Future Apple Hardware? Four Outrageous Prototypes Revealed!
Posted 12/02/2008 at 5:01am
| by Words by Jon Phillips and Illustrations by Adam Benton

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Eighteen months. It’s been 18 long months since Apple last released a game-changing piece of hardware, a product that reinvented a category and captured our imaginations, provoking eyes agoogly and jaws agape. That product was, of course, the original iPhone, a smart phone that could have been aptly named iPhone SG--iPhone Sui Generis--for it truly belonged in a class by itself.
But can any product release since the iPhone be considered an indisputable game-changer? The MacBook Air--slim of profile, portly of charm--came close. However, once you come down from the high of marveling at its aesthetics, the Air is still a rather prosaic notebook from a functionality standpoint. A changer of games it is not.
And so we’re left to wonder what comes next. It’s been 18 months, and an Applequake is due. Just three months ago, we were anticipating a new form of MacBook, something of the nano or touch persuasion, remarkable for its small size or novel user interface. But that MacBook never emerged, and its rumored code name, the “brick,” turned out to be a reference to a new manufacturing process, not a game-changing product, in and of itself. Well, we’re still smitten by this whole brick concept, so to satisfy our curiosities, we conjectured, spec’d, and illustrated how this notebook could take shape. And then we went further, designing three more game-changing fauxtotypes that could maybe, possibly, conceivably find a home in the Apple product universe.
Is it presumptuous to think our ideas could ever pass the muster of Apple’s design team? Most certainly, yes. We’re not privy to any official, codified design briefs (which surely must be the most fascinating design documents of the 21st century), and we’re not handcuffed by the limits of technology, economy, legality, and all the other factors that stop wild ideas at the cocktail-napkin stage. Nonetheless, it’s because we’re so entirely inspired by Apple design that we’re compelled to play along. The following four products are just fanciful “what ifs” to explore and hypothesize while we wait for the real game-changers to emerge.
Check out our first prototype, the triBook. More screen real estate than you can shake a stick at.