The 80's iPhone you never knew you always wanted

The iPhone, much like the iMac and iPod before it and the iPad after it, came seemingly out of nowhere to revolutionise the industry that spawned it back in 2007, leaving in its wake a veritable legion of pale imitations and an army of Apple acolytes that would be willing to shell out for anything the California tech giants put before them. It was, however, very much an invention of its time, and came along at a period when the world was really looking for it, so it's interesting to think exactly what would have become of the iPhone if it were released during Apple's first flush of fame back in the early 1980's. One designer has taken this thought a step further and visualised a unique concept for the hypothetical iPhone from 1984!

The design art for the (completely unofficial) Macintosh Phone was created by Bangkok-based designer Pierre Cerveau

The design art for the (completely unofficial) Macintosh Phone was created by Bangkok-based designer Pierre Cerveau, who uploaded images of his bizarre on his website over the weekend. Cerveau derived the concept from the Macintosh 512k, which was all the rage back in the company's formative years and was seen as a revolutionary machine in its own right back in its day. The speculative device includes an old school hybrid rotary/click wheel that owners would use to dial numbers or scroll through menus on the minuscule CRT display. The dialling system quite closely resembles the original iPod click wheel, only it seems somehow more tactile than that notoriously fiddly contraption.

As with the computer that inspired it's design, the phone has just 512 kilobytes (k) of memory. To put this minuscule figure into perspective, there's around a million k in a gigabyte, and the first generation iPhone had a whopping 4 gigabytes, which by today's standards is seen as laughable. Still, this was (hypothetically) 1984, many years before mobile internet and touch screens became standard, so you probably wouldn't have been able to do much with that beyond making calls anyway.

The phone's design is inspired by the classic Macintosh 512k computer

The back of the phone also mimics the original Macintosh, with similar cooling vents. The number of ports, however, has been reduced to just one. Although the Macintosh Phone's specs would make it virtually useless today, I'm pretty certain this would be one of the most sought-after collector's items in existence if Apple had actually released it back in it's first heyday. As for the artist himself. He's pretty humble about the design, simply stating of his creation: “Ever wondered how Apple's flagship product would have looked if it had been released 20 years before the first iPhone. Probably not, but I've decided to provide an answer anyway.”

This isn't the first time Cerveau has been inspired by Apple products in his creations either. A quick glance at his website reveals a number of ingenious designs built around Apple's flagship smartphone. The iPhone Easel, for example, could allow Apple sycophants the world over to display their babies as they see them; as genuine works of art. The iGramophone, meanwhile, is a unique iPhone and iPod dock which provides passive amplification for your device's internal speaker through a horn designed to resemble a gramophone from the 1930's. The best news is that most of these creations have been designed to be easily created with a 3D printer, so if you just so happen to own one (and who doesn't these days right?) and you're not so fussed about pissing off Apple's legal team then go nuts!

A quick glance at his website reveals a number of ingenious designs by Cerveau built around Apple's flagship smartphone

So what do you guys think? Are you glad that Apple waited until the 21^st century to join the mobile phone game? Or would you have been first in line at your local Woolworth's to snap up a Macintosh Phone back in 1984? I wouldn't have even been born, but I do love my retro clobber so I'd fall quite comfortably into the latter group.

Benjamin Hiorns is a freelance writer and struggling musician from Kidderminster in the UK.