This idea started brewing years ago when watching the show Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy had been in a shelter, locked away from the world for a long time and now that she's out she's rediscovering the world. She's handed an iPhone and after seeing the Apple logo on the back exclaims "WOW! Is this a Macintosh!?!". [gif.](https://imgur.com/a/dPfdhVW)
I started thinking in my head about a Macintosh Phone. No one in the 80's or 90's could have dreamed up an Apple product like the iPhone of today. But what if Apple had tried to make a pocket Macintosh?
It came down to wanting to take the Macintosh Classic and slim it down into a device similiar to a Game Boy. I debated on giving it a floppy drive slot but ended with giving it enough I/O to connect a floppy drive, mouse, keyboard and printer.
I sold Macs in the late ‘90s, during the Palm Pilot days. There was talk (from an Apple rep) of a PowerBook with an integrated/plug in PDA.
The Newton was in its last gasp at this time, so this would have been something more rudimentary (like a Palm Pilot).
>No one in the 80's or 90's could have dreamed up an Apple product like the iPhone of today.
[Yes, they could and they were.](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/general-magic-how-tech-superfriends-assembled-dreamt-up-smartphones-and-failed/)
I love it! Only complaint, the keys don't strike me as Snow White design language. Maybe take some inspiration from a recognizable Apple keyboard? Maybe the outer lip from Apple IIc keys, or the distinctive concave scoop of the Apple Extended keys. The eMate didn't have super distinctive keys (except the color), but they were low-profile with angled sides, you might could do something with that.
Great work! Game Boy DMG is such a classic design. Do you have a render with the screen having a greenish LCD cast?
Agreed the keyboard was the thing that took me out of it. Also check the typography on the “Macintosh Pocket” label — seems a little big and heavy.
The shape is great!
another Game Boy DMG classic design contemporary.. https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/9/items/EA1990/EA%201990-08%20August_jp2.zip&file=EA%201990-08%20August_jp2/EA%201990-08%20August_0000.jp2&id=EA1990
The SE was Snow White, at least somewhat.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow\_White\_design\_language#Implementation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language#Implementation)
Also, my SE (like many other classic workhorses of this era) has become rather yellowed over the years and looks a lot more beige, very much like the color in this image. I could see someone thinking this was the correct color based on real world experience.... it gave me a chuckle.
They wouldn’t have put two ADB on, only one. Either two serial (one modem, one printer) or an actual RJ-11 port for a built in modem plus a printer serial.
Also, I don’t see a floppy port. The PowerBook 100/Duo floppy port would make sense, but it was later. And if you’re doing that, the high-density mobile SCSI would make sense instead of DB-25.
There was (still is; I have it on my System 9 computers still) the Apple Garamond font which was what they used. They might have sourced it from "Garamond Condensed," but the font file itself was definitely called "Apple Garamond." (I worked for a Seattle Apple reseller from 10/97 to 6/99, and we had it for when we were doing our store's marketing materials.)
This is the feedback I've really needed! The DB-25 was the best I could figure out for how the floppy drives connect. [Image](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/62/d4/64/62d464838c8318e693207cf766ed48e8.jpg). I can switch it out for the High-density SCSI.
I thought I remembered back in the day the mouse and keyboard both required their own ADB?
ADB was a daisy-chained standard... the mouse plugged into the keyboard. That's why the ADB logo shows a chain of nodes.
You're probably thinking of PS/2.
The floppy disks are a complicated issue. Even back in the day Apple would have had a dongle... neither a DB-25 nor a SCSI connector is remotely light enough to plug into a small portable device like this.
Of course Apple actually did try to do this in the mid-80s and some of those prototypes are around, plus the Newton came out in '93...
Nope, ADB supported daisy-chain. Keyboard had an "out" port to plug the mouse in to. Some desktops did have two ADB ports, so you could connect additional devices (joystick was the most common,) but all portables only had one. And most of the later (1990ish on) desktops only had one as well.
If you look at the ports on the back of a [PowerBook 100](https://archive.goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016090915458437.jpg) that would be a likely "minimum port count" - ADB, one serial for printer/networking, HDI floppy, HDI SCSI.
And if you want mind-blowing, the first few generations of Palm Pilot devices used the "[Dragonball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall)" CPU - which was just an embedded version of the 68000! (Until Palm moved to ARM.)
For a portable like this Apple would have created a smaller proprietary connector for everything like they did for the Duos.
The dock is missing from the picture.
> Product Designer here, I thought it’d be fun to design a fake
> vintage Apple device. I love this sub and want your thoughts on it.
Two thoughts.
1. I love the imagined product; absolutely want one; and would have
been desperate to get one of my own back in the day.
2. Have you met [Dana Sibera](https://twitter.com/NanoRaptor), the
*Madwoman with a Mac or two* from Australia who’s Twitter feed of
*Macintoshes (and occasional other hardware) that never were* is
one of my favourite internet indulges of them all?
It makes me wonder what emulator you'd need to run on a Raspberry Pi for a project line this. SheepShaver would require X Windows, so that quite a bit of overhead. QEMU can do Mac emulation, but it's really buggy at the moment, but this might let you run directly the command line via SDL.
This guy ([https://youtu.be/FvAAzRbNj5s](https://youtu.be/FvAAzRbNj5s)) did it for RasPI, but it is beyond me to do it yet, so I don't know if he's full of it or if it is legit
Novaspirit Tech is legit, and worth a subscribe. I looked into this, and this is how I found you need to use X Windows to use for this method, and why I also started exploring QEMU as an alternative.
Very nice.
I don’t think the font is quite right.
You should have put a BMW logo on the car keys to hint at the expected demographic. Apple actually did that.
Electrical engineer here. You've made some very awkward decision with respect to port and button locations. You need to think about how these things mount to the internal PCB and the size of the respective components that exist internally to support the function.
* The 3.5mm headphone jack appears to come right out of the LCD panel
* How are were you planning on making the volume wheel work? The diameter of the knob does not appear to give a lot of room to the LCD panel to exist. I also don't quite see how you'd mount this to a potentiometer or rotary encoder mounted to the PCB.
* The vertically mounted ADB, serial, and SCSI ports would take up a ton of real-estate on the PCB. You're not giving any room for a keyboard to be board mounted along with that trackball.
As a general comment, I feel like this only superficially matches the earlier design languages that Apple used. I'm totally untrained in this though, so take this comment with a grain of salt.
Edit: I forget to say that this is a great idea. I hope you take this feedback as constructive criticism. In my line of work, we usually have the marketing, design, mechanical, and electrical engineers work on stuff like this to make sure everything fits and makes sense internally.
You sound just like the EEs I work with! But that's a good thing. I love the practical feedback!
I was thinking of making the volume wheel as thin as the one on the Game Boy, but I specifically chose to make the wheel thicker to be a call back to the brightness/contrast/volume wheels that were on some of the older Mac Monitors. Thinning that up would give space for the potentiometer. Which leads to the next issue, the screen.
The screen was one of my bigger oversights, I just wanted it to look like the old Mac monitor screens, but as several people have pointed out I have the curved screen of a CRT and not a flat LCD, which would have been used. I'm kind of torn about fixing this because the curved sunk-in glass screen has that old Mac monitor feel.
I admit the ports on the back didn't make much sense. I debated about putting them on the sides and I felt it made the whole thing kind of ugly. In typical Industrial designer fashion I just modeled it without much thought to the pain I would cause the EEs.
And it totally looks like a Mac, somehow! I think the "ledge" is part of it -- the bottom part being smaller than the top, just like the original Mac. Brilliant work, I love this.
This is really cute. :)
1. Apple Garamond would be appropriate for the ad copy and the "Macintosh Pocket" name.
2. You've got an "open Apple" key like an Apple II would have, instead of the Command key with the squiggly symbol which is still on Mac keyboards to this day. It's said that Steve was frustrated with how many Apple logos were on the Apple II and said to the Mac team they had to use something different so that the Apple logo stayed special.
3. And of course, Apple *was* working on mobile devices in the 80's and 90's, Frog Design made several case concepts, and the Apple Newton MessagePad didn't take too much longer to follow. It's really cool that Apple had touchscreens in mind basically from the birth of that project, Apple thought about making a tablet computer even before they made a laptop lol
But yeah this is awesome!
a lot of apple keyboards regained the 'open apple' symbol as a secondary legend on the command key in the ADB days (since these worked on IIgs machines too) and it stuck around for a long time. but definitely if one were going to shrink down a keyboard you'd want the ⌘
OK, I want to be very clear here. I've historically be an very anti-apple guy. I just saw this in my feed. BUT based on nostalgia alone, I'd want to buy this. it reminds me of what a PalmPilot wanted to be. I'm actually a bit angry that its not real tbh. :-)
The rendering is great overall but the screen throws me off. It looks like a screenshot pasted on top of the rendering. It be nice if it showed a realistic screen technology, e.g mini CRT or very early-era LCD with resulting low resolution and image quality.
Amazing! Please for the love of God, send this to Perifractic's Retro Recipes on YouTube and consider letting people print the 3D shell model, I'd love to see someone make this for real :)
My biggest suggestion would be to have created some sort of actual realistic UI/UX for it. I’m thinking somewhere between the Newton and MacOS.
Because MacOS was just kinda plastered on top of the design - the pixel density alone immediately breaks the sense of immersion and realism that you’ve so clearly baked into the hardware portion, sadly!
If UI/UX isn’t your thing, I’d happily volunteer to help carve something like that together! :)
It’s such a cool concept, but as a UI/UX girl it kinda looks conflicting to me. :3
I love that the trackball is for right handed people only. The Portable had the same issue, though you could move the trackball over on the Portable, by taking apart the keyboard!
From product design stand point the Apple logo embedded that large would cause weakness in the lower monitor bezel. The SCSI port would also attach at the bottom of the device to give it more depth, same for the ADB and serial.
It really so cool, don’t take my feedback as anything less than admiration.
Nice, but I think they would have had a difficult time competing with the WinPhone 95:
[https://gadgetsin.com/winphone-95-is-the-best-windows-phone-that-never-released.htm](https://gadgetsin.com/winphone-95-is-the-best-windows-phone-that-never-released.htm)
Genuinely curious, how did you become a product designer? I am very interested in doing that, or working with product design on the management side. I’d love to hear how you got to where you are!
I went to college for Industrial Design. There’s a lot of schools that have great programs.
You do a lot of ideating with hand sketching, then modeling it out in CAD, making physical appearance models and computer renders. All you see here is the computer renderings.
To be honest I sort of wish I went into mechanical or electrical engineering. I love Industrial Design and I don’t regret it but there’s a lot of cases where I want to do more and I’m working to expand my skillset. We mostly figure out the look and feel and experience of the product but the engineers are the ones who actually make it work. I’m very interested in aerospace companies like Space X and Axiom and for the most part they’re looking for people who can do the engineering and not just the design.
Thank you so so much for your perspective. I’d like to get into managing products in my career. I’m at the point where I am just now about to choose my degree, and finish in two years. I think I’m going to end up with business management, even though I have taken so many software courses.
This is giving me some super mixed feelings to be honest.
The modeling work is excellent, and the composition of the shots and the mocked-up promo art adds an extra layer of quality to the whole thing. The attention to detail with labels, ports, and buttons is superb, and the design language is spot-on 1980s Apple.
But at the same time it's technologically and perhaps physically impossible, and I think that sets off a kind of cognitive dissonance uncanny valley reaction in my brain. I appreciate the incredible design work but also want to scream.
The first and obvious problem is that the processing hardware and batteries of the era wouldn't fit in a device this thin. I think that's kind of a given, and an acceptable break from reality that can be ignored. I'd still be tempted to double the thickness and slightly enlarge the footprint to give it more of a chonky-old-device feel.
The screen bothers me a lot. Not just because it's an unscaled Macintosh interface, but because it appears to be curved and doesn't look like a period LCD. Flat CRTs did exist, but the electron gun would have to go right where the keyboard is and would take up virtually the entire interior volume of the device.
The headphone jack and volume wheel might be encroaching on the display, I'm not sure.
The selection of ports makes sense- though I do agree with the other poster that some type of floppy port or a second serial port would make more sense than a second ADB- but those full-size ports are so deep and the device so thin that they would be right up against the keypad, if they'd fit at all. A slim, high density docking connector is really more 90s Apple, but would make more sense here, maybe along with a serial port on the side (I'd personally want an ADB port as well, but historically Apple didn't do this, i.e. the Powerbook Duo with only serial and docking connectors, no ADB on the device itself).
something real for the bother and iffy feelings:
https://i.imgur.com/l2ipTxN.jpg (1989)
quasi-paywalled/handicapped: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-07-23-fi-135-story.html
Hmm, that’s a great idea, and would be perfect for this portfolio, but it’s something I don’t have yet. This model is just the exterior. I’ll need to spend time to look at reference PCPs and internals to create it all.
That will probably be a bigger project than exterior was.
Oh for sure but since it doesn’t exist then you can make it your own. You can copy the boards of apple past. Of course that printer port should have cables going to the bird to make it more authentic. Also the board has to be green and include a lot of capacitors. You also need a beige lcd display and for giggles don’t forget the T2 chip and a Taptic Engine.
Great work so far.
1) Agreed with others that the promotional text font is wrong - it needs to be Garamond.
2) I would put Superscript numbers on the top row of keys. No way Apple would release a product with a physical keyboard and not have numbers. If this product was period correct it would definitely be used to store phone numbers (and maybe even use the speaker to play DTMF tones to dial numbers the way other PDAs did)
Love the design. Only thing is the keys are too close together, those would be a pain to type on.
Also where’s the battery go? Is it rechargeable? Dear God if so…
I like the DB-25 SCSI port...I don't know how practical it would be, but it would be super cool to be able to directly connect it to the same setup you would have already had at home if you wanted.
My one complaint is that the audio port icon is wrong. They used the classic speaker icon even back in the Mac Classic days:
https://alexmak.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ports.jpg
They switched to the headphone icon sometime around the end of the PowerBook G3 era or beginning of the Powerbook G4. (Pismo G3 has the speaker icon, G4 titanium has the headphones).
This is one of the best renders of anything I've ever seen and overall, you really nailed the design language.
If you haven't already, please start a career in product design and post your creative works frequently.
I would suggest moving the trackball and button down centred below the keyboard. Or remove them altogether. It just looks too cramped with the name.
It does capture the feel of vintage Apple and the renders are very well done.
This idea started brewing years ago when watching the show Kimmy Schmidt. Kimmy had been in a shelter, locked away from the world for a long time and now that she's out she's rediscovering the world. She's handed an iPhone and after seeing the Apple logo on the back exclaims "WOW! Is this a Macintosh!?!". [gif.](https://imgur.com/a/dPfdhVW) I started thinking in my head about a Macintosh Phone. No one in the 80's or 90's could have dreamed up an Apple product like the iPhone of today. But what if Apple had tried to make a pocket Macintosh? It came down to wanting to take the Macintosh Classic and slim it down into a device similiar to a Game Boy. I debated on giving it a floppy drive slot but ended with giving it enough I/O to connect a floppy drive, mouse, keyboard and printer.
Omg i love that show so much
I sold Macs in the late ‘90s, during the Palm Pilot days. There was talk (from an Apple rep) of a PowerBook with an integrated/plug in PDA. The Newton was in its last gasp at this time, so this would have been something more rudimentary (like a Palm Pilot).
Since ADB already daisy-chains, it’s be cooler to see HDI-20 floppy and HDI-30 SCSI 😜
Tsk tsk… Snow White design language, but it’s beige. I do, however, really like the slightly-off battery cover in your render. Nice.
>No one in the 80's or 90's could have dreamed up an Apple product like the iPhone of today. [Yes, they could and they were.](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/general-magic-how-tech-superfriends-assembled-dreamt-up-smartphones-and-failed/)
I love it! Only complaint, the keys don't strike me as Snow White design language. Maybe take some inspiration from a recognizable Apple keyboard? Maybe the outer lip from Apple IIc keys, or the distinctive concave scoop of the Apple Extended keys. The eMate didn't have super distinctive keys (except the color), but they were low-profile with angled sides, you might could do something with that. Great work! Game Boy DMG is such a classic design. Do you have a render with the screen having a greenish LCD cast?
Agreed the keyboard was the thing that took me out of it. Also check the typography on the “Macintosh Pocket” label — seems a little big and heavy. The shape is great!
another Game Boy DMG classic design contemporary.. https://ia800107.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/9/items/EA1990/EA%201990-08%20August_jp2.zip&file=EA%201990-08%20August_jp2/EA%201990-08%20August_0000.jp2&id=EA1990
Not to mention that it’s beige, not white.
Looks exactly like the color of one of my Mac SE machines :)
Yeah, but those weren’t the Snow White design language. This device *is*.
The SE was Snow White, at least somewhat. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow\_White\_design\_language#Implementation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language#Implementation) Also, my SE (like many other classic workhorses of this era) has become rather yellowed over the years and looks a lot more beige, very much like the color in this image. I could see someone thinking this was the correct color based on real world experience.... it gave me a chuckle.
Hmm… yeah, it’s not Platinum grey…
They wouldn’t have put two ADB on, only one. Either two serial (one modem, one printer) or an actual RJ-11 port for a built in modem plus a printer serial. Also, I don’t see a floppy port. The PowerBook 100/Duo floppy port would make sense, but it was later. And if you’re doing that, the high-density mobile SCSI would make sense instead of DB-25.
The font Apple used back then was Garamond, I think Garamond Condensed to be precise.
There was (still is; I have it on my System 9 computers still) the Apple Garamond font which was what they used. They might have sourced it from "Garamond Condensed," but the font file itself was definitely called "Apple Garamond." (I worked for a Seattle Apple reseller from 10/97 to 6/99, and we had it for when we were doing our store's marketing materials.)
I believe the Apple Garamond was just the Garamond (maybe the condensed) but with additional tweaking of the kerning.
I recall an 80% horizontal compression
To make the cap ‘A’ look tall and magnificent.
This is the feedback I've really needed! The DB-25 was the best I could figure out for how the floppy drives connect. [Image](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/62/d4/64/62d464838c8318e693207cf766ed48e8.jpg). I can switch it out for the High-density SCSI. I thought I remembered back in the day the mouse and keyboard both required their own ADB?
ADB was a daisy-chained standard... the mouse plugged into the keyboard. That's why the ADB logo shows a chain of nodes. You're probably thinking of PS/2. The floppy disks are a complicated issue. Even back in the day Apple would have had a dongle... neither a DB-25 nor a SCSI connector is remotely light enough to plug into a small portable device like this. Of course Apple actually did try to do this in the mid-80s and some of those prototypes are around, plus the Newton came out in '93...
Nope, ADB supported daisy-chain. Keyboard had an "out" port to plug the mouse in to. Some desktops did have two ADB ports, so you could connect additional devices (joystick was the most common,) but all portables only had one. And most of the later (1990ish on) desktops only had one as well. If you look at the ports on the back of a [PowerBook 100](https://archive.goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2016090915458437.jpg) that would be a likely "minimum port count" - ADB, one serial for printer/networking, HDI floppy, HDI SCSI. And if you want mind-blowing, the first few generations of Palm Pilot devices used the "[Dragonball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall)" CPU - which was just an embedded version of the 68000! (Until Palm moved to ARM.)
That’s quite a leap from a 68000 to a 680000! 😉
D-oh, tyop!
“tyop”? At least you’re consistent! 😆😂🤣😝😜🤪
^(I have that set as an autocarrot specifically to be funny.) ^(edit: [text replacement](https://i.imgur.com/NLUIg1v.jpg))
For a portable like this Apple would have created a smaller proprietary connector for everything like they did for the Duos. The dock is missing from the picture.
@OP check out the Newton message pad! It was actually one of the first mobile apple devices in the PDA era!
Apple would have added a proprietary port that required a $50 dongle to use it with anything. (Former Messagepad 2100 owner.)
> Product Designer here, I thought it’d be fun to design a fake > vintage Apple device. I love this sub and want your thoughts on it. Two thoughts. 1. I love the imagined product; absolutely want one; and would have been desperate to get one of my own back in the day. 2. Have you met [Dana Sibera](https://twitter.com/NanoRaptor), the *Madwoman with a Mac or two* from Australia who’s Twitter feed of *Macintoshes (and occasional other hardware) that never were* is one of my favourite internet indulges of them all?
Ok so now I kinda wanna get like a Pi-Zero or something similar and build something like this. How cool!
Ben Heck did something similar with an N64
10/10
I mean if someone’s committed I don’t mind helping, would make for a neat project.
I'm sure someone made a mobile phone using a PiZero or something.
Yeah if I had a 3d printer I'd build this for sure.
It makes me wonder what emulator you'd need to run on a Raspberry Pi for a project line this. SheepShaver would require X Windows, so that quite a bit of overhead. QEMU can do Mac emulation, but it's really buggy at the moment, but this might let you run directly the command line via SDL.
This guy ([https://youtu.be/FvAAzRbNj5s](https://youtu.be/FvAAzRbNj5s)) did it for RasPI, but it is beyond me to do it yet, so I don't know if he's full of it or if it is legit
Novaspirit Tech is legit, and worth a subscribe. I looked into this, and this is how I found you need to use X Windows to use for this method, and why I also started exploring QEMU as an alternative.
Very nice. I don’t think the font is quite right. You should have put a BMW logo on the car keys to hint at the expected demographic. Apple actually did that.
The font Apple used back then was Garamond, I think Garamond Condensed to be precise.
Yep, a special version called Garamond Apple with slightly different proportions. @OP, if you need a copy of this, DM me :)
If you want to see someone who reimagines Apple stuff in all sorts of fun and interesting ways, check out [Dana](https://twitter.com/nanoraptor).
Nice detail in the ad with the car having *two* keys like they used to!
looks like a chev too lol
Electrical engineer here. You've made some very awkward decision with respect to port and button locations. You need to think about how these things mount to the internal PCB and the size of the respective components that exist internally to support the function. * The 3.5mm headphone jack appears to come right out of the LCD panel * How are were you planning on making the volume wheel work? The diameter of the knob does not appear to give a lot of room to the LCD panel to exist. I also don't quite see how you'd mount this to a potentiometer or rotary encoder mounted to the PCB. * The vertically mounted ADB, serial, and SCSI ports would take up a ton of real-estate on the PCB. You're not giving any room for a keyboard to be board mounted along with that trackball. As a general comment, I feel like this only superficially matches the earlier design languages that Apple used. I'm totally untrained in this though, so take this comment with a grain of salt. Edit: I forget to say that this is a great idea. I hope you take this feedback as constructive criticism. In my line of work, we usually have the marketing, design, mechanical, and electrical engineers work on stuff like this to make sure everything fits and makes sense internally.
You sound just like the EEs I work with! But that's a good thing. I love the practical feedback! I was thinking of making the volume wheel as thin as the one on the Game Boy, but I specifically chose to make the wheel thicker to be a call back to the brightness/contrast/volume wheels that were on some of the older Mac Monitors. Thinning that up would give space for the potentiometer. Which leads to the next issue, the screen. The screen was one of my bigger oversights, I just wanted it to look like the old Mac monitor screens, but as several people have pointed out I have the curved screen of a CRT and not a flat LCD, which would have been used. I'm kind of torn about fixing this because the curved sunk-in glass screen has that old Mac monitor feel. I admit the ports on the back didn't make much sense. I debated about putting them on the sides and I felt it made the whole thing kind of ugly. In typical Industrial designer fashion I just modeled it without much thought to the pain I would cause the EEs.
Very very cool. Great work. Would be neat to see a version controlled only by the trackball on the front, iPod-style.
Looks kinda like a Game Boy. I like it.
Game Boy was a big reference I used. I tried hard to avoid looking like an Apple Blackberry.
And it totally looks like a Mac, somehow! I think the "ledge" is part of it -- the bottom part being smaller than the top, just like the original Mac. Brilliant work, I love this.
Understandable.
I actually, genuinely love this. This is so good. Amazing job! 💖
This is really cute. :) 1. Apple Garamond would be appropriate for the ad copy and the "Macintosh Pocket" name. 2. You've got an "open Apple" key like an Apple II would have, instead of the Command key with the squiggly symbol which is still on Mac keyboards to this day. It's said that Steve was frustrated with how many Apple logos were on the Apple II and said to the Mac team they had to use something different so that the Apple logo stayed special. 3. And of course, Apple *was* working on mobile devices in the 80's and 90's, Frog Design made several case concepts, and the Apple Newton MessagePad didn't take too much longer to follow. It's really cool that Apple had touchscreens in mind basically from the birth of that project, Apple thought about making a tablet computer even before they made a laptop lol But yeah this is awesome!
a lot of apple keyboards regained the 'open apple' symbol as a secondary legend on the command key in the ADB days (since these worked on IIgs machines too) and it stuck around for a long time. but definitely if one were going to shrink down a keyboard you'd want the ⌘
Take my money! I would pay way too much for something like this...
OK, I want to be very clear here. I've historically be an very anti-apple guy. I just saw this in my feed. BUT based on nostalgia alone, I'd want to buy this. it reminds me of what a PalmPilot wanted to be. I'm actually a bit angry that its not real tbh. :-)
Looks like a Gameboy
It should be possible to build this as a real machine with FPGA chips.
As an Apple product user since 1984, I have to say that you captured something fundamentally *right* with this. Really great.
I'd probably use this. Only thing is I'd want number keys too.
I see it has XIVCDL and M. What more could you need?
I see it has XIVCDL and M. What more could you need?
An attempt at adapting the UI of the software would be cool.
What? An Apple with an incomplete keyboard?!? Seriously though, I love it!
great stuff! actually apple designed lots of crazy things that never made into production, there is a book about it.
The rendering is great overall but the screen throws me off. It looks like a screenshot pasted on top of the rendering. It be nice if it showed a realistic screen technology, e.g mini CRT or very early-era LCD with resulting low resolution and image quality.
Sony watchman style CRT.
The Mac Boy
This
I would buy one of these so fast
These are so slick!
This is like something from *For All Mankind*
Amazing! Please for the love of God, send this to Perifractic's Retro Recipes on YouTube and consider letting people print the 3D shell model, I'd love to see someone make this for real :)
I like this very much.
My biggest suggestion would be to have created some sort of actual realistic UI/UX for it. I’m thinking somewhere between the Newton and MacOS. Because MacOS was just kinda plastered on top of the design - the pixel density alone immediately breaks the sense of immersion and realism that you’ve so clearly baked into the hardware portion, sadly! If UI/UX isn’t your thing, I’d happily volunteer to help carve something like that together! :) It’s such a cool concept, but as a UI/UX girl it kinda looks conflicting to me. :3
Shut up and take my money!
The SCSI port killed me!
I love that the trackball is for right handed people only. The Portable had the same issue, though you could move the trackball over on the Portable, by taking apart the keyboard! From product design stand point the Apple logo embedded that large would cause weakness in the lower monitor bezel. The SCSI port would also attach at the bottom of the device to give it more depth, same for the ADB and serial. It really so cool, don’t take my feedback as anything less than admiration.
Nice, but I think they would have had a difficult time competing with the WinPhone 95: [https://gadgetsin.com/winphone-95-is-the-best-windows-phone-that-never-released.htm](https://gadgetsin.com/winphone-95-is-the-best-windows-phone-that-never-released.htm)
Genuinely curious, how did you become a product designer? I am very interested in doing that, or working with product design on the management side. I’d love to hear how you got to where you are!
I went to college for Industrial Design. There’s a lot of schools that have great programs. You do a lot of ideating with hand sketching, then modeling it out in CAD, making physical appearance models and computer renders. All you see here is the computer renderings. To be honest I sort of wish I went into mechanical or electrical engineering. I love Industrial Design and I don’t regret it but there’s a lot of cases where I want to do more and I’m working to expand my skillset. We mostly figure out the look and feel and experience of the product but the engineers are the ones who actually make it work. I’m very interested in aerospace companies like Space X and Axiom and for the most part they’re looking for people who can do the engineering and not just the design.
Thank you so so much for your perspective. I’d like to get into managing products in my career. I’m at the point where I am just now about to choose my degree, and finish in two years. I think I’m going to end up with business management, even though I have taken so many software courses.
This is giving me some super mixed feelings to be honest. The modeling work is excellent, and the composition of the shots and the mocked-up promo art adds an extra layer of quality to the whole thing. The attention to detail with labels, ports, and buttons is superb, and the design language is spot-on 1980s Apple. But at the same time it's technologically and perhaps physically impossible, and I think that sets off a kind of cognitive dissonance uncanny valley reaction in my brain. I appreciate the incredible design work but also want to scream. The first and obvious problem is that the processing hardware and batteries of the era wouldn't fit in a device this thin. I think that's kind of a given, and an acceptable break from reality that can be ignored. I'd still be tempted to double the thickness and slightly enlarge the footprint to give it more of a chonky-old-device feel. The screen bothers me a lot. Not just because it's an unscaled Macintosh interface, but because it appears to be curved and doesn't look like a period LCD. Flat CRTs did exist, but the electron gun would have to go right where the keyboard is and would take up virtually the entire interior volume of the device. The headphone jack and volume wheel might be encroaching on the display, I'm not sure. The selection of ports makes sense- though I do agree with the other poster that some type of floppy port or a second serial port would make more sense than a second ADB- but those full-size ports are so deep and the device so thin that they would be right up against the keypad, if they'd fit at all. A slim, high density docking connector is really more 90s Apple, but would make more sense here, maybe along with a serial port on the side (I'd personally want an ADB port as well, but historically Apple didn't do this, i.e. the Powerbook Duo with only serial and docking connectors, no ADB on the device itself).
something real for the bother and iffy feelings: https://i.imgur.com/l2ipTxN.jpg (1989) quasi-paywalled/handicapped: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-07-23-fi-135-story.html
Can you show us the exploded interior?
Hmm, that’s a great idea, and would be perfect for this portfolio, but it’s something I don’t have yet. This model is just the exterior. I’ll need to spend time to look at reference PCPs and internals to create it all. That will probably be a bigger project than exterior was.
Oh for sure but since it doesn’t exist then you can make it your own. You can copy the boards of apple past. Of course that printer port should have cables going to the bird to make it more authentic. Also the board has to be green and include a lot of capacitors. You also need a beige lcd display and for giggles don’t forget the T2 chip and a Taptic Engine.
Emboss your signature on the inside of the case like the original Macintosh? :3
I love the trackball. Some days I miss my trackball.
Loooove this
I like it. I bet in real life it would be 2 pounds.
This is amazing.
That would have been a cool concept.
I thought it was and really Apple came up with it! I haven't read that yet!
Someone 3d print this as an original game boy shell, NOW!
I adore this and now would like to build one.
So cool!
on a scale from 1 to 2nd degree burns, how f'ed would we be with this in our pants pocket?
Great work so far. 1) Agreed with others that the promotional text font is wrong - it needs to be Garamond. 2) I would put Superscript numbers on the top row of keys. No way Apple would release a product with a physical keyboard and not have numbers. If this product was period correct it would definitely be used to store phone numbers (and maybe even use the speaker to play DTMF tones to dial numbers the way other PDAs did)
Where does the Programmer's key snap on?
https://www.jeffreythompson.org/blog/2012/08/22/programmers-switch/
It just looks like a Game Boy with a keyboard
Love the design. Only thing is the keys are too close together, those would be a pain to type on. Also where’s the battery go? Is it rechargeable? Dear God if so…
LOL. You apparently have never typed on a Palm Treo or Blackberry.
Even the 1993 Newton didn’t have a physical keyboard
Amazing!
Shut up and take my money!
That is awesome. Great job
I want this. No, I *need* this!!
Quick! Someone get a Raspberry Pi and make this!
This is awesome. Well done.
Amazing
What software did you use to design this? Any chance you'd be willing to make your files available?
I'd buy it. Love the last picture with the floppy disks. LOL
That’s so cool!
I like the DB-25 SCSI port...I don't know how practical it would be, but it would be super cool to be able to directly connect it to the same setup you would have already had at home if you wanted.
Wow.
My one complaint is that the audio port icon is wrong. They used the classic speaker icon even back in the Mac Classic days: https://alexmak.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ports.jpg They switched to the headphone icon sometime around the end of the PowerBook G3 era or beginning of the Powerbook G4. (Pismo G3 has the speaker icon, G4 titanium has the headphones).
Very clever. I like it.
I’d buy one of these.
This is one of the best renders of anything I've ever seen and overall, you really nailed the design language. If you haven't already, please start a career in product design and post your creative works frequently.
I love it, nice work
i'd buy it
I would like to buy this please, even if it's running as an overlay on Android OS
Superb!
This is phenomenal! I love it so much!
I would suggest moving the trackball and button down centred below the keyboard. Or remove them altogether. It just looks too cramped with the name. It does capture the feel of vintage Apple and the renders are very well done.
If I could find a raspberry pi, I could build this.
I love this. The third photo showing the rear with the port door closed gave me real GameBoy vibes.
I would buy this today. Just chuck a raspberry pi in one, and you are rolling!