Steve Jobs and a lot of the best people at Apple left the company in 1985. The company was taken over by idiots ("bozos" was Steve's preferred term).

Steve (and all the people at NeXT) returned to Apple 12 years later. Officially Apple "bought" NeXT but for nearly half a billion dollars but in reality that was clever account keeping to satisfy investors and Apple was in fact on the brink of going bankrupt. They didn't have half a billion dollars. They didn't even have enough money to cover salaries of their employees. The people at NeXT took over and made it into what it is today and they refer to 1997 as the year that NeXT bought Apple.

Both the Pippin and the Newton shipped several years after Steve and his core team left. They were products of the "Bozo" management team. Both were killed pretty much at the same time as Steve coming back. He killed a lot of other stupid products as well.

Pippin was just the original Xbox concept before the Xbox arrived. Similar to Microsoft’s windows ce gaming agreement with Sega Dreamcast. Cram a low end computer in a console and put the bootable OS and app on a CD. Boot directly into the game. Same cd could be played on a Mac.

Problem was, it came out at a time when Apple had too many projects going on at once. So it was both too expensive, and left to rot with “licensees” instead of being built, promoted, and sold by Apple.

I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I'm thinking of.

https://512pixels.net/2012/03/apple-servers/

The Cube, along with the G4 iMac are two of the most beautifully designed computers I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a couple of videos of people retrofitting the guts of an M1 mini into both of those, which is a ridiculously tempting project that I’ll never actually get around to doing.