Apple Prototypes: 5 Products We Never Saw 169
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I must ask... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I must ask... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I must ask... (Score:5, Funny)
It never made it to market for fears of chipped teeth being a Mac stereotype.
The iBuzz (Score:2, Informative)
iBuzz Doubles Your iPod Pleasure... [engadget.com]
*grin*
Re:The iBuzz (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can just imagine the commercial... (Score:5, Funny)
"Hi, I'm a PC."
"And (oooo) I'm (mmmm...ahhh!) a Mac.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nice. I'll take the one on the right.
Er, I mean my right. Wanted to make that clear.
The Newton Telephone (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternate article title (Score:5, Funny)
"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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alternate article title (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, I've taken a few karma hits bashing MS here. It's been a while though. IIRC, one of them was me simply pointing out some problem or something. It was enough to get me tempbanned. I couldn't post for about a week or so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I don't want to comb my hair or shave in order to use the phone.
Of course, the natural progression after video is to integrate another human sense. How about smell? The comedic potential aside, I don't want to smell some person's poor excuse for "pleasant fragrance" in that powerful, eye-watering scent wafting out of my phone. Because people just waking up won't bother to shower or brush their teeth before they call; they'll just cover the phone in perfume.
Re: (Score:2)
This is why I like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That could be said of just about any technology company. Heck, I worked at a really small software company a few years ago and despite a shortage of resources, they invested some time into a variety of products that never saw the light of day. The philosophy was more like "it's neat... but would it sell?" Any project goes through this phase, it's not just some business practice exclusive to Apple. Yeah, stupid pr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's also because of mistakes in the article. The PowerBop certainly wasn't a prototype (and certainly wasn't for *Internet* access) but was a wireless modem sold in France for the local BeBop wireless phone system that was briefly deployed in cities prior to the availability of GSM cell phones and as an unexpensive alternative to the ana
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I wasn't aware that this kind of "broken by design" public phone system had been tried elsewhere. This is interesting
I don't recall the range thing to be that much of a problem though (that's from what I recall users saying a
Re:This is why I like Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is why I like Apple (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is why I like Apple (Score:4, Funny)
As a sheep herder, I take exception to the implication I am not a man.
Re:This is why I like Apple (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Wow (Score:2)
On the other hand, I'd hate to think of what would happen to me if it broke.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, how would you call tech support?
iGirl (Score:5, Funny)
Didn't work. Even Steve Jobs can only do so much.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually I'd forgotten that I released the source code to that stuff I spent my lonely nights writing when I left high school
Re: (Score:2)
Incomplete list (Score:5, Funny)
- 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).
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure I'd eat anything labeled as an "ipple"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
PDA (Score:4, Interesting)
iPhone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone out there should take a long hard look at what made the revo good (and the nokia communcator bad (clunky, bad tiny keyboard keys)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple PenLite (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
William
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Screw graphic designers! I'm a college student (engineering and CS) and I want one! I use an iBook now, but when I replace it it'll be with a Tablet PC because I want to be able to draw diagrams in my notes. It just pisses me off that I'll have to use something other than Mac OS because Almighty Steve won't deign to grace us mere mortals with a tablet Mac.
Re: (Score:2)
William
Other Apple prototypes (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Picture here: http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/failproj/be
Edit? HELL YES. (Score:2, Funny)
Then I started thinking about the iBrator and Ellen Fleiss again and all was well.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Even on Slashdot, that's pretty low standards.
Missing from the list... (Score:4, Interesting)
Swing for the fences (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah - it's easy to forget how cool it was when you could just plug'n'play a NuBus card while PC users were still setting ISA jumpers. (Or Superdrive floppies, or a bunch of other firsts.) But those platform advances didn't pay off. Wintel slowly caught up to each innovation, and with greater economies of scale.
The iPod was a homerun of the modern era. But you wait around a while and zuner or later they catch up again...
They still have yet to get the following working propery:
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Pippin (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Get with the program, Apple! (Score:2, Interesting)
Where and when did Apple go so wrong?
---
CAPTCHA of the comment: reprieve
Now it can be told... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Computers were awfully slow back then. We ran NFS mounted root drives over Ethernet all the time. The system wasn't impacted that greatly because drives weren't a whole lot faster anyway. You could run dozens of machines without local storage booted off an ethernet segment without major problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Just 5 of soo many (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't, say, Windows big. But it doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the Pippin.
On Video Phones (Score:3, Interesting)
Proto iMac (Lamp-arm) used articulated neck (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Magnetic Smart Fluids (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm just curious how they engineered it so that that wouldn't happen? Perhaps some sort of persistent magnetic field that kept everything solid by default, and then somehow canceling out that field when the screen needed to be moved? I have only a basic
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yawn (Score:2)
Apple's been doing this forever ... (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You are bitching about a product line that (digging out my calendar) that ran for 17 years and died in 1993?
Exactly how many product lines run for 17 years? There are automotive lines that are lucky to see 5. For a computer 17 years is the equivilent of a Redwood tree. WINDOWS hasn't been around that long. (As a product line, I'm not even talking about Windows 3.1.1, 95, 98, ME, XP etc.)
I was playing with those things as a kid. I mean literally as a kid. I was 7 when those things were out, and I
Re: (Score:2)
The 6502 to 68000 CPU switch was really the only total discontinuity, and that wasn't exactly just a few days ago
Actually, the Apple IIe card for the Mac LC worked very well for me and a number of instituitions in my area at the time. I have some documents here on OS X that originally came from my Apple II via that route. I have some articles I wrote which have been viewed/edited on the following processors, all in Apple machines:
I remember seeing a Paladin... (Score:2)
Where are the cable boxes? (Score:3, Informative)
The propable functionality has likely been superceded by the tv shows on ITMS, but that isn't the point.
Ahead of its time.. (Score:5, Funny)
"..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 (Score:3, Informative)
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!
Re:PowerBop not a prototype; I have one (Score:3, Informative)
So with powerbop, you could connect to classic BBSes and do faxes, but mostly all you co
one-hit entrepreneurs versus Steve Jobs (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It wouldn't surprise me, as it was designed for a wizzy lifestyle.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Stupidity. It's not like it accomplished anything. With that said, DON'T FEED THE TROLLS.