The iPhone and iPad we know today is a minimalist-designed blank slate — a digital piece of paper, if you will. Nothing garish, nothing in excess. And that’s mostly true in its prototypes! But some of these leaked early iPhone and iPad prototypes? They’re bat-shit crazy. One early iPhone prototype shows edges and angles galore with diagonal corners and another iPad prototype even has a kickstand. Yes. A kickstand.
The pictures of these iPhone and iPad prototypes were found in court documents by BuzzFeed FWD and The Verge.
Not all the prototypes were weird though. Some prototypes actually look like they’d be real products. Above, there’s an iPod Nano-inspired iPhone prototype made with brushed aluminium and complete with rounded corners. Another iPhone prototype labelled n90 actually looks amazing — impossibly thin (though thicker in the middle) and skinny, it looks very much like a delightful candybar.
Other prototypes look like knockoffs of Apple products you’d see other companies make — inelegant designs that feel forced to be quasi-futuristic.
The funnest prototypes, however, are the ones you’d never think Apple would even consider making. The iPhone with the diagonal corner looks like a Vertu phone with its eight different sides (including corners). The kickstand iPad? That had to have been a joke to rankle Steve Jobs, right? Right? [BuzzFeed, The Verge]