This is wild. We’ve already seen early prototypes of the first iPhone, but at least they resembled a phone. These photos actually look more like an iPad than the first iPhone, but Apple had to start somewhere, right?
According to ArsTechnica, which dug up the images, Apple’s first iPhone prototype was 2-inches thick and had a display that measured 5-inches x 7-inches. The device was powered by processor clocked between 200Mhz and 233MHz, too, which is slower than the 412MHz clockspeed the original iPhone launched with, and is a far cry from the quad-core chips we see in high-end smartphones today. How times have changed…
The prototype you see above was crafted back in 2005, two years before the official iPhone was ever announced, and it packed notebook-worthy features including an Ethernet port (imagine plugging your iPhone into the wall for Internet access?), a serial port and USB ports. Obviously these were likely used for diagnostics purposes and hooking the device up to computers, but it’s still funny to think they were built into a device that would one day be the small and pocketable iPhone.
I guess we’re no longer surprised that “iPad” was once considered as a name for the iPhone.
