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imagining the apple ecosystem 

I found this description of work undertaken in the apple design lab, long before the design of the iPhone, extremely interesting. From Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney, pg 54-56:

The idea was to explore a suite of mobile products even further off in the future. Brunner and his team felt confident that the new PowerBook and Newton portable would kick off a whole range of mobile products. They began imagining non- computer products, including digital cameras, personal audio players, small PDAs and bigger pen- based tablets. (These might sound familiar but fulfilment of these dreams wouldn’t come for at least another decade – and under the leadership of an entirely new regime.) They hoped that pen- based digital assistants, digital cameras and laptop computers could be linked together using infrared, radio wave and cellular networks. Brunner wanted the design group to have several mobile products ready in case Apple’s upper management suddenly decided the company needed to start making them.

While an Apple team in California worked on several concepts for portable products, the team at Tangerine designed four speculative products: a tablet, a tablet keyboard and a pair of ‘transportable’ desktop computers. Brunner wanted the products to be convertible; the tablet should convert into a laptop and vice versa. ‘For some reason, ironically, we thought convertibility would be really important,’ explained Brunner. ‘So you could go from a traditional keyboard and mouse mode to a pen- based mode, which is a little bit of a rage today with some subnotebooks.’ 39 Brunner noted that these ideas, which seemed a bit strange and radical in the early 1990s, weren’t a million miles from the latest tablets and hybrid laptop/tablets for sale today.

Jony, together with help from Grinyer and Darbyshire, worked on a tablet called the Macintosh Folio. It was a chunky, notebook- sized tablet with a pen- based screen and a huge built- in stand. Made of Apple’s then- usual dark grey plastic, it could almost be a predecessor to the iPad, despite being about five times thicker. Jony worked alone on a special smart keyboard for the tablet called the Folio keyboard. But unlike today’s detachable keyboards for modern tablets, the Folio keyboard was conceived as an ‘intelligent keyboard’ because it featured its own CPU, network jacks and a trackpad. In effect it was half a laptop, namely, the keyboard half. Grinyer and Darbyshire worked on a pair of ‘transportable’ desktops that were half desktop, half laptop. These were transformer- like computers, convertible machines with built- in keyboards and screens that could transform from a desktop into a portable and back again.

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