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Early 2005 iPhone Prototype Looked More Like a Thick iPad Mini
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It was probably just for development's sake. Considering they were building a whole new platform from scratch, it was probably easier and more reliable to mess around with an Ethernet port than getting the WiFi protocol working from scratch. And eventually just have it as a fallback.
So while they were waiting for WiFi module + drivers to be written, or if WiFi broke via a patch, they could still do "something" to test the Internet integration / app store protocols / etc.
I mean, I've seen some prototypes for neat things... and some of the early EARLIEST stages of the prototypes were in large wooden enclosures instead of the cool+small+metal enclosures they wound up with.
I think everyone's readying way too much into this...
This isn't a prototype in a way that this hardware would have ever been pitched. This looks like a prototype board being used for software development. Dev boards like this get used all the time. You throw together some hardware that approximates the processor and memory structure that will be used for the final product and the software engineers get started while the hardware guys do their thing. They almost always have a lot of extra I/O used for debugging (like the Ethernet and serial port).
I've used very similar looking setups to develop software for locomotive air brakes and automotive ECUs. Nobody looked at the dev board and immediately though that it was the smallest air brake system they'd ever seen, or the slowest car. Seriously, the fact that a dev board used to develop software for the iPhone looked ugly means nothing.
This isn't a prototype in a way that this hardware would have ever been pitched. This looks like a prototype board being used for software development. Dev boards like this get used all the time. You throw together some hardware that approximates the processor and memory structure that will be used for the final product and the software engineers get started while the hardware guys do their thing. They almost always have a lot of extra I/O used for debugging (like the Ethernet and serial port).
I've used very similar looking setups to develop software for locomotive air brakes and automotive ECUs. Nobody looked at the dev board and immediately though that it was the smallest air brake system they'd ever seen, or the slowest car. Seriously, the fact that a dev board used to develop software for the iPhone looked ugly means nothing.
I bent my Wookie!
lolz!!, sounds like gravity took a toll on a figurative "cigar"
Just a chip house eval board
This looks like Samsung's standard prototype evaluation kit that anyone can get with enough money. Typically, at least to civilians, kits like this run anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand considering the chips on them. To major accounts like Apple, these are given complementary in an attempt to have the semiconductor manufactures get their parts designed in. I have even seen semiconductor manufacturers write custom apps and drivers to promote their chips to systems houses like Apple.
My guess is this was one of the first targets for the transition of the Mac OS X code base into the first release on an ARM platform. Remember, when the iPhone launched, Steve said "It runs OS X." I bet this unit was not at all part of the Johnny Ive industrial design but a plaything of the software engineers moving the code into the ARM instruction set.
In most prototype evaluations, you never utilize all of the the connectors on an evaluation board. Thus, this is even before Apple spun an internal board for the first iPhone prototype and long before anything was machined in Ive's vision.
This looks like Samsung's standard prototype evaluation kit that anyone can get with enough money. Typically, at least to civilians, kits like this run anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand considering the chips on them. To major accounts like Apple, these are given complementary in an attempt to have the semiconductor manufactures get their parts designed in. I have even seen semiconductor manufacturers write custom apps and drivers to promote their chips to systems houses like Apple.
My guess is this was one of the first targets for the transition of the Mac OS X code base into the first release on an ARM platform. Remember, when the iPhone launched, Steve said "It runs OS X." I bet this unit was not at all part of the Johnny Ive industrial design but a plaything of the software engineers moving the code into the ARM instruction set.
In most prototype evaluations, you never utilize all of the the connectors on an evaluation board. Thus, this is even before Apple spun an internal board for the first iPhone prototype and long before anything was machined in Ive's vision.
Exactly. This is really not a prototype of the iPhone, but of a tablet which later was set aside and the focus turned to adding the cell radio and shrinking it to the phone form factor. So in a way Ars is being misled by this Anonymous Apple developer. I guess Ars is going on with it since it makes for good headline and Macrumors too.
sar·chasm ('sär-"ka-z&m) : The giant gulf (chasm) between what is said and the person who doesn't get it.
This beast beats all of Samsung's gigantic phones!
This is the size all the complainers really want!
Should come with a velcro headband, so one can iStrap it on!
The prototype was 5x7, that means the screen is about 8.6". And they say the iPhone's screen is too small...
That's why the serial port is there, too. You can't debug over USB.
If the device crashes HARD, you get into it with a console over the serial port to see what happened.
Design & Development
It's very obvious by the comments being made that very few subscribers to MacRumors have the slightest clue about new product design and development. Most postings are so far from understanding what it takes to design a complex product that they boarder on being humorous.
It's very obvious by the comments being made that very few subscribers to MacRumors have the slightest clue about new product design and development. Most postings are so far from understanding what it takes to design a complex product that they boarder on being humorous.
Damn! What the hell is that?
The 1983 version is way nicer than that 2005 monster.
^^1983 iPad^^
The 1983 version is way nicer than that 2005 monster.
^^1983 iPad^^