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Before the iPhone, Apple's Stunning Phone From 1983
Several readers pointed out the story of the Apple phone that never was, from 1983. Pictures of the concept phone are impressive, as you'd expect from Hartmut Esslinger, later founder of Frog Design. Even more interesting is that this phone is part of a much larger collection of Apple artifacts curated by Stanford.
I wonder how many Nokia/Motorola/HTC/Samsung/Microsoft patents this provides prior art against?
Uh, no. Linux was even created because Linus wanted a free UNIX like desktop.
He wanted something that he could hack on, and the free UNIX at the time was not good enough.
Since the beginning Linux users have touted how this will be the year of Linux on desktop. It has nothing to do with "servers first, desktops last", because Linux users very much have wanted Linux to be number #1 on desktop.
This is how I know you are shilling or trolling. It should be obvious to the slashdot crowd that most of the development in Linux is happening on the base of the system and server and DB related tools. Of course, any Linux user wants his desktop experience to be great as well.
You miss the point. This isn't a users vs tech specs question.
It's a cathedral vs. bazaar question.
The cathedral can pick one priority. The bazaar (by its very nature) cannot.
The bazaar model (and we could debate the extent to which Linux development really follows that model, but as theoretical ideal it's apt enough) implies a set of cooperating interests each pursuing their own goal. In short, the bazaar model gaurantees that the product will be what the people working on it cared about, which may or may not align with their users.
Thus we get things like the kded4 process being permanently unstable because the devs wanted the plug-in modules to work a certain way, and one shitty module brings down all the rest. The user doesn't care about the overhead saved by this model. They just care that their desktop becomes periodically unstable in a way that is nearly impossible to debug. Take your pick of other Linux development problems.
In the cathedral management picks their priorities, and the developers can go defile themselves if they don't like it. That can create the iPad, and it can also create Windows Bob (and the Paper Clip).
The question is, and always has been, which is better overall? While citing best and worst examples from both camps can be illuminating, it does not make for proof that one is better than the other.
Every post here is just random noise about Apple itself, not about the device.
Was this a working prototype? Did they even have flatpanel displays like that in 1983? What kind of processor would drive the phone? Where the heck would all the internals fit, a 1983 era computer was 10x the volume of this phone "prototype".
I can't imagine that this device was anything but a non-functional "concept" mockup. I don't think it was feasible to build one of these for at least 10-15 years.
I see you've been modded funny but I don't think that it was the aim of your post.
I think you are comparing apples with oranges. Linux is not a company so it doesn't have the same goals as a company. It started as a geek pet project and it's goal was fun and learning. What it does now is providing a kernel to whoever wants to use it. Anyway, with Linux you probably mean the companies or just the geeks building distributions on the top of the Linux kernel and the GNU software, plus Google with their Linux/Android products. Or you might even mean the desktop environments like Gnome, KDE and many others. But if you compare apples with apples, let's say Apple with Canonical, you see that they are moving more or less in the same way. Canonical is even going through the pain of reinventing the UI because they want to be more user friendly.
By the way, I installed the Mint desktop on the Ubuntu 11.10 VM I'm experimenting with because I discovered that I can't stand Unity or Gnome Shell. They're both very unfriendly to me but I understand how they could be better suited to some casual users or (in the case of Unity) to devices with a small screen.