Apple iPhone turns 15 years old today. To mark the occasion, YouTuber Luke Miani showed off a handful of iPhone prototypes. They feature pre-release software and somewhat unfamiliar designs.
To give you an idea of how rare these handsets are, two of them are valued at $500,000 apiece.
The first computer built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is the Apple-1, right? Not quite. Turns out before that was the “Apple Computer A.”
Unfortunately, the actual Apple prototype with that name was not found. But pictures of it from 1976 were. And they show details of this handmade Apple prototype.
Photos purporting to show an Apple MagSafe Battery Pack prototype surfaced Wednesday, revealing an earlier design with a glossy finish and a repositioned charging LED. The device also features internal identification markings.
The device looks genuine, but it’s very different from Apple’s final product, which went on sale last July at $99.
AirPods come in white, white and also white. But a collector scored a prototype pair in very unusual translucent blue casings.
Taste a rare look at a product that’ll never hit store shelves.
Apple once made an iPhone with the Death Star in place of the usual company logo. It’s an iPhone 4 prototype — and an infamous bit of Apple history.
Watch a just-released video overview of the device to find out how it’s different from the smartphone Apple actually shipped.
A Twitter user by the name of @AppleDemoYT has posted images online they claim to be an early Apple Watch prototype, built as part of the pre-production process before Apple introduced the device in 2015.
Such prototypes are very rare, with Apple preferring not to show images that shed light on how it develops products. Somehow this one made it out in one piece — provided it’s legitimate, of course.
Apple reportedly explored adding an iPod port to the Mac mini. Images of a prototype unit surfaced online over the weekend, showing a product Apple decided not to release.
A prototype Apple Macintosh used in the development of MacWrite can be yours, if you can scratch up about $180,000. It’s almost unique because of a disk drive different from the one used when this revolutionary computer shipped.
An Apple prototype of an early laptop, one of only four known to exist, sold on eBay Tuesday evening for more than $16,000.
It was the second time the owner of the Apple Macintosh Portable M5126 – fully functional and with a rare-for-its-time backlit screen – tried selling the test device on the auction site. Last month, bidding closed at just over $10,000 but the buyer backed out.
A rare Macintosh prototype that was once rescued from the trash recently sold for more than $10,000 on eBay.
But the winning bidder backed out and now, the clear-plastic Macintosh Portable M5126 laptop is back on the auction site. Bidding started at 99 cents with no reserve.
The world had never seen anything like the iPhone when Apple launched the device on June 29, 2007. But the touchscreen device that blew everyone’s minds immediately didn’t come about so easily.
The iPhone was the result of years of arduous work by Apple’s industrial designers. They labored over a long string of prototypes and CAD designs in their quest to produce the ultimate smartphone.
This excerpt from my book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products offers an inside account of the iPhone’s birth.
This post contains affiliate links. Cult of Mac may earn a commission when you use our links to buy items.
An ultra-rare Apple-1 prototype used by Steve Jobs as a demo unit is going on display at a Seattle computer museum. It’s the crown jewel of an impressive collection of vintage Apple gear that will be housed in a new wing opening Friday at Living Computers: Museum + Labs.
Lāth Carlson, the museum’s executive director, calls the Apple prototype “the most important computer in history” — and also “the most boring to look at.”
This week on The CultCast: We laugh and cringe about Apple’s weirdest, wackiest and worst products of all time! Plus: How Michael Scott almost single-handedly destroyed Apple; the cool new features in the iOS and macOS betas; facial recognition is coming to iPhone; and a look at the beautiful prototypes that led to some of Apple’s most iconic products.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. It’s simple to accept Apple Pay and sell your wares with your very own Squarespace.com website. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10 percent off any hosting plan.
The original iPhone nearly came with a digital click wheel that mimicked the iPod’s interface, according to video of an alleged prototype running the software that has not previously been made public.
Former Apple engineers confirmed in the past that Apple created a click-wheel-based solution for the iPhone’s software during the early stages of development, but until now, no one outside Apple had seen what it looked like.
Serious Apple prototype collectors usually know exactly what they are looking for as they try to build a physical timeline of each distinct device ever made. A Holy Grail artifact would be an Apple I. Fewer than 50 are said to exist.
Hap Plain wants the pieces none of us, including him, have ever seen.
He is one of a very select subculture who search the world over for Apple prototypes. Before being polished into the personal computing icons of our lives, Apple computers, iPods, iPhones and other devices start out as crude, unfinished test models so glitches and user experience hangups can be identified and worked out before hitting the market.
Progress on the Apple Car is coming along faster than anticipated after Project Titan hit some speed bumps earlier this year.
Based on a batch of new hires, it appears that Apple Car parts may have already entered the prototyping phase at the company’s Product Realization Lab, where machinists and engineers produce and test product designs.
What will the iPhone 7 look like? Even Apple doesn’t know. According to a new rumor out of China, Apple is currently experimenting with at least five distinct iPhone 7 models, each with a totally different combination of hardware, including a possible AMOLED screen, a USB Type-C connector instead of Lightning, and a fingerprint reader built into the display.
The Apple Watch was created under crazy, sleep-deprived conditions, with its first working prototype being an iPhone strapped to the wrist with a Velcro strap, and the Digital Crown represented by a custom dongle plugged into the bottom of the phone via the headphone jack.
Those are a couple of the revelations from a new in-depth article, reporting on the creation of Apple’s eagerly anticipated wearable device.