During an illustrious history that has brought us the iPod, iMac, PowerBook and OS X, Apple has pumped countless dollars into products that didn’t live up to its standards for mass production. As sought after as Apple’s finished products, Cupertino prototypes are the stuff of lore, fetching big bucks on eBay, and spawning tall tales of what was, and what should have been.

Tablets, phones, projectors, artificial intelligence ... and to think, these are only the ones we've heard about:

 

PenLite

Those clamoring for a bona fide Tablet Mac to finally emerge from Apple’s laboratories might want to use Time Machine to travel back to 1993 and convince CEO John Sculley to take some of his eggs out of Newton’s basket. Blinded by the ultimately doomed MessagePad, Sculley prematurely pulled the plug on PenLite, a lightweight, full-fledged, Mac OS-capable PowerBook Duo with a stylus instead of a mouse and a touch screen instead of a keyboard. Fifteen years later, we’re still waiting for it.

 

PowerBop

While Apple loses points for the wholly uncool antennae and ridiculous name--not an internal joke, but rather a tie-in with France Telecom’s groundbreaking Bi-Bop mobile phone--the technology behind PowerBop was nothing short of revolutionary. Designed as the first wireless laptop in Apple’s arsenal, Macintosh PowerBop was canceled way back in 1993 due to incessant bugs and a unreliable network. By the time Apple could get it to work, it was called Airport and the rest, well, is history.
 


Apple Interactive Television

The Holy Grail of products that didn’t quite make it to shelves. Apple’s original set-top box beat TiVo to the game by several years, and was the first of its kind to allow pausing and rewinding of live TV (via an interactive service provider) and even a little recording (to an attached VCR). A true computer for the living room, AppleITV included RCA audio/video, S-Video, coaxial, and ethernet, SCSI and serial ports, but no hard drive. Unfortunately, without a service to connect to, or anywhere to store media, the thing is pretty useless, but that doesn’t stop people from paying more for an AppleITV than for an AppleTV to get their hands on one.

 

WALT

While it could be distant cousin of Pixar’s Wall-E, the unfortunately named Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone is actually the first known predecessor to the iPhone. Designed closely with then-telecommunications giant BellSouth and built like a giant trackpad, WALT was a cumbersome “screen-based telephone” that allowed you to “turn your phone into an electronic address book, message pad and fax machine,” or so said the instruction manuals that made the rounds with early prototypes. Its killer app was integration with BellSouth’s ANYWHERE Fax Service, which transformed WALT into a full-featured mobile fax machine. The benefits of lugging a giant phone around on the off-chance a fax arrives are largely unproven, but something about WALT’s WYSIWYG futurism is still appealing.

 

Starfish

Another joint effort circa 1993, Starfish was actually an Apple-branded incarnation of an Epson multimedia projector. Targeted to Mac-devoted business clients and sporting an internal speaker system and long-range IR remote, Apple bailed on the project after just a few months of development, leaving Epson in the lurch to finish the project alone, which they did. The ELP-3500 that released in 1996? Let’s just say it originated in the sea.

 

FireDrill

Back when FireWire was still in its infancy, Apple tried out a few different motherboards with varying degrees of success. One of these, aptly named FireDrill, utilized a pair of chips from little-known multimedia processor company TriMedia. Unfortunately for them, the chips ran way too hot for comfort, and Apple quickly abandoned the project for one fitted with cooler and speedier PowerPC processors. It might not work, but the blood-red motherboard is straight fire.

 

Knowledge Navigator

A prototype that exists only in video form, it’s doubtful that the technology behind Knowledge Navigator exists today, let alone in the late ’80s. Set against a classical music soundtrack, this brainchild of then-Apple CEO John Scully is nothing short of remarkable, a digital hub with a brain, human voice and snappy bow tie. Leave it alone and it’ll take messages, schedule meetings, organize files and brush up on the rate of deforestation in Africa. Engage it and it’ll respond to your questions (and ask the occasional follow-up), scour the Web faster, and more accurately, than Google, and ignore your mother’s phone calls. It’s ridiculous now; it was certifiably insane in 1987. Check out the demo video below.

 

PDA

Apple is widely credited with creating the industry’s first portable digital assistant in the Newton MessagePad, and consistent rumors have called for a new PDA to emerge from the depths of Apple’s campus, sporting a multi-touch screen and running a modified version of OS X. Of course, iPhone comes pretty darn close, but we can’t help but remember the 2004 All Things Digital conference, when Steve Jobs uncharacteristically mentioned how proud he was of the Apple PDA his team had developed but never shipped. We’ve never seen it in the flesh--and there’s a distinct possibility that Steve was pulling our leg--but we want to believe there’s a product hidden at 1 Infinite Loop that’s a little iPhone, a little Newton, and a whole lot of wow.

 

VideoPad

At the Mac Expo in 1995, Apple again piqued the industry’s curiosity with a sort of next-generation Newton. Dubbed VideoPad and presumably developed alongside Apple’s VideoPhone app, the flip-style device merged a cell phone, PDA and videophone that somehow communicated with a giant base that had two screens of its own, along with a CD-ROM drive and a handset. We’re not really sure how (or if) it ever worked, but it’s likely the reason for iPhone’s complete lack of video capabilities. Clearly VideoPad scarred somebody at Apple for life.

 

Honorable mention
Macintosh Spirit

Before the Happy Mac graced our start-up screens, Steve Jobs commissioned Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon to create a logo for the still-in-development Macintosh. Handsomely paid $30,000 in advance for his work, the resulting image of a flying Mac man holding a keyboard and mouse didn’t quite float Steve’s boat. The fickle CEO passed on Folon’s “Macintosh Spirit” and tapped Apple art directors Tom Hughes and John Casado for a more palatable logo, which we now know as the timeless Picasso logo.

Can't get enough prototypes? Click below to check out the concepts dreampt up by the Mac|Life staff.