Earliest known photos of an Apple iPad prototype | Hacker News Reader

Earliest known photos of an Apple iPad prototype

networkworld.com

82 pointsot24 comments

I'm not sure why Apple included this photo in the bunch, but it's random enough to warrant inclusion. Behold! An unidentified man "using" the 035 tablet mockup.

The picture of a man holding the device gives the viewer scale and perspective.

Those sentences were in two separate paragraphs, and while not unambiguous, it's pretty safe to say that the first sentence was intended to relate to the photo above.

Nope. Every single photo had the description above it, including that one. "A more head-on view." Nor is the "head-on" photo random at all.

The "guy holding iPad awkwardly" photo only seems random if you don't recognize it, though. It was (apparently) the model for the "in use" diagram Apple put in their design patent. http://www.google.com/patents/USD504889

You're being a slave to patterns. By my reading it seems at least as likely that a mistake was made when the attachments were added to the text.

The existence of the paragraph break makes it fairly clear (to my reading) that the "it's random enough" paragraph was commentary associated with what had just come.

How is a head-on view of the device random?

Seems a lot more likely to me that the line break was a device to add drama to the "Behold!". Basically I read that as an ellipsis.

This adds a lot to the speculation that the iPad actually came first, and they forked it to launch the iPhone, then came back around to launch the iPad.

I've always found that decision fascinating -- what a brilliant strategic move to recognize that Apple could create the new touch-screen market using phones first, rather than what at that time would have seemed more obvious, a touch computer.

No speculation needed. Steve Jobs himself mentioned it in an interview at D8, two years ago:

“I actually started on a tablet first,” Mr. Jobs said. He explained that nearly 10 years ago, he had the idea of a keyboard-less computer where users typed on a multitouch glass display.

He asked his user interface designers to build a prototype. When he saw the results a few months later, Mr. Jobs was particularly struck by one of the features in the prototype: the ability to scroll up and down at the swipe of a fingertip.

“I thought, ‘My god, we can build a phone with this,’ and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone,” he said.

Mr. Jobs said the tablet got back on track only after Apple had established itself as a major player in the smartphone business.

“Once we got our wind back,” Mr. Jobs said, “we pulled the tablet off the shelf.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/first-came-the-idea...

I'm amazed how close that ~2004 prototype is to what they launched in 2010. I'm really curious what the software on those early models was like.

That can be an advantage of "timeless" industrial design; it doesn't matter how long it takes to bring it to market. The G5/Mac Pro cheese grater hasn't changed since 2003, but what's ten years when you're borrowing from the 1960s?

It also helps that the vast majority of Apple's customers aren't even aware of what the Mac Pro is if they have even heard of it before. Many Apple stores don't even have them in the drop-in area anymore. I can't count how many times people have assumed I own a MacBook Pro and just said it wrong.

If it was a higher profile machine it would have gotten a redesign by now. Hell, the only machine that spent more time in its final form factor was the Xserve, which literally can't be redesigned because there are only so many ways you can build a 1U rack mountable server.

In the iPhone announcement keynote Steve says they toyed with Linux at one point before deciding to fork Mac OS X into iPhone OS.

I wouldn't be surprised if they just ran a skinned full Mac OS X on this one, because it was already there, and it would mean the UI guys could get to work right away on cool stuff (like rubber band scrolling as mentioned). The fact that it's so fat tells me it probably just had a G3 or G4 inside, basically a MacBook with a touchscreen and no hinge.

Judging by the iBook/white MacBook-like white plastic backing, I'd have to agree.

The industrial design doesn't have any bearing on what components are inside.

If this ran software at all (Apple tends to develop the two in isolation: no doubt around this time some people were working on touch interfaces, but nowadays the two don't tend to meet until they're quite far down the line) then I suspect it would have been test software similar to Switch Board, which they install on prototypes at the moment) unless it's pretty close to production.

I would be surprised if this was running G4. Apple's dissatisfaction with IBM was growing circa 2003-04 and if they were noodling around with the form factor they would have been under no pressure to put in a production CPU; they'd have gone with the best technical solution to the problem (which I doubt is a G4. Might have been another IBM chip).

> In the iPhone announcement keynote Steve says they toyed with Linux at one point...

You sure it was in the keynote? I seriously doubt that, I've watched that presentation (his best, no doubt) several times. He wouldn't ruin his biggest product announcement mentioning Linux :)

I think it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs bio. A team (Tony Fadell & iPod team) wanted Linux and Scot Forstall wanted OS X. Scott won.

Edit: It was first published in Business Week a week after Jobs's death: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/13/scott-forstalls-personal...

Since they refer to it as a "mockup", I assumed these had no actual hardware and were just tests of size, form factor, weight, etc.

If it had any hardware, it'd be easiest to just reuse existing stuff - basically an official Modbook[0], only with a capacitive instead of resistive touchscreen.

[0] http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/modbook

According to Steve Jobs, Apple had a working tablet prototype in 2000, and it used multitouch gestures (like swipes).

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/first-came-the-idea...

At the time, only a Public Beta of Mac OS X had been released, which certainly didn't have support for multitouch gestures. Geez, the iPod hadn't even been announced yet, and all Macs had PowerPC processors.

Judging from appearance alone (which isn't much to go on, admittedly), it seems like the device could have been a hit in 2004. Likely the OS and other software was nowhere close to where it needed to be, but it's interesting to imagine where we'd be like right now if the tablet wars started in 2004 (or if Apple had launched then and totally failed).

Why do these photos look like they were taken in the 1920s?

They come from legal documents submitted to the courts, so they were probably greyscale PDFs that had been printed, scanned and printed. If someone could have screenshotted the PDF and included it in a Word document I'm sure they would have somewhere during their lifespan.

Documenting things for inclusion in litigation isn't cheap. There's no reason they needed to print the images on glossy photo paper in full color. Google is asking Oracle to pony up over $4 million just for their bill of costs over the Java API Copyrightability case: http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120706111715...

What prototype does Apple have now for release in 2022? Entering hypersleep...

I still remember how weird it felt with the first cellphones, people looked like talking to themselves.

I could imagine something like "corrective lense" (heh, retina based haha) that goes in front of your eye/eyes, and "projects" in such way that it positions for your brain a virtual image in front of you - HUD display with some kind of UI - and then using voice, or... well awkward (but maybe not in the future) - you use your hands, as if in front of you there is some kind of input device - yet, it's only projection in your eyes.

Some kind of AR is needed to pretend that what's projected to your eyes, in these iLenses :), can go behind the hands, as if you are typing stuff there.

Naaaah... That's too cheezy!

Like Project Glass by Google?

yes, but on your contact lenses.

My next-door neighbor is working on contact lens displays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com