
Earliest known photos of an Apple iPad prototype - ot
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/earliest-known-photos-apple-ipad-prototype
======
_pius
_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.

~~~
sjwright
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.

~~~
dpark
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>

~~~
sjwright
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.

~~~
dpark
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.

------
tsunamifury
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.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/first-came-the-idea-for-a-
tablet-jobs-says/)

------
Simucal
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.

~~~
grecy
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.

~~~
kalleboo
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>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
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...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/first-came-the-idea-for-a-
tablet-jobs-says/)

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.

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

~~~
uxp
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...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20120706111715256)

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

~~~
malkia
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!

~~~
albertzeyer
Like Project Glass by Google?

~~~
malkia
yes, but on your contact lenses.

