Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/27/if-apple-designed-iphones-in-t.html
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Nailed it. Well done, Future Punk.
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The 90s ones remind me of the real-life Handspring Visor Palm OS PDAs, like this one:
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I want to see the 70s Radio Shack Flavor Phones.
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Why is everything so realistic except for the thickness?
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Someone had some fun, and I know it’s not meant to be taken seriously, but that is way off base. Cell phones were not remotely as small as the first one until '89 or so with the Motorola flip phones. By the 90s, when they’re showing those iMac style phones, you had already seen Apple make a similar product with the Newton. Apple was really flailing around in those years. Remember the Pippin?
Honestly, I think the PalmPilot line is what Apple could have done if they hadn’t been so darned awkward at that point. So I think a better render would be coming from the universe in which the Newton didn’t get so mismanaged, and a model of it came with a cell modem. But, really, PalmPilot/Treo is what actually happened.
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If Apple designed an iPhone in the 90’s, it would look like this:
But FuturePunk is right: if the Newton hadn’t failed (and if Jobs didn’t hate it), Apple eventually would have released a version with the iMac aesthetic, probably.
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Yeah, that 1980s iPhone is way off. The display would be a really low-contrast passive LCD screen, not a pretend CRT. There wouldn’t be any buttons, as you’d have to scroll around to get anything done. And it would be three times as thick. This was the eighties, after all.
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This immediately jumped out at me as well. It’s not like they didn’t already have things like this – even in the 1980s (just look at the Seiko T001 TV watch).
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So often these mockups just apply a different design language to an existing product, rather than expecting the usual revolutionary changes Apple makes. Can you imagine a Macintosh without a mouse, lots of function keys on the keyboard, and a proportional Chicago font with a command-line-only interface? That would be silly, but that’s what people would have expected. Much like this phone mockup:
… they applied the ipod and Mac aesthetics without imagining multitouch, glass screens, or even that you didn’t need to buy it at a Cingular dealer – you could buy direct from Apple!
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I still miss my HTC Desire Z, and I always will. I liked having a mouse pointer and a physical qwerty keyboard, dammit!
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I dunno, I’m three thicker now than I was in the eighties when I was a smartarse kid who knew everything.
Disagree. I think these miss the mark. By a lot.
How about the Sinclair flatscreen TV? That sort of thing worked off batteries…
I think you sometimes have to let the arty people do their thing. They may surprise you. The flat screens in the docking sequence of 2001 look like LCDs, but they were all slide back-projections, and that was because Kubrick could not get a flat enough CRT screen at the time.
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You had a Desire Z?
I… thought I was the only one… *eyes brim with tears*
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And I always liked the design of the razr v3 motorola.
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Visor Edge 4 lyfe.
(Also, while time has passed most of their capabilities by, Weasel Reader continues to do a fine job getting Gutenberg texts onto PalmOS devices, and even the teeny ones can store a fair amount of plaintext.)
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I had one of these at work! But barely ever used it. I was issued a first Gen Palm too, which I loved and still own! It’s a bit annoying though to constantly replace it’s double A batteries
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For what it’s worth, Sony was making tiny CRTs that could be used in such a device in the eighties, but they were too big to achieve what the artist designed.
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Space:1999 had one in 1975! S1E1 9:26 in:
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