During an illustrious history that has brought us the iPod, iMac, PowerBook and OS X, Apple has pumped countless dollars into products that didn’t live up to its standards for mass production. As sought after as Apple’s finished products, Cupertino prototypes are the stuff of lore, fetching big bucks on eBay, and spawning tall tales of what was, and what should have been.

Tablets, phones, projectors, artificial intelligence ... and to think, these are only the ones we've heard about:

 

PenLite

Those clamoring for a bona fide Tablet Mac to finally emerge from Apple’s laboratories might want to use Time Machine to travel back to 1993 and convince CEO John Sculley to take some of his eggs out of Newton’s basket. Blinded by the ultimately doomed MessagePad, Sculley prematurely pulled the plug on PenLite, a lightweight, full-fledged, Mac OS-capable PowerBook Duo with a stylus instead of a mouse and a touch screen instead of a keyboard. Fifteen years later, we’re still waiting for it.

 

PowerBop

While Apple loses points for the wholly uncool antennae and ridiculous name--not an internal joke, but rather a tie-in with France Telecom’s groundbreaking Bi-Bop mobile phone--the technology behind PowerBop was nothing short of revolutionary. Designed as the first wireless laptop in Apple’s arsenal, Macintosh PowerBop was canceled way back in 1993 due to incessant bugs and a unreliable network. By the time Apple could get it to work, it was called Airport and the rest, well, is history.
 


Apple Interactive Television

The Holy Grail of products that didn’t quite make it to shelves. Apple’s original set-top box beat TiVo to the game by several years, and was the first of its kind to allow pausing and rewinding of live TV (via an interactive service provider) and even a little recording (to an attached VCR). A true computer for the living room, AppleITV included RCA audio/video, S-Video, coaxial, and ethernet, SCSI and serial ports, but no hard drive. Unfortunately, without a service to connect to, or anywhere to store media, the thing is pretty useless, but that doesn’t stop people from paying more for an AppleITV than for an AppleTV to get their hands on one.

 

WALT

While it could be distant cousin of Pixar’s Wall-E, the unfortunately named Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone is actually the first known predecessor to the iPhone. Designed closely with then-telecommunications giant BellSouth and built like a giant trackpad, WALT was a cumbersome “screen-based telephone” that allowed you to “turn your phone into an electronic address book, message pad and fax machine,” or so said the instruction manuals that made the rounds with early prototypes. Its killer app was integration with BellSouth’s ANYWHERE Fax Service, which transformed WALT into a full-featured mobile fax machine. The benefits of lugging a giant phone around on the off-chance a fax arrives are largely unproven, but something about WALT’s WYSIWYG futurism is still appealing.

 

Starfish

Another joint effort circa 1993, Starfish was actually an Apple-branded incarnation of an Epson multimedia projector. Targeted to Mac-devoted business clients and sporting an internal speaker system and long-range IR remote, Apple bailed on the project after just a few months of development, leaving Epson in the lurch to finish the project alone, which they did. The ELP-3500 that released in 1996? Let’s just say it originated in the sea.