Ars Technica shares several photos of an early functional prototype of the iPhone from 2005, revealing a device closer in size to a thick iPad mini than an iPhone.
The photos were sent to Ars by an anonymous former Apple employee who worked on the project in the early 2000s. The prototype is 5x7 inches in size, and nearly two inches thick - though much of the thickness was to accommodate features like serial and Ethernet ports installed purely to use the device in a development environment.
Apple watchers have seen all manner of iPhone prototypes pop up on eBay, in court documents, and in leaked photos. But most were either close approximations of the first iPhone that was released in 2007 or of later models.
What we don't often get to see is early Apple prototypes, those from way before the iPhone started to look like a phone-like object. That's why we were excited to receive photos showing an in-house version of the iPhone from early 2005. The images to Ars through a former Apple employee who worked on various Apple hardware projects in the early 2000s and was thus exposed to some of the earliest versions of the iPhone.
Ars Technica points out that the Samsung ARM chip used is "a distant relative of the chip the first iPhone ended up using, just older and slower."
Wednesday February 26, 2025 6:32 am PST by Joe Rossignol
In an all-caps post on Truth Social today, U.S. President Donald Trump said Apple should fully end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Tim Cook meeting with President Trump in 2017
"APPLE SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM," he wrote.
Trump's post comes one day after Apple held its annual shareholders meeting, during which a majority of...
Wednesday February 26, 2025 7:15 am PST by Joe Rossignol
In a recent press release, Apple confirmed that iOS 18.4 will be released in April.
From the Apple News+ Food announcement:Coming with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 in April, Apple News+ subscribers will have access to Apple News+ Food, a new section that will feature tens of thousands of recipes — as well as stories about restaurants, healthy eating, kitchen essentials, and more — from the...
The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is expected to launch later this year, arriving two years after the previous model with a series of improvements.
While no noticeable design changes are expected for the third generation since the company tends to stick with the same Apple Watch design through three generations before changing it, there are a series of internal upgrades on the way.
By the time the ...
Tuesday February 25, 2025 2:58 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple is making significant headway on its long-rumored foldable iPhone, with a new report suggesting the company has achieved a major breakthrough by effectively eliminating the screen crease that plagues current foldable devices.
According to Korean publication ETNews, Apple is finalizing its component suppliers for the foldable iPhone, with the selection process expected to be completed...
Tuesday February 25, 2025 1:18 pm PST by Juli Clover
Multiple iPhone owners today noticed a pronunciation processing issue that causes the word "Trump" to momentarily show up when using dictation to send a message with the word "racist."
In some cases, when speaking the word racist through the iPhone's built-in dictation feature, the iPhone briefly interprets the spoken word as "Trump" and "Trump" text shows up in the Messages app before being ...
Monday February 24, 2025 9:14 am PST by Joe Rossignol
According to a post on X today from a leaker known as Kosutami, Apple plans to launch AirPods Pro 3 in May or June this year.
The leaker also claimed that an AirTag 2 will launch around the same time.
Kosutami is best known as a collector of prototype Apple hardware, but they have occasionally shared accurate information about Apple's future product plans. For example, they accurately...
Monday February 24, 2025 6:11 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple plans to launch a second-generation AirTag in May or June this year, according to a post today from a leaker known as Kosutami.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported that a new AirTag would be released in mid-2025. May or June would align with that timeframe.
Below, we recap three new features rumored for the AirTag 2:
With a second-generation Ultra Wideband chip, the...
Sunday February 23, 2025 2:23 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
The first beta of iOS 18.4 is now available, and it includes a small but useful change for CarPlay.
As we noted in our list of iOS 18.4 features, CarPlay now shows a third row of icons, up from two rows previously. However, this change is only visible in vehicles with a larger center display. For example, a MacRumors Forums member noticed the change in a Toyota Tundra, which can be equipped...
I think everyone's readying way too much into this...
This isn't a prototype in a way that this hardware would have ever been pitched. This looks like a prototype board being used for software development. Dev boards like this get used all the time. You throw together some hardware that approximates the processor and memory structure that will be used for the final product and the software engineers get started while the hardware guys do their thing. They almost always have a lot of extra I/O used for debugging (like the Ethernet and serial port).
I've used very similar looking setups to develop software for locomotive air brakes and automotive ECUs. Nobody looked at the dev board and immediately though that it was the smallest air brake system they'd ever seen, or the slowest car. Seriously, the fact that a dev board used to develop software for the iPhone looked ugly means nothing.
