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."

I must ask...

Whatever happened to the iBrator??

Re:I must ask...

It's coming in 2007, called iPhone. The downside is that someone has to call you to make it work like the iBrator was intended for.

Re:I must ask...

If you call yourself is that masturbation.

Re:I must ask...

"Whatever happened to the iBrator??"

It never made it to market for fears of chipped teeth being a Mac stereotype.

Re:The iBuzz

No, I think he was thinking of the iBrator [google.com].

I can just imagine the commercial...

"Hi, I'm a PC."

"And (oooo) I'm (mmmm...ahhh!) a Mac.

The Newton Telephone

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.

Alternate article title

"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? =)

Re:Alternate article title

What good is karma if you don't spend some now and again?

You're kidding right? You really think you're going to take a karma hit for saying MS copies Apple on slashdot?

What's the weather like on your planet?

Re:Alternate article title

My karma's going to take a hit for saying this, but it always seems like anybody who mentions taking a karma hit gets rated 5.

Re:Alternate article title

Except that "funny" doesn't count towards karma. Mission (not) accomplished!

This is why I like Apple

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.

Re:This is why I like Apple

>every man, woman, infant, convicted felon, and sheep herder on Earth
As a sheep herder, I take exception to the implication I am not a man.

Re:This is why I like Apple

The best thing about the Newton was Steve Jobs' press conference claiming that there was a "2.5 trillion dollar market" for it

That's very interesting, as Steve Jobs wasn't at the company when Newton was conceived, and killed the division upon returning to Apple in 1997.

Re:This is why I like Apple

but didn't have any apparent keyboard interface for writing outgoing faxes.

You don't know how a fax machine works, do you?

Re:This is why I like Apple

I still consider Apple to be the gold standard for a company that continually pump innovation into its product line, while keeping old users happy. My first Mac was back in '94. I bowed out in the late 90's to do the Linux thing for a while, but after a few years of scratch building computers and rebuilding operating systems once a week because Gentoo decided "Hey lets roll out a new version of GLIBC!" I'm back on mac.

I just love opening the lid, doing my work, and slamming it shut. When they drop in a new widget, it's solid. Sure you have to take it in for an occasional blown logic board... but you CAN take it in for a blown logic board. My Sony's would drop a component and it would be "oh well, sucks to be you." The only reason I had to replace my previous iBook was that I had marinated the thing in coffee. It was 3 years old and running like the day I, or rather work, bought it.

How many of you kill a three year old laptop and say "GOSHDAMNIT!!!!" It was that good to me.

Wow

I'd sure like to get my hands on one of the Paladin thingies. If I ever wanted to start up a small business, I could keep that little puppy on my desk, not to mention I would have a blast programming it. I think with a little adaptation I could seamlessly integrate a lot of important business applications without having to rely on much overhead or security risk lost to network transmission.

On the other hand, I'd hate to think of what would happen to me if it broke. :-/

Re:Wow

I'd sure like to get my hands on one of the Paladin thingies.

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.

iGirl

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.

Incomplete list

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).

PDA

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.

iPhone?

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 [yahoo.com] and an ultralight computer [sonystyle.com]. Apple would need to go a different direction.

Apple PenLite

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.

Other Apple prototypes

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.

Edit? HELL YES.

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 [google.com] and the iBrator [flamingmailbox.com] 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.

Missing from the list...

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.

Swing for the fences

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.

Pippin

What about the Apple Pippin, their video game console? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [wikipedia.org]

Get with the program, Apple!

I have been waiting 20 years for a Knowledge Navigator [wikipedia.org]!!

Where and when did Apple go so wrong?

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CAPTCHA of the comment: reprieve

Now it can be told...

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.

Re:Now it can be told...

it never crashed on me, which is a lot to say for a prototype.

Being a DEC product it probably had something like RSX inside. It will only crash if a device fails. But a good UI is way too much to expect.

Just 5 of soo many

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.

On Video Phones

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."

Proto iMac (Lamp-arm) used articulated neck

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.

Yawn

Am I the only one who was utterly underwhelmed by those five products? Most seemed to try and solve multiple problems poorly instead of solving one or two very nicely.

Apple's been doing this forever ...

... 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

I remember seeing a Paladin...

...when I was in training for Apple Service with Kodak. I knew it was a prototype and was almost able to take it home. It was a very cool concept, almost reminded me of a Powerbook Duo strapped to a fax machine.

Where are the cable boxes?

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.

The prototypes would probably still beat Zune

I would think that if Apple decide to release any of the prototypes for sale, they would still beat the Zune in sales.

Bad names...

All these stuff seems to me nice, but with very bad names.
And John did not like bad names :)

Ahead of its time..

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.

PowerBop not a prototype

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!

one-hit entrepreneurs versus Steve Jobs

You hear about the rich software wizards who make a fortune and then fade off into the sunset, e.g Netscape, Yahoo, etc. But Steve Jobs has had four mega-hits over three decades Apple-2, Mac, Pixar and iPod. So it take several dogs between megahits. Very few people get a second chance, much less four, and hes not done yet.

Re:PenLite

Posting non-AC would help ;)

Re:what ever happened to the iFuck?

Why mod this guy down?

I agree with him 100%, the poster above probably should go see one.

-Red

Re:PenLite

Now, if only I knew how to sell it...

1. Send it to me.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:PenLite

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.

Re:I know where all the WALTS are

Didn't I see that WALT device attached to a fancy Japanese toilet?

It wouldn't surprise me, as it was designed for a wizzy lifestyle.

Re:Amazing

Not really. Come back when you can link to someone who has been exploited by it. Deliberately downloading and using such a corrupted dmg doesn't count.
 

Re:PenLite

PenLite wasn't the codename, but it was pretty cool. We had one around for a while, as well as a Paladin - (which was based on an '030 PowerBook Duo and worked quite well and was featured in USA Today once upon a time). Like a PowerBook Duo 230 with the display flipped around, facing out.

PenLite used a MacOS 7.1.x version of the Newton OS recog engine. "Rosetta" was on Mac OS long before any of the breathless assholes in the Mac Rumor community ever thought of it.

There was a flip-swivel screen idea for a PowerBook G3 Series companion to Wall Street named Hollywood, but beyond that, I can't go into specifics (even as AC). It never got prototyped.

In fact, there are more projects Apple's kept secret and cancelled than these Mac Rumors jerks have ever guessed at correctly. I wish those folks would just pass silently into the night, because their annoying guesses and speculation on upcoming Apple products are the main reason working there can be such a pain in the ass. Apple used to be pretty fun place to work, but everything in and out is monitored these days - precisely because a few attention-seekers like Jason O'Grady and "Nick DePlume" chose to go into the leak-amplifying business.