Former Apple employee dished out details on Apple’s early prototyping practices

Mar 11, 2013 13:14 GMT  ·  By

An iPhone prototype dating back to 2005, two years before the original device was unveiled to the world, has been leaked in photos by a former Apple employee who agreed to shed light on the company’s early prototyping practices.

The lucky receivers of said photo gallery were Ars Technica, who are now proudly showing off an in-house version of the iPhone from 2005.

The images were handed to them by a former Apple employee who worked on various hardware projects in the early 2000s at Apple. The employee is not named for obvious reasons.

As the images show, the first iPhone prototype was more of a tablet computer than a smartphone. Steve Jobs himself admitted during a live interview that Apple had originally intended to release the iPad before the iPhone.

This early prototype had a number of ports akin to desktop computers, including USB, Ethernet, and even a serial port.

Apple didn’t necessarily intend to actually use these connectors in the finalized product, according to the source. The company usually set these up so that engineers could easily work with the hardware.

He also said, “at that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be.”

Measuring about 5×7-inches, the device looks humongous by today’s standards, not to mention it was two inches thick.

“Seems large now, but at the time it was really impressive seeing basically a version of OS X running on it,” the source said.

With all the unfounded iPhone 5S/iPhone 6 rumors floating around, this old-school hardware leak is a breath of fresh air.

Other images in the gallery also let you peek inside the chassis where several ARM chips are housed.

It’s amazing to see how bulky and primitive these prototypes were just a few years ago.

iPhones today are full-fledged computers with a single tethering plug, an uninterrupted Internet connection, high-fidelity displays, and almost a million different applications to download and install anytime, anywhere.

Photo Gallery (5 Images)

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