Historic Apple Prototypes: Apple Mouse, Cube, Mac Tablet
The reason everyone is so interested in the leaked Apple iPhone goes beyond natural interest in the product. It's just that Apple usually does such a good job at keeping the their hardware under wraps. The lost iPhone(s) are easily the largest leak in the company's history.
Of course, Apple's labs are always brimming with activity, and many of these prototype designs eventually fall into the hands of collectors in the years to come. Here are a few interesting ones that were successfully designed behind closed doors.
A
clear-case Prototype Apple Mouse apparently given to some Apple employees. It's labeled "Prototype" on the bottom and lights up when the
it's plugged in.
A metal industrial design prototype of the
Apple Macintosh G4 Cube. The
production cube was, well, closer to the dimensions of an actual cube. The final Cube design was actually leaked prior to its release, though there were a lot of doubts about its authenticity at the time.
Apple's tablet efforts go back a long way. This
PenLite design is from 1992 and represents a pen-based Mac built from a Powerbook design.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....