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Apple’s First iPhone Was Made in 1983 [PICS]

A closer ancestor would be the Newton IMO, given it's 'PDA-like' form factor. Interesting find though!
 
greygray said:
A closer ancestor would be the Newton IMO, given it's 'PDA-like' form factor. Interesting find though!
Click to expand...

BAH! Newton was a notwen, a PDA was NEVER designed to be a smartphone, or a phone ... this is why PocketPC-PE's like the iPaq failed after initial stints of having just data access (something even the current iPad 2 has - not a phone app natively), and even the HandSpring devices failed at - along with the original Treo 270/280's.

Newton was great but its home was being a PDA/Tablet ... this is why Apple brought back its original project designer and lead just prior to the iPad 2 introduction.

Still this is a GREAT find!!
 
gkarris said:
It's also in a book, Apple Design....


You should see Apple's prototype tablets... :eek:

;)
Click to expand...

Thanks guys, happy to share. Saw a link on Facebook so I google'd and came across it. Very interesting.

I think there's a link to a very old iPad concept in the article I linked :)
 
Cool. They had an iPad in 1983 too.

apple_ipad.jpg
 
Prom1 said:
BAH! Newton was a notwen, a PDA was NEVER designed to be a smartphone, or a phone ... this is why PocketPC-PE's like the iPaq failed after initial stints of having just data access (something even the current iPad 2 has - not a phone app natively), and even the HandSpring devices failed at - along with the original Treo 270/280's.

Newton was great but its home was being a PDA/Tablet ... this is why Apple brought back its original project designer and lead just prior to the iPad 2 introduction.

Still this is a GREAT find!!
Click to expand...

Probably because the price of the technology at the time of integrating phone service in the device. However:

Newton can also dial a phone number through the built-in speaker of the Newton device by simply holding a telephone handset up to the speaker and transmitting the appropriate tones. Fax and printing support is also built in at the operating system level, although it requires peripherals such as parallel adapters, PCMCIA cards, or serial modems, the most notable of which is the lightweight Newton Fax Modem released by Apple in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad#Connectivity

It would have been possible to release a usable Newton smartphone. In fact, some users have been able to do use the newton as a cell phone with additional hardware.

Remember, the Newton came out in 1993, and sold for about $400. The first smartphone was also released in 1993, and cost about $900. Very few people in 1993-1997 would have seen the point of having an integrated phone/PDA device to justify a $1000 price tag.

Unfortunately, Apple lost their ass on Newton, and it scared them away from handheld tablets for a while. Otherwise, we probably would have seen production models of the iPhone rolling out a long time ago.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
The "Find all posts by" and "Find all threads started by" links in the Statistics section of the profile page only show the last 500 posts (nowadays a bit less than that) and last 500 threads (nowadays less than that, thus you will not find waloshin's first post that way, especially with a post/thread ratio of probably less than 2.
Click to expand...
I realized that after I tried to look up mine, and realized both of them had 20 pages specifically.
 
gkarris said:
It's also in a book, Apple Design....


You should see Apple's prototype tablets... :eek:

;)
Click to expand...

It's so unfortunate that that book (AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group [Graphis, 1997]) is out of print and will likely never be revised. It came out right when Jobs came back to Apple and Jonathan Ive was just beginning to become the major player in the ID group. The photos and the back-stories of the prototypes and projects that never saw the light of day were incredibly fascinating, but the book was poorly edited and riddled with typos. Still, it has a treasured place on my bookshelf / coffee table.

The more recently published book, Apple Design, is completely unrelated to the earlier one and is not nearly as good. Without the "what could have been" element of all the prototypes, this book is just not very interesting IMO.
 
Rampant.A.I. said:
Probably because the price of the technology at the time of integrating phone service in the device. However:

Newton can also dial a phone number through the built-in speaker of the Newton device by simply holding a telephone handset up to the speaker and transmitting the appropriate tones. Fax and printing support is also built in at the operating system level, although it requires peripherals such as parallel adapters, PCMCIA cards, or serial modems, the most notable of which is the lightweight Newton Fax Modem released by Apple in 1993.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad#Connectivity

It would have been possible to release a usable Newton smartphone. In fact, some users have been able to do use the newton as a cell phone with additional hardware.

Remember, the Newton came out in 1993, and sold for about $400. The first smartphone was also released in 1993, and cost about $900. Very few people in 1993-1997 would have seen the point of having an integrated phone/PDA device to justify a $1000 price tag.

Unfortunately, Apple lost their ass on Newton, and it scared them away from handheld tablets for a while. Otherwise, we probably would have seen production models of the iPhone rolling out a long time ago.
Click to expand...

Released in 1993 or just the modem?
- somehow I recall being younger than 17 going to summer music courses taking the bus out of the city and seeing a kid I knew since Grade 6 (2yrs younger than I) using the original Newton. Hmm. I guess that happens with Age.

EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
I didn't know about the IBM Simon ... but was that ACTUALLY usable as advertised? Delays released in '94.

I thought the first smartphone, or at least the first phone marketed as as martphone was released in 1999 (Ericsson R380 running Psion, ahem Symbian) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_R380
this was after Nokia's original communicator (not the same one you saw in that movie The Saint featuring Val Kilmer - that was a 3rd generation of that designed hardware which used Symbian - the original was NOT a smartphone of any inkling. Also this was long before Nokia's 7610 also running Symbian.

in all honesty ... was the iPhone and the one featured in this threads original post a STICK at IBM "the man" yet again? Or should history rewrite the first smartphone with Apple in 1983 yet the first shipped/sold smartphone being IBM's Simon.

I hate the way that looks even compared to early 80's tech ... and I can imagine the ads saying "Simon says ...." ugh.!
 
I'm not sure, that's just the Wiki article, and I also seem to remember the Newton and eMate being older than that. I think the modem was released a while after the Newton was on the market. My Google fingers are lazy today or I'd tell you ;)

Hard to tell because they never really caught on. I remember heading over to Di-No Computer (one of the few LA area storefronts that stocked Apple Computers at the time) and never even seeing an eMate or Newton save for one somebody brought in for repair, and they didn't even have them on display.
 
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