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Early Apple Employees Auction Killer Collectibles

If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.
Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.

What’s on the block:

Apple [...]

Video: There’s Sexy Technology, Then There’s This…

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You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.
BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of [...]

Bottom-Feeding Jeweler Unveils Despicable Diamond iPad for $20,000

We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats [...]

iPhone App Magnets To Appify Your Fridge

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If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.
Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. [...]

XO Laptop is eMate Redux?

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The One Laptop Per Child initiative seeks to bring technology to the developing world to make up for historic educational and economic inequities. Though I think the project has plenty of problems (Did anyone check to see that a laptop was the best way to repair inequalities in Africa and South America? Or, as Om Malik so succinctly put it, “What about the people?“), the actual XO laptop they’ve produced is quite cool and has capabilities rare on mainstream machines.

The machine is outfitted with a touch screen, a stylus, and a keyboard. In other words, it’s exactly like Apple’s eMate, a Newton product line extension from 1996 targeted at the educational market. Jason O’Grady has a great rundown of both the XO and the eMate over at ZDNet, but there’s a bigger point here that hasn’t been made: Technologies are not inherently interesting or bound to succeed. They require the right context and adoption strategies to take off. Though the XO is far from guaranteed to succeed in the long run, if it does, it won’t be because its technology or design is so superior to the eMate’s. It will be because it connects with people in just the right way. That’s all innovation is — the right idea at the right time for the right people.

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About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

Email the author | Read more posts by Pete Mortensen.

2 comments

    “exactly like Apple’s eMate”?!?!

    That’s an astonishingly ignorant statement.

    True, there are superficial similarities (and some echoes of the eMate in the OLPC), but these are radically different systems, especially in terms of their screen, power and networking technologies/capabilities – all their hardware and software in general, actually.

    The eMate was a Newton in a clamshell case with a built-in keyboard. That’s it. The OLPC is quite a bit more. You could call the eMate a precursor to it, but not “exactly like” it.

    Um, the XO-1 doesn’t have a touchscreen. As much as I love the eMate, the XO-1 can do mesh wifi networking, videoconferencing, can be programmed and reveals it’s source code, and beyond all it’s technical wizbangs, it will be actually marketed better and in the end, won’t be Steve’d. The poor eMate never had a chance. The XO-1, might with the power of the community and FOSS, make it.

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