Kevin Noki has realized a ground-breaking, long-lost prototype created by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger for Apple in the 80s. FlatMac lives – and it works.
Everything about this is extraordinary, down to watching the Macintosh operating system loaded from floppy disks. (Ah, the sound of that drive mechanism brings back some memories. And the satisfying thunk sound as disks are inserted… there’s a meridian response to this in certain nerds…)
Check Kevin’s channel for build notes, part notes (and very much deserved affiliate links good grief), and more interesting builds.
Part of what built the Apple we know today and contributed to the form of modern consumer electronics was the formation of the Apple Industrial Design Group. Jobs in the 80s was design-obsessed, fetishizing his Porshe 928, but also fascinated by the industrial design work of Braun and Sony, both of which you’ll see prominently reflected in Apple designs ever since. That prompted him to run a competition for reshaping Apple’s design, which at the time could be summed up as “beige and boxy.” (Think Apple //e.) The winner: frogdesign and founder Hartmut Esslinger.
And so began a design bromance between Steve and Hartmut Esslinger, a renowned designer in the Black Forest of Germany who had worked heavily with Sony, and, much to Steve’s delight, also liked driving his Mercedes way too fast. Walter Isaacson picked up on this story in his bio, but those of us who read John Sculley’s book got it there, too. See:
The Frog, Snow White and The Apple
A photo history of Frog, the company that designed the original Mac
The quintessential frog contribution to Apple actually isn’t the Macintosh – even though Apple’s internal team adopted the frog-created “Snow White” design language for the Mac and other hardware of the era, and as that DNA shaped Apple effectively up until Jony Ive and co. rebooted it in the late 90s. No, frog fans know the peak Esslinger Apple design is the 1984 Apple IIc.
And that’s why the FlatMac looks so much like “what if the iPad had grown out of an Apple IIc but ran a Macintosh operating system.” FlatMac was part of a series of prototypes in the same design language. I first became aware of those prototypes in the beautiful 1997 book, AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group by Paul Kunkel with photography by Rick English. I picked this up on a discount table in a bookstore around that year, back when everyone was writing off Apple; I guess it’s worth some money now. But you get a refined, blank-white cover (fitting) with the old rainbow-colored logo and Garamond font, and a bunch of color illustrations, including these frog prototypes.
Esslinger, not to be outdone (and certainly not to be overshadowed by Apple’s own industrial designers), put out his own book more recently to share those same prototypes:
hartmut esslinger’s early apple computer and tablet designs
So it is just mind-boggling seeing this machine come to life, in a functioning model that frog’s own team was just hand-carving out of foam and whatnot.
And that brings me to why I’m talking about this: we’re living in a true golden age of fabrication. In music and live visuals, with all the availability of Teensy and Raspberry Pi hardware alongside 3D printers and conventional fab techniques, I think we could see an explosion of clever DIY hardware that has the level of refinement previously only seen in mass-produced consumer devices.
And that’s… fantastic. It’s a chance to dream up all-new hardware as if you’re a prop designer for a science fiction show that you personally star in. Figure how much of our current creations come from those kinds of prototypes – Star Trek alone gave us the touchscreen (LCARS) which begat Lemur and the iPad, plus the communicator and tricorder which gave us the cell phone, smartphone, and iPhone. Part of the craft of realizing that was all about building stuff manually. Add in a little assist from 3D printers and other modern materials and tech, put in digital guts to give it life (for an absurdly low cost now), and you can be a digital luthier for futuristic expressive instruments for yourself.
I mean… if you can get out of the trance you just put yourself in by watching this FlatMac video. (Like I said, the floppy drive…)
One more thought on this, but I’ll put that in a separate story.
Apple IIc image by Bruno Cordioli, who has a nice essay on this machine and retrocomputing along with the image.
