Unearthed touchscreen iMac G3 prototype evokes a very different era of Apple | Ars Technica
25 years ago, Apple was cool with firms hacking up kiosk-friendly touch iMacs.
It never would have had the Fidelity or capability to be useful in any meaningful way though. Apple just made interesting stuff. IBM had touchscreen Windows machines in 1995, but nobody would bother writing an article about that because it's useless and boring.
IBM also made the 'Simon' as the first Smartphone in the early 90's, but it was terrible. Apple Newton as well. There's a reason things don't become commercially viable, though they are near.
Dude, watch the video. This wasn’t done by Apple. It was modded by ELO, a company which is still around today. They made it for shopping centre payment stations and other similar use cases. And frankly, from the looks of it in the video, it worked just as well as they do today (which is to say mediocre at best).
Resistance touchscreens have been around for a long time.
Capacitive touchscreens weren't commercially viable until the early-mid 00s. Apple literally stole the UI and design patterns from other companies to do their stuff. E.G. See the money they still pay to Creative Labs.
Touch screen computers also don’t make sense ergonomically. There’s a lot more arm and hand movement on a touchscreen compared to even a mouse, so you’ll get tired quicker.
I see a lot of people online saying this kind of thing, though I gotta wonder if it's mostly old people who can't adapt new paradigms.
I would never buy a computer without touch anymore. The thing the ergonomics argument misses is just because you have touch doesn't mean you can't use a mouse (or touchpad) also when it makes more sense. Tiredness is never an issue for me.
There are some things that are just infinitely more natural with touch, using an electronic device that lacks touch just feels like using incredibly outdated technology to me now.
The headline is more breathless than the story (what else is new?).
The prototype was put together by ELO, an Apple value added reseller focused on informational and ordering kiosks. No one would have expected this to be usable for general PC stuff.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The other is a sticker on the side of the Strawberry tray-loading iMac, indicating that it was an "Engineering Prototype" from Elo, a company that was an official "Value Added Reseller" for Apple products.
The transparent brightly colored plastic, the streamlined shape with rounded corners, and the bold-for-the-time choice to forgo floppy drives and myriad other PC ports made the G3 a style icon, to the point where the G3 is part of the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection.
As Michael MJD points out in his video, the iMac made sense as a good-looking computer you could park on a surface and allow people to manipulate without a keyboard or mouse.
Elo pulled this off in perhaps the most elegant fashion, fitting two transducers onto the standard CRT display, one to transmit and one to receive acoustic waves.
Touching the screen disrupts the wave pattern and alters the amplitude at a specific point, from which Elo's tech can deduce an X/Y coordinate and even the Z-axis depth of pressure being applied.
Apple's Value Added Reseller (VAR) program still exists, with companies like WEI and others offering enterprise IT support, security, or other mostly software-related services for those looking for a white-glove setup.
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