Developer Giulio Zompetti He is known on Twitter, among other things, for sharing photos of old Apple product prototypes. This time he brings us an image of an Apple Watch in development during early 2014. A prototype with a curious sensor layout that never hit the market.
The museum that is the Cupertino laboratories and its content
Scrapped #prototype of first gen #AppleWatch, early 2014, in almost mint conditions. pic.twitter.com/vUtqm3ijcb
— ???????? Giulio Zompetti (@1nsane_dev) February 4, 2021
Apple is known for entering new product ranges in a very disruptive way. With designs that change the established and that add new value to a certain segment. In the case of the Apple Watch, this has certainly been the case. To achieve such success tests are needed, many tests, and some of these, less than we would like, we get to know them thanks to photos like the one at the top of the article.
In the image we see the back of a first generation Apple Watch where the LEDs and photodiodes used to detect the heart rate are lined up in a group of three. Sensors that are also significantly larger than the ones we saw in the final product. In fact they are large enough that the central sensor appears to be split in two.
Apple Watch Original.
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In the photos we also observe that the speaker seemed to have only one opening instead two while the microphone seems the same as we all knew. As for the texts and inscriptions on the watch, we appreciate several curious things. The first is the logo in the upper left that reminds one of the death star that has appeared on some prototypes.
We also see how the serial number is written in Myriad Pro while the rest of the text is in the San Francisco Compact typeface, which is now the standard at Apple. It looks like Apple was testing different fonts, as shown by the icon at the top right “Abc 789”.
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The truth is that if Apple ever agreed to expose a part of the prototypes and proofs of concept that it has to keep in research laboratories, it would undoubtedly attract the attention of many. It is clear that developing a product from scratch requires trial and error, if you can call it that. With this we know one more piece of the history of the company.
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