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Apple Prototypes: 5 Products We Never Saw
Michael writes "For every Apple product we see on the shelves, there are dozens that never make it to production. Sometimes, these rare gems surface on the web for us to take a look at, and ponder what might have been. Scouring through the interweb, I've compiled this list of 5 Apple products that only the most hardcore of hardcore MacAddicts have ever stumbled across.
Surprisingly, some of these products, over 10 years old, are still being speculated about in one form or another to this day. Will we see new products based on these old prototypes? It's far more likely that anything resembling the devices listed below have been rebuilt from the ground up, but still, it's fun to look back on the products that didn't make it to the mass market."
Whatever happened to the iBrator??
-- thinkyhead software and media
When the Newton came out in the mid-90s, a lot of people remarked on how much it "looked" like a telephone without buttons. Even the speaker was in just the right place.
Who needs buttons when you've got a touch-screen anyways?
It could even surf the web, with a little help from a nearby Macintosh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Apple Prototypes: 5 Products Microsoft Never Got To Copy"
I should AC this, but what the hell. What good is karma if you don't spend some now and again? =)
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Apple seems to have a philosophy of "just because we *can*, that doesn't mean we *should*" Many of the products in that article would have been plausible, but incredibly half-assed in terms of practical functionality, given the state of technology at the time. The videophone Newton is a pretty good example of this...sure, it might have worked, but the device was gigantic. Apple has a knack for waiting until tech gets small enough that it will fit into a tight package.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
it was a prototype female that was attracted to long hair, lonely, coders who spend their nights writing open source software, planning to overthrow the evil empire, and have enough computing power to siumultaneously recompile their kernel while playing Quake 3. And she was supposed to be eager to watch the entire Star Wars collection on DVD, but only if he got it to play on his linux box.
Didn't work. Even Steve Jobs can only do so much.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
They forgot to list the following products:
- iZune, the modest mp3 player.
- iPond, the relaxing garden equipment.
- iPple, an actual Californian apple with a fancy name.
- iCar, the fancy, white car with an iPod scroll wheel instead of a regular steering wheel.
- iBus, same as above, just bigger. Intended for hip schools.
- iShmael, the iPod designed for Amish, relies on two horses to power it.
- iLonium 210, the perfect Russian killer (designed during the cold war).
Full Tilt
Why the heck can't they just make a decent PDA and be done with it? They had a decent start with the newton then just chucked it out! If it could dock with a normal screen and keyboard easily, possibly with wireless, it could do double duty as some sort of internet appliance at home as well. We have all that is necessary today to pull this off tech-wise. Sure, there's a ton of smaller cellphone thingamajobbies out there, and all their various iPod gizmos, but I think there's still a market for a real PDA if it was built with apple's eye for function.
I wish apple would do something like that now, a convertible tablet mac. That is the only thing holding me back from buying a macbook pro, as I would miss the tablet features of my fujitsu.
In addition to the items in the article, my research has come up with several other items that Apple prototyped but never manufactured. These include:
The iCorvair - Apple's first and only attempt at making a car. It was similar to the Volkswagen in that it was to appeal to the same market and had it's engine in back. Unofrtunately, a design flaw in the suspension gave it a tendency to flip over going around corners.
The eLisa - This was an Apple Lisa with a special AI user interface that emulated a psychiatrist. Focus groups found it annoying to be asked probing, personal questions while trying to get things done, so the project was dropped.
The iPod Cathode - So named for it's use of four EL84 vacuum tubes in the circuit that drives the headphones, this iPod variant had a short battery life and there was no way to dissassemble it to service the tubes.
The Mac Maxi - The end all and be all Macintosh. This was a fully partitionable powerhouse mainframe computer that was the size of a dishwasher (mechanical, not Mexican) with EMC disk drives, a built-in Caterpillar diesel UPS, and it's own recirculated glycol cooling system. This was to be the conceptual opposite of the Mac Mini, but the project was scrapped after the prototype tipped over and killed someone.
The Apple 0 - (pronounced Apple-Naught) This precursor to the Apple I featured a 74LS00 chip hammered into a block of wood as the main processor and had two modes of functionality, called "on" and "off". Users could tell when they were in the "on" mode by the glowing of a small grain-of-wheat light bulb.
Unknown host pong.
I think Paladins have vows to stop you getting your hands on their thingies. That and the time it takes to get the plate mail off.
Man, I saw the words 'edit post' in the URL to that story and I got all excited, thinking about how I was gonna go change it to reference Apple products like the Apple Post-It Notes and the iBrator and the iZune or whatever ... then once I found out I couldn't edit the post I got all sad.
Then I started thinking about the iBrator and Ellen Fleiss again and all was well.
Copland. From Macworld, July 1995: "A fundamental reworking of the Mac system software is in the works--Macworld reveals how this will make the Mac even better It will do more. It should crash less and use less RAM. It will automate more tasks and reduce desktop clutter. "It" is the next generation of the Macintosh Operating System, a major reworking of the Mac OS. Due in mid to late 1996, this as-yet-unnamed successor to System 7.5, code-named Copland, promises to boost productivity by making the Mac OS operate more efficiently, by building automation into common tasks, by incorporating many features that ..." (Any wonder why Win95 got a leg up on Macs when it launched?)
MacUsers everywhere should bow their heads and thank Gil Amelio for killing Copeland and apologize profusely for allowing Steve Jobs for ignominously have him ousted after he cleaned up the excesses on Infinite Loop.
This is the Apple I like. When most other computer companies were making clones, Apple was doing R&D and making some nifty stuff. Granted, they also almost went broke, but I still liked the attitude, even if there were management problems, turf wars, and whatnot. The balance has shifted somewhat away from R&D, which was obviously needed, but I don't think the balance is quite right yet... I'd like to see more things along these lines from Apple. They've got money now. It wouldn't kill them to swing for the fences a few times.
What about the Apple Pippin, their video game console? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin
Perhaps you were thinking of.... this?
iBuzz Doubles Your iPod Pleasure...
*grin*
I have been waiting 20 years for a Knowledge Navigator!!
Where and when did Apple go so wrong?
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CAPTCHA of the comment: reprieve
Every, and I mean every company has products under development that never see the light of day.
Case in point: mid-'90s, I did a lot of 3D animation and multimedia production. One of my clients was DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation. Some of the presentations I created for them were for products like the DEC Dove, a tablet/laptop that could use wireless to connect to other DEC Doves in a conference room (this was 1994, before wireless was a standard and about when tablet computing first appeared).
I was lent a prototype of the Dove (cost: $50,000, delivered by an armed guard) in order to digitize it and create a 3D model. The operating system was something akin to PalmOS, and the screen would automatically rotate from landscape to portrait mode when the screen was opened. I had only the one example, so I can't say how the wireless function worked, but it never crashed on me, which is a lot to say for a prototype.
There were other DEC projects, none of which got past the stage of painted foamcore models, like a network-attached storage appliance that was about the size of an abridged dictionary. Again, this was 1994, and I didn't see an equivalent product in the marketplace for another 7 or 8 years. That one was ahead of its time, since most of the networks I worked with back then were 10Base2, chugging along at 10Mbps. NAS at that speed would be all but useless for anything but small Word docs.
I could go on about what killed DEC, but I'd rather let DEC ex-employees tell that story.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
First off, the list of 5 is really a 5- more list, there are numerous others listed by the same author on the same website in other articles.
And yes, there are many more items, from the workstations developed with Apollo, the clients with Wang, the Pippin game machine, etc.
Then there's the technologies like Hotsauce, Cyberdog, OpenDoc, and of course Newton, all of which got into demo or even release but never really made it. And of course the first post-Next version of MacOS which was to be interoperable with MS Windows (not the Star Trek Windows-on-Mac but a MS Windows-based MacOS layer).
It's really remarkable the amount of technology Apple has pumped out, and of that how much have proven remarkably prescient. Whenever folks complain about how much attention Apple gets I always point out it is because they truly do innovate & lead the market (their small market share notwithstanding)
Oh, want links to all of the nouns above? Try using your search-engine-of-choice with Apple and whichever it is strikes your fancy - lots of nifty stuff.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Video phones failed because people have come to realize that they DON'T WANT to be seen. In his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace puts it very nicely: "It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn't been stressful about voice-only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realized they've been subject to an insidious buy wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice-only telephony. They'd never noticed it before, the delusion --- it's like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you to not have to pay anything close to complete attention to her."
a few of my friends (okay, all of the groomsmen in my wedding) work(ed) at Apple. One of them showed me one of the iMac (with the lamp arm) prototypes.
It was the basic iMac lamp you know, but it didn't have a shiny Luxo-like arm. What it did have was fully articulated arm... that is, it moved like snake-light, except that it didn't have tension built in. It was totally fluid and you could move the monitor to just about any angle and direction you wanted.
The trick was, there was a paddle behind the monitor on the right side of the mount - you pulled on it like a flappy-paddle gearshift behind the steering wheel on some new cars. When you did, the arm would go totally limp, with all the weight of the monitor in your hands, and when you released the paddle, the arm went totally stiff - like some kind of magic potion turned the snake-arm into stone.
I don't know what kind of clutch it used to do that, but it was really eerie. One moment, you could pull and push and pretty much move the monitor however you wanted, and the moment you let go - BAM - the round base and the monitor and the arm were magically a one-piece device - rock solid and totally stable.
While quite interesting as a design concept - it was rightly rejected. First of all, it totally ruined the lines of the monitor (bah me if you want, but its true) on the back and made it look like some kind of weird bike/computer thing. Secondly - and most importantly - even if you were warned "Look, the weight is going to go from zero to 15 pounds in a microsecond, so be sure to hold on tight" - you'd still end up pulling the handle, it would crash land on the bottom of the monitor frame like a ton of bricks on the keyboard below. I was warned, and i did it. The break point wasn't at the beginning or the end of the pull - which was about and inch and a half of travel. Unlike a car clutch, which has a smooth and vague transition, this went from on to off like a light - and the problem was that the weight of the monitor also went from zero to everything in your hands that fast as well.
In the end, Apple is the quintessential engineering house.. they start off with the user in mind totally, then they throw out whatever doesn't work, even if it cost a ton of money to develop.. then, they develop and maintain contingencies on the off chance that they'll totally change direction.
That's why they are kicking ass and why their stuff is worth more than they charge for it and why they can't make their shit fast enough.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
I think you're confusing two icons: Heidi Fleiss, Hollywood madam, Ellen Feiss, teenage Mac switcher. The first is a bit skanky these days, the latter is probably legal now.
... even to those of us who used the Apple II before the Mac.
...
There was the Apple II Ethernet card. (Production ready, Announced, Hyped, Cancelled.)
There was the Apple IIGS / Mac hybrid, which would have allowed an upgrade path for Apple II software owners (e.g. schools) to keep their investment and slowly migrate to the new Mac platform. (Cancelled.)
There was the Apple IIGS "Mark Twain", with hard disk, SCSI, SIMMs. (Production ready, Cancelled.)
There was the "GUS" Apple IIGS software emulator for Mac OS. (Almost complete, Never released.)
Apple makes great stuff. But every generation of Apple users should expect to be screwed in the wrong hole at least once. Obsoleting your latest purchase by switching CPUs for example
SLM
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Seriously. I have five of them (quadra 605 and 610-based, plus MPEG board) in my basement. Apple put some serious effort into developing a cable/set-top box prototype, but it never went to market.... and I'd have more to say on the matter if I could actually read the contents of the one hard drive that came with the lot.
The propable functionality has likely been superceded by the tv shows on ITMS, but that isn't the point.
I had access to a Penlite for a while when i was at Apple. At the time it seemed to be a solution looking for a problem. A fun prototype but a bit buggy from memory. There were times when you wanted the keyboard to reset it. The newton felt much cooler to me. I once used a newton to take notes in a developer conference with full handwriting recognition and then went back to the hotel and uploaded the notes to my colleagues. No big deal now but was pretty cool at the time. I still have some of the beta newtons floating around. My kids used them for a while but there was nothing much they could do with them. The Penlite i had to give back when they killed the project. It was verrrrryyyy tempting to keep it as it was pretty unique but i guess they didnt want us showing it to customers.
It wouldn't surprise me, as it was designed for a wizzy lifestyle.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Apple pushed on the Newton for quite some time. It did OK, but they were a little too expensive for the time, and a little too bulky for a normal pants pocket.
Unfortunately, things really took off with the Palm Pilot... which dumped functionality for a form that was actually convenient and fit in a pocket. Sound familiar? I say unfortunately, because 3Com / Palm clearly hasn't had the legs to keep running with it. Now the pure PDA are has the Palm Pilot on the low end, MS's Pocket PC on the high end, and a gamut of random stuff like Psions in the middle. And it looks like the market is shrinking.
Personally, I've had many PDA's, and liked them all. They were replaced by a Treo, until the shoddy build quality dragged that phone into nothingness. Since the Treo, I've used a standard phone with a unlimited use network plan. Now when I need to make an appointment, I just go to calendar.yahoo.com. Text input with the phone pad is worse than with the Treo's excellent keyboard, but typing in appointments at my normal computer works perfectly.
I suspect that apple is working on something WRT the iPhone. It would make perfect sense for an iPhone to sync automatically with iCal. It could be more of an Apple Communicator or something like that, with phone functionality relegated the same status as text messaging, calendar functions, and purchasing music from iTunes.
There isn't a lot of room left in the space between a dedicated PDA and an ultralight computer. Apple would need to go a different direction.
The ______ Agenda
"Hi, I'm a PC."
"And (oooo) I'm (mmmm...ahhh!) a Mac.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
Yeah, as if any users could ever be foolish enough to deliberately download and install malware.
Oh look, this nice-looking program seems to be free...
This made me laugh:
"..the GMS based service was extremely buggy, and moving from service area to service area caused an almost constant loss of signal.
The device was ahead of its time."
Yeah, ahead of its time indeed! It was clearly anticipating the features of the latest 3G phones.
I bought a PowerBop around 1994 (don't recall the date exactly) and still own it! It is probably a relatively rare system as Apple made few of them.
The PowerBop was a high-end PowerBook with a MC68030 and a 68882 FPU (a must have at the time!). The system was running at 33Mhz and had active matrix display.
The interesting part was the built-in Wireless Modem. Being fairly large, the modem was replacing the floppy drive (an external floppy drive was included in the package). A small antenna was visible on the right of the laptop.
The PowerBop modem was using a wireless phone network deployed by France Telecom in 1991 called Bi-Bop.
The Bi-Bop service was based on a rather clever and simple idea. France Telecom installed numerous access points in large cities in France. The access points and mobile phones were nothing more than enhanced digital cordless phones.
Using this light infrastructure, France Telecom was in position to be one of the first companies to offer a (relatively) low cost mobile phone service.
The PowerBop was connecting to the service just like a regular Bi-Bop mobile phone. At 14,400 bps, the speed was pretty good especially for a wireless connection.
All of this made the PowerBop a very innovative system. Picture this: sitting outside of french café checking your emails, surfing on BBS and getting faxes! In early 1990's it was the killer feature!
Even better, France Telecom also sold private access points to install in your home. Meaning that your Bi-Bop phone was becoming a regular cordless phone when used at home.
This was also working with the PowerBop. I was surfing at home with a wireless laptop in the early 90s! The ultimate geek toy!
It is interesting to see that 15 years later, there is no unified service offering phone and wireless networking at home and in the street...
Antoine
PS: my first post on Slashdot!
Found a website which explains it better then me. :)
http://www.engr-sci.org/dbis/stories/2004/14112.ht ml
I have a Powerbop (with my stack of "collector" powerbooks). It's a Powerbook 180 with a wireless modem allright, but the data was only 9600 at best (possibly less) and there was no email at the time, unless you had your own private access. There were no fully fledged commercial ISPs in france until some time later. Apple "innovation" had not foreseen the tcp/ip and the internet and at the time, "MacTCP" was pretty lame.
So with powerbop, you could connect to classic BBSes and do faxes, but mostly all you could do was access the Minitel network, at a premium...
I was the penlite manager... it was indeed a duo with the display flipped, designed to be docked in the duo dock. it also had a "transformer" bag with an integrated keyboard, the bag also worked as a stand and a harness for medical workers (most of the beta testers were with a hospital). It was a wireless pen (a version with eraser and pressure stroke), also had a wireless cdpd module for cellular connectivity, ability to IR link to other penlites, early firewire, powerpc upgrade, a long list... lots of stories about that project.. very fun, fast track, only 9 months to production. oh yes it went into pilot production before executive management killed it, most were shipped to Japan. The first prototype had a pen and finger interface; project scribe. That one you could ink with the pen and flip pages with your finger, demonstrated at an Apple WWDC.
Some other ATG less known projects; hand held mac (think pre-palm) that ran hypercard, done by apple ATG and sony (project names; handimac, smartifacts, pocket crystal) that became general magic. The digital camera done with toshiba (image of this made it into time mag) then sanyo then kodak (project name; papaya). The mobile media device with cd-rom (also ran hypercard) that became kalieda (project sweetpea). Both general magic and kalieda suffered from the anti mac os license position, as both had to recreate the OS and in doing so delayed by years the release.