Zhang Shule is a columnist for People's Daily Online and People's Post and Telegraph

More epoch-making than the iPhone,

will fail!

Looking back at the failure of Apple's game console Pippin, one key word cannot be bypassed: advanced.

Among the consoles of its time, Pippin had too many advanced ideas:

Mac OS 7.5x compatible operating system PippinOS;

A unique gameplay experience that can be played online;

Connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor to "upgrade" to a PC;

Able to play music or watch VCD; keyboard with drawing tablet;

There is even a mouse trackball on the unique "meniscus" shaped handle,

There is also a wireless handle option......

Many advanced features make Pippin epoch-making, and even many of its settings were absorbed into the game console iteration by the "Royal Three" (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo) after the 2000s.

However, the decathlon brought about by being too advanced has also caused another shortcoming:

It's good in any way, but it's not strong in any way.

The networking function, for example, is indeed the highlight of this console.

However, in the era of dial-up Internet access, it can only run at a slow speed of 14.4 kilobytes per second, and when connected to a TV to view web pages, the display method is completely different, which further exacerbates the visual intolerability.

In addition, the problem of too few games may be able to be filled in with high-quality games in a short time.

However, the console's poor performance resulted in a lack of smooth gameplay with complex graphics.

If you run a racing game, you will find that the back of the car disappears from time to time.

As for the "escort" game that Bandai used to give Pippin, using its classic IP "Dinosaur Squad" to create an action game, its protagonist often presents a picture effect of a broken leg in the game, which is even more "terrifying".

As for the setting, which is infinitely close to a personal computer, in the game, players will also experience a PC gaming experience that is rare in console games: stuttering......

These advanced selling points have finally become slots in the game experience.

As a result, the advanced has become an alternative "backward".

In fact, the later success of the iPhone was, in a sense, also due to its advanced adaptation to the software and hardware environment and user needs of the time.

In fact, as early as 1994, IBM launched the world's first smartphone, IBM Simon, which is recognized as the world's first.

The phone has no physical buttons, is operated entirely by touchscreen, and integrates a telephone, pager, fax machine, clock calendar, notepad, email, and games all in one.

If you only look at the above introduction, you will inevitably feel like the original iPhone.

But at that time, it was generally still in the era of big brother, and feature phones had not yet been popularized, not to mention miniaturization and touch screen experience.

Obviously, by the time Apple released the first iPhone in 2007, the conditions weren't really ripe.

So much so that it was not until 2009 that the iPhone 3GS began to really break the circle, and a year later, with the global popularity of the iPhone 4, it was completely established that the smartphone should grow into the iPhone.

In other words, if you want to relive the shock of Steve Jobs taking the iPhone 4 out of his pocket, or taking the Macbook Air out of the envelope, the premise must be that the tide of the times has surged to that point.

Otherwise, epoch-making will only be crossed out by epochs.

However, Pippin has not been without accomplishments, in addition to helping Steve Jobs return and making Apple less ahead of its time in epoch-making concepts, it has also made an unexpected contribution to the gaming industry:

At that time, Bungie, a small company that had been designing games for Apple for a long time, was developing a sci-fi first-person shooter for Pippin.

But after Pippin's failure, the company turned to Microsoft and developed the Halo franchise.

As a result, the launch of its first generation in 2001 with Microsoft's original console, Xbox, prompted many gamers to buy consoles for Halo, indirectly pushing Microsoft to become one of the top three consoles.

Although history cannot be assumed, what if Halo was born a few years earlier and appeared on Pippin?

Maybe the hot sale is just a dream, and it will only fail because it is too advanced.

Published in the People's Post and Telegraph on January 5, 2024, Issue 386 of the column of "Le Youji".

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