When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in January 1997, he was ready to clean house in the design department. The computers Apple released were ugly pizza boxes like the LC series. Jony Ive, who had arrived at Apple five years before Jobs’ return, walked down the hall with a resignation letter in his pocket to his first meeting with Jobs. The letter was never accepted because the Industrial Design Group was producing some amazing work that was locked away in the back room. What was the work that saved Jony’s job? What were the designs sitting on the workbench that so impressed Steve Jobs?

“What were the designs that saved Ive’s job?”

A rare look into early Apple prototypes is provided by the book, “Apple Design: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group” by Paul Kunkel from January 1997. It gives unprecedented access to prototypes and lost designs from this era. Just before Jobs return there were two major design studies, Pomona and Spartacus, that resulted in physical prototypes. This was the work that so impressed Jobs that he kept Ive and the rest of the team.

I’ve always had a bit of an obsession with one of the computers from the Pomona design series. It's the “Curved Wood and Black Metal concept with detachable speakers”. Its curving lines and use of wood were so radically different from anything on the market in 2001, when I got the book.

I love turning ideas into physical objects, and for years I played around with ideas for reproducing the iconic curves of this design. Steam bending wood exceeded the limits of my small basement shop. It wasn’t until a Maker Space moved in near me that I had the tools recreate this iconic prototype. The laser cutter was the tool that finally gave me the skills to recreate this prototype and explore a path-not-taken in personal computing.

Robert Brunner was the design chief at Apple from 1989 to 1996. His leadership was visionary and established the Apple Industrial Design Group that has created all of the recent iconic product lines. He created a design brief, Pomona, calling for a rethinking of the personal computer. The brief called for designs that redefined home computing, employing new materials (leather, wood) and new shapes that would blend into the home environment. It was to be a desktop Mac with a minimum footprint that did not conform to Apple’s existing design language. It would also, for the first time, combine the thin LCD screens with the power of a desktop CPU. The design was to explore “minimum footprint opportunities. As remembered by Brunner...

“Pomona concepts should not necessarily follow Apple’s existing product language. Instead they should project high-performance values with compelling vision, provocative forms, rich materials unique configurations, and added functionality using miniature components.”(1)

There are only two images of this prototype (see above). One from the Apple Design book and another that I had to dig up at the Library of Congress from a very old copy of MacUser magazine from January 1994 in the article “Why 2004 won’t be like 1994” by Jon Zilber.

From these two images I was able to design to create the design in Illustrator and export to the laser cutter. Images and details of the build are here.

In recreating this machine, I didn’t want to create just a shell, I wanted to produce a working late 1990’s era Mac. That meant a computer running Mac OS 7.5.5 or OS 8. The heart of the machine is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu with the MacBuntu skin to make it look like OSX. It's also running two emulators. SheepShaver which emulates a PowerPC setup with OS9 and Basilisk II which emulates 68040 with Quadra 630 ROM that runs both System 7.5.5 and OS8. I really wanted to get a working copy of Apple’s lost OS, Copland, but couldn’t find a working install. The screen is an iPad 2 screen with 1024x768 with an HDMI adapter that picked up on Alibaba.

Here are some images (more here) of the finished prototype running OS 7.5.5.





The work on the Pomona design series lead to the prototypes for the Twentieth Anniversary Mac. Jony Ive led this work and the 20th Anniversary Mac was his first released design. It was released on in January 1997, the same month Jobs returned to Apple with the Next acquisition.

This was an incredibly rewarding build that drove me to pick up an entirely new set of skills that I’ve applied to many other projects. My thanks to the Apple Industrial Design team, even your discarded projects are inspiring.