and 8 MB increments
    Video
    • 8 bit and 16 bit video support
    • Dual Frame Buffers for superior frame to frame animation
    • Support for NTSC & PAL composite, S-Video and VGA (640x480) monitors
    • Up to 16.7M colors
    Audio
    • Stereo 16 bit 44 kHz sampled output
    • Stereo 16 bit 44 kHz sampled input
    I just found this interesting and wanted to share.
  3. Controller - Apple Bandai PiPPiN by bi_boy · · Score: 1 · on PlayStation 3 Unveiled

    The controller has a slight resemblance to the Apple Bandai's failed PiPPiN console.

    Bandai Pippin Image Archive

  4. Re:I like the Controller by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on PlayStation 3 Unveiled

    http://www.macgeek.org/museum/pippin/images/Pippin Controller.jpg

    looks similar, no?

  5. Re:Apple Pippin by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Interesting · on Apple's First Flops

    a few pippin links
    http://www.businessweek.com/1996/14/b346998.htm
    the business week artical from 96
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin
    The wikipedia entry

    http://www.macgeek.org/museum/pippin/
    and the macgeek pippin / bandi museem

    I belive it was released by bandi it just got drowned by the price and the fact it was a bit ahead of its time (look at consoles now , offering simmilar multi media features)

  6. Re:xbox 360 design...uninspired by dogbowl · · Score: 1 · on The Xbox 360 Unveiled

    The xbox360 design is nothing more than a Dell OptiPlex case http://www.interlink.ru/pic/888296.jpg/
    and an Apple pippin controller http://www.macgeek.org/museum/pippin/images/Pippin Controller.jpg/.

    The only thing the controller is missing are the analogue joysticks .. and thats only because Nintendo hadn't invinted them yet back when the pippin came out!

  7. Re:What Apple REALLY needs to do,,, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Apple Developing Two-Button Mouse

    You mean like the Pippin?

    ROTFL, please stop, you guys are killing us!

  8. Re:Because.. by Kenja · · Score: 5, Informative · on Apple Now Debt Free, Says Internal Memo

    Yes they did. It was called the Pippin and was relased by Bandai. It did very bad in the US and Japanese markets. It booted MacOS 7 off of a CD (no internal storage) so, while it could run any Macintosh game, the game had to be built with an OS image on the CD.

  9. Re:Nobody has mentioned the Pippin! by ODD97 · · Score: 1 · on Dismal Console Failures

    If you've never heard of the Bandai Pippin, click here to waste some time. I think anyone that's heard of this console would agree that it should be on that list.

  10. Look to the Livingroom by Matey-O · · Score: 2 · on Steve Jobs And The Oh-So-Cool iMac

    "middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year."

    Why, that sounds like a game console, doesn't it? And the unhip, uncool Microsoft just got into WHAT consumer related business? I turned my Xbox around the other day and noted that, along with the ethernet and power jacks, the third plug was Video Input/Output.

    To make this related to the thread, Apple HAD a Mac based home console that had a limited release in Japan. Looking for the link, Bah! The Pippin! So is that another groundbreaking trend that Apple was too soon on? (pssst, Newton!)