AppleTV is one of the most little-known current Apple products, yet has incredible functionality. For a relatively low price, you can do just about anything you can do on your iDevices right on your TV.

But long before AppleTV, there was a humble product known as the Apple Pippin. Named after a variety of, well, apples, the Pippin was designed to be a video-game player with functionality unheard of in 1995 when it made its debut.

Originally, Pippin was intended to be an open software platform, almost a proto-App Store. The description, per Apple’s original FAQ for the product, is fascinating:

Apple believes that families are looking for more than video game players today. Certainly they want to be able to play their favorite games, but they also want to communicate, learn, play interactive music, access information and much more. Pippin provides them this capability. In addition it provides them a high level of compatibility with a mainstream personal computer technology. This will provide them the knowledge that their investment in CD-ROM titles and experience will not go to waste.

In other words, Apple wanted to use the Pippin as something resembling a modern XBOX:

Their Pippins will integrate within their audio-visual consumer electronics world. In addition, it will be able to communicate and transfer files with their personal computers should they have them in their home. Finally, the Pippins with the addition of a GeoPort adapter or external modem will permit the customers to communicate over cyberspace.

While these descriptions of communicating over cyberspace seem laughably dated, this was cutting edge for the mid-90s. This was a device that was expandable, had multiple uses, and was one of the first entries of a computer company into the video game market.

This was my favorite portion of the FAQs, just because of how dated it feels:

Apple is integrating hardware technologies which improve the “on-screen” appearance of text on a TV screen. While the text will never be as clear as that on a computer monitor it is substantially better than anything in the video game industry today.

The Pippin was manufactured by Bandai and was intended to expand to other manufacturers, but with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997, the project was shut down along with all other projects where Macintosh technology was whitelabeled for other companies to use.

This museum description says it all:

It was not a success.

Have you used an Apple Pippin? Let us know in the comments.