Fun Fact: Apple Designed a Touchscreen Phone in 1983
Abstract
In 1983, Apple’s design consultant Hartmut Esslinger sketched a telephone with a stylus-operated touchscreen, 24 years before the iPhone. It was a corded desk phone fused with a Mac, not a mobile device, and it never left the concept stage. The drawings surfaced in 2011 from Stanford’s Apple archive and in Esslinger’s 2012 book.
The “Macphone”
In 1982 Apple signed Hartmut Esslinger, founder of the German firm frog design, to a $1-million-a-year contract to define the company’s look. The result was the Snow White design language, applied to Apple products from 1984 to 1990. Among the exploratory concepts Esslinger’s team produced was a 1983 study that fused a Macintosh with a corded telephone: a wedge-shaped desk unit with a built-in screen operated by a stylus. One surviving mockup image shows a check-writing and accounting application on the display.
The concept never became a product. Apple in 1983 had no touchscreen manufacturing, no networking to make a “smart” phone useful, and a Macintosh still a year from launch. The design sat in a drawer until 2011, when researchers found it in the Apple collection at Stanford University; Esslinger published more of the series in his 2012 book Design Forward.
Myth: The 1983 concept was “Apple’s first iPhone.”
The design is regularly captioned that way. It was a corded landline with a stylus, not a pocket device, and it used pen input, not the capacitive multi-touch that defined the iPhone in 2007. The lineage is one of industrial design and ambition, not technology: no engineering path connects the two. See Myths and Misconceptions.