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Apple Prototypes: 5 Products We Never Saw

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Nov 30, 2006 12:26 AM
from the blast-from-the-past dept.
Businesses Apple Technology
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."
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Apple Prototypes: 5 Products We Never Saw 25 Comments More /

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  • I must ask... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Slur (61510) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:30AM (#17044846) Homepage Journal
    Whatever happened to the iBrator??

  • Alternate article title (Score:5, Funny)

    by Weaselmancer (533834) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:32AM (#17044878)

    "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? =)

  • This is why I like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rude Turnip (49495) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [noitaulav]> on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:34AM (#17044884)
    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.

  • iGirl (Score:5, Funny)

    by b17bmbr (608864) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:37AM (#17044926)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by eebra82 (907996) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:38AM (#17044932) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:39AM (#17044946)
    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.

  • Apple PenLite (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nightspirit (846159) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:41AM (#17044984)
    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.

  • Missing from the list... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dgrisman (974104) on Thursday November 30 2006, @01:01AM (#17045166) Journal
    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.

  • Pippin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cybercyph (221022) on Thursday November 30 2006, @01:09AM (#17045228)
    What about the Apple Pippin, their video game console? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [wikipedia.org]

  • Now it can be told... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ktakki (64573) on Thursday November 30 2006, @01:12AM (#17045266) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Just 5 of soo many (Score:4, Informative)

    by maggard (5579) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Thursday November 30 2006, @01:37AM (#17045464) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Proto iMac (Lamp-arm) used articulated neck (Score:5, Informative)

    by gsfprez (27403) on Thursday November 30 2006, @01:56AM (#17045588)
    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.

  • Apple's been doing this forever ... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SickLittleMonkey (135315) on Thursday November 30 2006, @02:57AM (#17045930) Homepage
    ... 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

  • Ahead of its time.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by kauttapiste (633236) on Thursday November 30 2006, @06:45AM (#17046926)
    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.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by dbIII (701233) on Thursday November 30 2006, @12:57AM (#17045120)
      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.

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