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November 29, 2006

apple

The Apple products you didn’t see

Posted Nov. 29, ’06, 12:30 PM PT by Collin Allen
Category | Apple

PenLiteThe Apple Gazette has a short list of five Apple products that never saw public production. Plenty of prototypes are imagined and created while only a small few make the cut, which makes the trial run items all the more fascinating. Among the five, two really stand out: the PowerBop and the PenLite.

Apple’s PowerBop was PowerBook with built-in cellular wireless internet access, a feature still only found as an add-on card in today’s market. Buggy wireless was to blame for the machine’s demise, however the PowerBop lives on today in AirPort, EDGE, and other wireless technologies.

Another interesting, and still rumored, piece of Apple hardware is the PenLite notebook/tablet PC. Not surprisingly, this little gem was developed alongside the Newton and undoubtedly featured the same handwriting recognition software. Because it never made it to the public, we’ll have to assume the reason for this is the same reason why we don’t yet have a tablet running Mac OS X — the market wasn’t big enough, or the timing wasn’t right. Whatever the case may be, it’s disappointing that another potential collector’s item (like the Newton) failed to make its debut.

If you’re looking for details of more unreleased products, I highly recommend the rare book, AppleDesign, which is filled with photos of various incomplete Apple projects. Like the rest of these treasures from the past, even the book itself is hard to get ahold of.


1 Comments

Duckalope said:

Actually, quite a few notebooks today have built in cell phone cards.

November 29, 2006 2:57 PM

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