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Frog Design's Hartmut Esslinger Reveals Early Apple Designs in New Book

brianbobcat said:
I want to know what wireless technology they would've used for the mouse and keyboard all the way back then. It's not like wifi and Bluetooth were things yet, much less commonplace.
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Well Tesla was doing wireless remote control of boats in the early 20th century. It's nothing new.
Though given the commodity hardware at the time of that design I would guess for IR over RF wireless.
 
La Porta said:
Hm? The same machines are in there, I have the book myself.
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Sorry - I thought I found a copy of the book but it turned out to be another one with the same name ("Apple Design"). This one.

That book isn't the one you're referring to according to one Amazon.com review (which is what I meant by "Nope, not it"):

To be perfectly honest, I returned it the day I received it. I was thoroughly underwhelmed by this book.

What made an older book, AppleDesign, much better, was the numerous photographs of prototype products. This book lacked any insider access to prototypes, and therefore is composed of facts and images I am already familiar with. Why bother keeping this book? You can easily get the same information and images found in this book on Wikipedia.
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None of those devices would have been working prototypes. Frog Design would have purely been for concept output. Throw them at the apple engineers to see if they could actually build them (to a budget) and hence why we never actually saw them released at the time due to the lack of tech available - so, being that apple had contracted Frog to come up with concepts, apple therefore owned the concepts and sat on them until the tech was available in the late nineties, which also coincided with Jobs return where he decided to streamline the companies many models/options into the revolutionary line up that now resides.

saggsy
 
The baby Mac looks a lot like the 1999 iMac. Despite the size, I think the prototype looks even better! Though, in a world dominated by grey boxes the iMac did look refreshing.
 
TC03 said:
The baby Mac looks a lot like the 1999 iMac. Despite the size, I think the prototype looks even better! Though, in a world dominated by grey boxes the iMac did look refreshing.
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Actually it really looks like the Apple //c's monitor with a slot loading media drive. Not even the first iMac had a slot loading drive (although it looks more like a 3.5" floppy drive). You could probably make one by getting a small LCD screen, mount it inside the case for the //c monitor and stick a mac mini inside it! The mini's bluetooth will take care of the wireless features.
 
troop231 said:
It probably would've used Infrared technology like that used in TV remotes.
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Not IR...it would have been wireless tech similar to the frequencies cordless phones run on. It's easy to forget that the first "wireless" mice weren't infrared (which often requires line-of-sight), but were instead 'wireless banded radio'.

Apple had chose to abandon wireless radio on most of their developments and instead opted for the current "WiFi" technology we see today (which back then was rare).
 
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