Beats by Dr. Dre Powerbeats 2 Sport Earphones – White

Dear Friends,

This week we saw snow flurries just about every day, a sure sign winter is coming. The higher elevations have snow sticking to the mountain tops and the trails are turning white at Sugarbush. We have been taking advantage of the still somewhat mild weather around my house and working to get the horse barn ready for another winter. Our big fall project this week was fixing a water line issue, our barn hydrant failed part way through last winter. We had assumed it somehow froze but why June when water still wasn’t coming out we knew we had bigger problems. Thankfully, we have a second water hydrant so it was just an inconvenience for several months. I’m happy we have finally fixed the issue.

We are eagerly anticipating Apple’s announcement next week. Customers are always surprised to hear that we do not have any special intel when it comes to Apple product announcements. We have to do what everyone else does, guess. Added excitement to this event is a new location and time zone, we all want to know what Apple has to reveal.

This week’s Kibbles & Bytes exclusive special is a Philips Hue bundle. Philips Hue is easy to set up and works with Home Kit and smart speakers. I have just installed this set up in my own house, it’s perfect for those with older homes and wants smart home conveniences without costly installs and wiring projects. This starter bundle can easily be set up within a few minutes and it’s as easy as switching out a few light bulbs. Give it a try, I’ve discounted this bundle and thrown in free shipping

This weekend my cousin and her Fiance are coming for a quick visit. They will be coming up from Boston to look at some potential wedding venues and they are going to show me how to properly cook in my Instant Pot. I got my Instant Pot two years ago, but honestly, I don’t know how to use it. Seeing as my cousin and her Fiance use theirs all the time I’ve asked them to finally show me how to use mine!

After my cooking lesson, I’ll work off a good meal with a Vermont tradition, wood stacking. Perhaps this isn’t an actual tradition, but the work needs to be done none the less. Our woodstove isn’t our primary heat system but we do enjoy the added warmth when the cold weather really sets in.

Thank you for reading,

Emily & Mike

This October marks seven years since Steve Jobs passed away leaving behind a legacy of innovation and development that has undeniably changed the world we live in and how we live in it. From its early days, Apple has almost always taken the unconventional approach to creating hardware and software, tackling obstacles from an uncommon angle and often finding newer, better, more streamlined ways of doing things. This has led to groundbreaking advances and a modest list of not-so-successful ideas that failed to hit the mark or were perhaps too far ahead of their time.

It’s with this in mind, that we discuss Apple’s little-known singular foray into the world of gaming consoles, the Pippin.

The iPhone and iPad have blossomed into powerful mobile gaming platforms in recent years, and even the often joked about desktop and laptop Macs have more than enough computing power to run most modern desktop games. The Pippin, though, despite the pretense of being its home computer and/or educational platform, was a video games console through and through.

The Pippin was an ugly duckling in the highly competitive market of the mid-1990s, and unlike other machines of the time such as the Panasonic 3DO, weren’t intended as a proprietary, single console like we associate devices such as the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It was instead meant to be something that could be licensed out to many companies. Apple had designed the brains of the machines but would leave the manufacturing to other firms.

In terms of performance it did boast a few innovative features such as the fact that Mac computers of the era could play software designed for the Pippin since it shared much hardware with the Macintosh. With its educational usage in mind, rather than being solely an entertainment platform it had peripherals like a full keyboard, optional wireless controllers and even a printer.

Wanting to get in on the lucrative console business, Japanese toymaker and anime publisher Bandai decided to be first to license the tech, and in February 1995 the first Apple Bandai Pippin consoles went on sale in Japan. The machine’s US launch would take place a few months later, in September. The Japanese-market Pippin ATMARK consoles were a rather classy white, while American-market Pippin @WORLD (pronounced At-World) consoles were black. In Europe, the Katz Media Player had a different but similar black design.

Bandai may have been the first company to release a Pippin, but aside from the tiny European release by Katz, there were to be no more. Unfortunately, the machine was a complete failure.

It never caught on for reasons which had nothing to do with failure to be a good idea. It had at it’s core a PowerPC 603 RISC CPU which could have rivalled the Sony PlayStation for it’s rendering power had it been it’s utilized.

First, it was too expensive. At launch, the retail price of $600 was an unprecedented price for the time. Secondly, it launched into a market already dominated by Nintendo and Sega, and unlike other high-end consoles with the same price point such as the Neo-Geo, it had almost no software or games available.

While with Bandai’s support around 70 titles would be released in Japan, including the extremely popular Gundam franchise, that wasn’t the case in the US market. Over the console’s short lifespan, we only saw 18 games ever hit shelves. And not a single one approached the “must have” status a console needs to attract new customers despite having early internet support, the infrastructure just wasn’t there.

All in all, the Pippin would sell less than 50,000 units in its two years on sale, it’s that less than 5000 units were sold to US consumers. Bandai would cease support for the console in 1997 when it abandoned its deal with Apple and tried to align itself with Sega instead with it’s Netlink internet peripheral for the Saturn, which also didn’t work out. Katz vowed to continue support for the console but they were ultimately getting their hardware from Bandai and couldn’t maintain support beyond it’s current inventory of a few thousand units.

It wasn’t until the Sony PlayStation line finally broke into the scene that Nintendo and Sega would be dethroned as the leaders of the console market, a distinction that they have shared only with Microsoft’s XBox line of gaming consoles.

The Pippin is one example of an excellent idea that just couldn’t find footing through no direct fault of its own. It lies in repose with other valiant but failed attempts at console gaming such as the Atari Jaguar, Philips CD-i, Sega Dreamcast, Memorex VIS, Pioneer Laseractive and Panasonic 3DO among others.