The Pippin (stylized as PiPP!N) is a defunct open multimedia technology platform,[4] designed by Apple Computer.

According to Apple, Pippin was directed at the home market as "an integral part of the consumer audiovisual, stereo, and television environment".

Bandai Company Ltd. developed the ATMARK and @WORLD models, and focused them on the gaming and entertainment business in Japan, Canada and the United States.

Apple did not want to choose a name that would be specific for certain market space, as it will certainly appeal to many types of consumers and be shipped in a variety of forms from many manufacturers.

Apple intended to make the Pippin platform an open standard[8] by licensing the technology to third parties, much like how JVC shared the VHS format in the 1970s.

[8] Relying on third-party companies to produce Pippin systems was a way to increase Macintosh's market share – a goal identical to Apple's clone attempt in the late 1990s.

Apple's involvement would be to define the initial logic board design, and Bandai would provide the casing and packaging.

[12] In March 1996, the white-colored Bandai Pippin ATMARK (ピピンアットマーク, Pipin Attomāku) went on sale in Japan at a price of 64,800 yen, which included a dial-up modem and four bundled CD-ROMs.

[citation needed] In October 1995, the Nikkei reported that Mitsubishi Electric would follow Bandai as a licensee to the Pippin technology.

"[9] An example of this is the Yellows series by Akira Gomi; originally a book displaying nude Japanese women, it was converted to an electronic database.

On June 4, 1996, Katz Media, based in Norway, became the second (and last) company to sign a license agreement with Apple to produce Pippin systems.

Instead, it attempted to use the system as a set-top box for a television set or VGA display, to be distributed to its partners' respective client bases in order to interface with a variety of vertically marketed interests, such as catalogs, databases, Internet content, and so on.

[34] Katz Media then signed with a hospital in France, using the KMP 2000 as an online system so that, as a team, physicians could pull up and review case studies, and collaborate on diagnoses and treatments.

[35] On June 16, 1997, the Netface Consortium in the Netherlands selected the KMP 2000 as the device to be used as a part of what the company called "the world's first Internet shopping mall.

[39] This led to a short-lived, last resort attempt to market the Pippin as an all-in-one set-top box, but this approach failed.

[38] By the time the Pippin systems were released, the market was already dominated by the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, and the mostly Windows-based PC.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he stopped all Macintosh clone efforts, which shut down the Pippin concept.

Katz Media, who was receiving its systems from Bandai, vowed to continue supporting Pippin in a PR notice released June 25, 1997.

The goal of the Bandai Pippin was to create an inexpensive computer system aimed mostly at playing CD-based multimedia software, especially games, but also functioning as a thin client.

Pippin supports generic dialup Internet service providers (ISP), which at the time included Prodigy, America On-Line, and eWorld.

The memory chips are soldered onto a printed circuit board which is placed in a plastic housing, simplifying installation for the end user.

The only official method of producing add-ons for the Pippin was by developing PCI-compatible devices and then placed in a docking station cabinet.

A proprietary riser card interface (referred to by Apple as an X-PCI slot) is located on the bottom of a Pippin system and is used by docking stations.

Apple intended for the Pippin platform to be an appliance, and encouraged consumers to purchase a fully featured Macintosh system if they were looking for something upgradable.

[4] Some add-ons were made available by Bandai and other third-party manufacturers, this includes a docking station with a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive (PA-82002), a Deltis 230 MO Docking Turbo (MOS330P) with a 230 MB magneto-optical disk drive that is manufactured by Olympus Optical Co. Ltd. (requires KINKA 1.2 or later); and AppleJack wireless controller/gamepad (PA-82014/BDE-82014), and a Keyboard drawing pad stylus combination through the AppleJack ADB interface (PA-82003).

Developers are constrained to the base hardware profile of the Pippin platform, using no hard drive cache for downloaded content, and sharing 128 KB of NVRAM with the system.

In Pippin Launch, the icons are clickable squares, and the user does not have access to standard Finder features, such as "New Folder".

Other than the RSA authentication and modified system files, according to Apple, "Yes, Pippin titles will play on Macintosh computers.

A July 1996 article in Electronic Gaming Monthly pointed out that the competing Sega Saturn and its separately sold Netlink device combined still cost under $400, making it a far less expensive Internet appliance than the Pippin.

The small default memory configuration could not run the industry-standard Netscape 2.0 browser, nor anything comparable to Java and VRML support.