Photos Of Early iPad Prototype Revealed In Court Filings [Updated]

Although the iPhone was the first iOS device to be launched, it was the iPad that started Apple's venture into the touchscreen device market.



Network World dug up documents filed in the Apple-Samsung trial, in which Apple asserted that Samsung's products copied Apple's designs. More specifically, the documents that reveal images of early iPad prototypes were filed during Jonny Ive's deposition in December last year.



The research and development for such a device started way back in the first half of the last decade, which means that Apple developed, and iterated through multiple versions of the device before arriving  at the final design.

During his deposition, Ive said that initial design work on the iPad started as early as 2002:


The earliest design prototypes of the iPad are shown below:


For the entire set of images, head over to Network World.

After realizing how much better multitouch tech in the iPad was, Apple halted development of the tablet to work on a phone with the same capacitive touch. That of course turned out to be the iPhone, three years after the release of which, Apple launched the iPad.

The prototype was a lot thicker than current and past generations of the iPad, and it also lacked a home button, as can be seen in the images above.


Update: BuzzFeed obtained colored images of the actual prototype, and it appears to have borrowed a lot of its looks (including the thickness) from the early 2000s plastic iBook.

That's nearly a decade of work on a product. Compare that to other manufacturers who scrambled to come up with a decent iPad competitor, and barely managed to come at par, only recently. They still haven't yet, though, managed to steal market share away from the iPad.