Apple’s First Phone, from 1983, Never Made It to Market (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s First Phone, from 1983, Never Made It to Market (2014)

lowendmac.com

This was not before the Macintosh as the author points out.

Hartmut Esslinger prototyped the "MacPhone" in a study in 1984 after the success of the Macintosh. [1] Other prototypes in this series were part of the Snow White project. [2]

Information sourced from "Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple" by Hartmut Esslinger. [3]

[1] http://imgur.com/MMYDogd [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language [3] https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Simple-Early-Design-Years/dp/389...

Is this legitimate? All references to the phone lead back to the same website.

I'm surprised that the technology existed to do touch-based signatures. That would have required precise touch input and a decent amount of computing power in a tiny form factor.

The screen is surprisingly large, slim and doesn't have the LCD look most laptops had at the time. It also is glossy, which really only became popular when Apple had its resurgence.

Its most likely a visual prototype made using unrepresentative materials and processes, intended as a tool to aid design discussions and provoke innovation.

I can't imagine this could have been built, never mind productised, using 1984 technology. There was absolutely no way to get a processor + memory system + display into a box that small.

In 1984 everyone was using floppy disks for storage, and hard drives cost thousands of dollars. Even battery-backed RAM would have taken up an unexpectedly large volume.

Everyone takes touch panels for granted today, but in 1984 the only place you could find a high contrast touchless LCD panel was in research labs, or possibly available at ludicrous cost as an advance product demonstrator.

Touch - even pen touch - technology was certainly around, but not at this level of sophistication for affordable consumer applications.

That's because this was a product concept exercise. It's an exercise in thinking about functionality, design, and form and less about the underlying technology.

There was a period during the Scully era where Apple did a number of these concepts, most famously the "Knowledge Navigator" video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc

This was circa 1987, but was looking ahead to 2000 and beyond with things like always-on background networking and video conferencing. 30 years later we're finally getting to some of the stretch concepts shown in the video, such as conversational interfaces like Siri.

Post-Scully and back into the Jobs II era, this stuff went away. And it's probably a good thing they did. Here's why:

"Commercial entities have no advantage in releasing concept products the likes of which they hope to subsequently sell. If the conceptual piece truthfully captures their “best” it can only tell their competitors how advanced they are and where they fall short. If it camouflages their true capabilities in an effort to mislead their competitors, then what value is it to others? In fact, the intention to mislead competitors is really the only effective reason for a commercial entity to publicly release concept products"

https://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

There were touch screens even before 1984.

There touch pad accessories including transparent ones to put over the screen for drawing applications for many popular 80s computers including the Atari. These were good enough for CAD and drawing applications.

Touch POS were also available in the late 80s including virtual signature terminals.

The Casio PB-1000 was a micro computer with a touch screen and it was released in 87.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_PB-1000

It was relatively cheap and mass produced Apple could've released something very close to their prototype pre 1990 for sure.

Apple started developing the Newton in '87 so it's not that surprising to see touch screens in a prototype from around that time.

it would probably also make sense that they made something like this while they were trying to figure out what sort of newton-like object they should make

By visual prototype I mean: not working. The screen graphics on that prototype are likely paper with printed pixels and a sheet of polycarbonate stuck over the top. All very simple methods to make something that looks right, but certainly doesn't do anything useful. Its a very common process[0] in industrial design. The housing mouldings are made from polyurethane cast in silicone moulds (vacuum casting).

I am a product designer (physical products)

[0] http://www.amalgam-models.co.uk/services/prototyping/

Yes. A lot of these prototypes were documented in the 1997 book "AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group" by Kunkel and English (now out of print).

https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...

Some images from the book can be found here:

http://www.99mac.se/forum/t/301501-samlarbok-i-nyskick-apple...

Esslinger also wrote his own book called "Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple".

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3897904071

Wow that newton emate picture really brings back memories. I love the design of that thing!

The second sentence of the article states that it's just a mock-up, then the rest of the article proceeds as if the author believes it was a real, working device.

What amazes me is that 3 decades later, that design still looks fresh. Make the plastic shiny and it could have been from this decade. In an industry where designs become obsolete so quick, this is no small feat.

I agree on the flip phone, but not on the desk phone. It looks very last century, matte plastic or shiny plastic.

The very tail end of this product concept for "smart landline", two decades later, was the Amstrad Emailer, which had all sorts of features to maximise its use of premium rate billing. It was universally regarded as terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mailer

A premium for checking email is an interesting concept, I could see people wanting to sign up for this now as a way to reduce the compulsive need to check for new emails

Aren't there extensions to control compulsive checking of websites?

Yes but I'm thinking of the type of scheme people use to lose weight. "If I dont lose 3 pounds this month I'll owe you $10" but for email or media usage

I love stuff like this. There's something fascinating about early touch and pen input devices.

This article sent me on a bit of a wiki-wormhole, ending up on Bill Buxton's collection website, which is fantastic.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxto...

You'll love skank phone : https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/SkankPhone

Flip phone: http://lowendmac.com/2014/apples-first-phone-from-1983-never...

Thanks, we've updated the link from http://www.ua-magazine.com/1983-iphone-prototype, which had little beyond the photograph.

It was gorgeous and groundbreaking.

I'm guessing it would have cost at least $1000 at the time, maybe $2000, which might have been a hard sell competing with ... who? PC? Landline phone? Home use or corp IT?

Before its time ~~ before its market.

It's easy to forget the massive leaps that we've made in computing technology in the last 30 years... In 1983, $1000 wouldn't even buy you a 5 MB hard drive - a hard drive, by the way, that was roughly the size and weight of a brick. A year later in 1984, Apple Macintosh 128k retailed for $2500. If the technology had actually existed to build this phone in 1983, I imagine the cost would have been in the six figure range, at least.

The Motorola DynaTAC was available in 84'. They had car models before that, so maybe Motorola?

I had a boss who used to sell them and told me just to lease them it was around $2K up front with like $99/month for something like 50 minutes a month with $.99 for each minute of overage.

But at the time the market was so small and only one or two companies selling service.

I believe the ICL "One Per Desk" was the slickest phone/computer combo commercialised around that time -- it shipped in 1984.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Per_Desk

"Nothing new under the sun" might be true for human nature, but I'm pretty sure ol' Solomon would eat his words if someone flew back in time and showed him an iPhone.

So this prototype actually predates the Macintosh itself, which was 1984?

Fascinating. And also to see them already using the Chicago font, too, which must have been designed that very year.

No. Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design was hired to prototype a number of different ideas and concepts at Apple.

Project Snow White, as it was called, sought out to create a unified design language for a range of products (and to hopefully catalyze the engineers into creating new product categories).

Susan Kare designed the Chicago typeface in 1984. According to the Esslinger book the "MacPhone Study" was done in 1984 after the release of the Macintosh. [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Simple-Early-Design-Years/dp/389...

Image from the Esslinger book regarding the "MacPhone concept"

http://imgur.com/MMYDogd

In 1983/1984 there was a super-secret internal group at Atari that was working on a product that was going to "save the company".

[Note: if you're CEO of a company, don't tell the press that there's a super-secret project to "save the company", because all the other engineering teams will read the papers like everyone else and think "Well, shit, how is the work that we're doing of any value? And why did we read this in the San Jose Mercury News, and not get it from internal channels? This place has terrible management." And they'd be right.]

When it was revealed, it was a telephone. Not a very good telephone, either. They'd been working quite a while, and were well into double-letter board revisions. They really didn't know how to do telephones.

Hmm, maybe the voice call switches to a modem and the person on the other end of the call gets a copy of the check which they can then print out. Seems feasible for 1983 technology. I imagine you could send the data for a check over 300 baud without too many issues. I guess the signature field would have to be sent as a bitmap, which over 300 baud would take a while, but probably not a deal-breaker.

For businesses this would have been an easy and fast way to send money. No need for stamps. I imagine that was the target demographic as such at thing would have cost thousands in 1980s money.

Curious to know if any banks would have accepted a printed out check without some kind of deal with Apple. I'm not even sure if I could deposit a scanned and printed out check today.

I don't know about back then, but it's very common today for banks to accept scanned checks of various sorts. Many banks have mobile apps that let you take a picture of the front and back of the check and deposit it that way.

There are also services that convert paper checks to electronic form or let you create electronic checks. For example:

http://ww.deluxe.com/about-deluxe/deluxe-resource-center/che...

https://www.deluxe.com/echecks/

(I have no connection with Deluxe, I was just aware of their electronic check service since I was looking at business checks and this option came up.)

I love Snow White. It could work today for an entry-level Apple brand.

Agreed. As much as I dislike Apple's current style, Snow White was gorgeous, as was the platinum design theme they used in the early '90s (e.g. the Quadra 605). I wish we could get back to that kind of look again.

Back in the day, it was "Apple //c", not "Apple IIc"! The "II" was stylized differently for each of the different models.

If you have to render Apple's stylizations of their word marks in running text (an idea I dislike), then you're better off writing it as "Apple IIc".

Semantically, it's still the Roman numeral for 2, and the Romans used the letter I twice for that, so let's use the proper codepoints and leave stylization to a font choice, which on the web means using some kind of markup language.

"Apple //c" really is how it's written on the screen when you boot it up, though. That's the way Apple themselves actually wrote it.

There were no built-in, on-screen italic fonts back in those days!

I agree: these machine names are Apple ][, ][+, ][e, etc and the //c.

Right! Except the IIe was "IIe", at least in later versions, wasn't it?

Let's not forget their next foray into phones, the MOTO ROKR with Motorola. That was 2005, only two years before the iPhone came out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Rokr#/media/File:MOTO...

Looking back, Apple seems to have had 3 major product materials: beige plastic, white plastic and aluminum.

I wonder what’s next.

Apple used to make their laptops out of Titanium, which is lighter than aluminium. I wonder if they could ever go back to it. Maybe they'll make a super high end "MacBook Pro Pro" :P

It didn't last very long. Besides price, paint wouldn't adhere to the surface for long.

Which was a shame, I always found the bare titanium to have a distinctive look.

That product design is pretty impressive for back then.

What do you mean by that? Looks like very in-theme 80s American ID work. The materials, textures, and forms all speak a pretty clear lineage of western design at the time. This work was done by Frog, a well respected design consultancy and I believe this work was done by their US offices, but it could have been done by their Europe branch (I am not sure, it seems like others in the thread have more knowledge on this).

But if your concept of 80s design is more in line with the work done in the Memphis movement, I totally get why you would see these as outliers to 80s industrial design!

Looks like a nicer minitel, which was around at the time. Perhaps it was apple's attempt to bring the concept to the us? Or sell it in france.

Ten years later, they made a handheld version of this.

I remember Steve Jobs making a video call during the unveil of iPhone 4 to Wozniak and saying this moment has been a long time in the making. Indeed, so many visions of a calling computing handset to finally now see it a reality.

And now i am nostalgic for gray plastic.

I collect retro consoles, I've had about all the gray plastic I can stomach

If Apple made that flip phone as a cellular device, I'd buy one right now.

This isn't a big revelation. There's video and more. https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=1983+vi...

There's no video of the product at those links, just static photos that someone turned into a video slideshow.

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