Oh man i miss that iPod nano. First apple product i ever bought.
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Apple Once Prototyped a Mac Mini With an iPod Dock
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And there would've been someone who figured out how to turn that into an extra FireWire port, since the iPod was FireWire capable.
...unless of course you owned a built-in CD/radio/USB car receiver prior to car models 2009 and onward .... and then you were screwed. (I know. It happened to me when I bought my new Camry, only to find in the newer iDevices Apple had decided on a whim to change just what those 30 pins connected to .... none of which were compatible with any model released prior to Apple's non-sensical rewiring of the 30 pins (whether from the car manufacturer or a third-party like Pioneet et al).
Even the Car Dealers were pissed off.
This was actually real. I have one. 😉
We did not ship it because at the last minute the iPod connected changed, and it did not make sense to ship the depreciated connector.
Also, the Mac Mini had an internal connection for PCIe (You could solder on a connector and run a wire out the back.)
And many folks did not know, but the Mac Mini could run off 12v. The 18v input was only to support the FireWire output. In fact, for the DARPA Grand challenge for autonomous vehicles (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/-grand-challenge-for-autonomous-vehicles), many of the cars used Mac Minis as the onboard processor!
We did not ship it because at the last minute the iPod connected changed, and it did not make sense to ship the depreciated connector.
Also, the Mac Mini had an internal connection for PCIe (You could solder on a connector and run a wire out the back.)
And many folks did not know, but the Mac Mini could run off 12v. The 18v input was only to support the FireWire output. In fact, for the DARPA Grand challenge for autonomous vehicles (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/-grand-challenge-for-autonomous-vehicles), many of the cars used Mac Minis as the onboard processor!
I (Jony Ive) am leaking to you guys that this prototype is not scrapped yet .... We will be releasing it as the next Mac mini update 5 years later!! It will take 5 years for us to update the Mac mini just like how the current Mac mini took 4 years to be updated (2014 to 2018 had no updates) because we don't care about the Mac anymore 😔 it's all about services these days! What a great departure from Steve Job's original focus on the mac!!!
After the Apple management team realised that it could be dong-lified and the adapters and cables sold separately this entire design team was fired.
I remember this, too. The logic board on the early Mac Minis had the solder pads for a 30-pin connector in the production models, but not the connector itself. It was at the time when Back to My Mac was active, so that there was speculation that you’d put your user directory on an iPod and carry it all with you.
In the end, Steve Jobs’s vision was what became iCloud Drive. There’s a recording of him at MacWorld just before he came back from NeXT, talking about how he stores all his files on the server, never backs up and never loses any files. So the idea of putting all your files on an easily lost or damaged device was unlikely to fly.
That just left music/video transfer which is more easily done with a cable.
"It couldn't be simpler", "Everything is just a few hundred clicks away". Oh that satire is sooo good.
If only they had called it the magic wheel...
I still use mine daily, and love it. It is now optically connected to an Airport Express for Airplay 2.
Granted, it never did replace my receiver and speakers, but for kitchen/bedroom use I like the sound a lot better than that of my Audio Pro Allroom Air One or Libratone ZIPP.
So Apple was both seriously considering this and yet the project didn't see the light of day? Ugh, macrumors hype about something that didn't happen fifteen years ago. Give me a break.
I think they have shifted focus towards how much money they can make instead of innovating. And with Jony and now Phil gone, I think it will only get worse. I am not saying they aren't making great products, they just don't seem to be taking risks anymore. I think it is insane that the iMac hasn't had a substantial redesign since 2009 but the price sure has gone up.
Mine is still going strong. This is a case where the product was good, but the marketing claims and pricing was certainly not.
The looks are certainly an example of the classic Apple design language which is still used for the AirPods today.
Yeah, but it was more than that. We saw this exact thing about a year ago. The dock interface was fully-funcitonal.
Thank you for finding this. I have Iconic, but there's more of this somewhere out there on the web. I saw a complete disassembly of it, as well as proof that the dock was recognized as a USB bus device when an iPod was plugged into it.
Yep and we would also still be using 15 pin serial ports and parallel ports if folks werent forced to upgrade and be pissed off.