Yeah ok it isn’t that Apple Tablet. But this is a picture, taken around 1990, of the Apple Pen Mac, a little known and never launched Apple tablet project. As far as we can tell there is no other image of this device anywhere on the Internet, and very few references to it at all.
The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.
Holding the Pen Mac in the picture is Glam CEO Samir Arora, who told me about the device over dinner a couple of weeks ago. Arora worked at Apple on the project, eventually going to a spinout company, Rae Technology, which was designing applications for the Pen Mac. Rae Technology eventually morphed into NetObjects.
The Pen Mac project was led by Paul Mercer but was eventually axed in favor of the Newton. Then Apple CEO John Sculley wanted a PDA, not a tablet. From a 2006 NY Times article:
Then in 1987 and 1988, after Steven Jobs had been ousted from the company by John Sculley, then chief executive, engineers like Mr. Mercer were given wide latitude in exploring new ideas at the company. On his own, Mr. Mercer pursued two projects for hand-held computers, code-named Swatch and Pen Mac.
In the early 1990’s, before a meeting of Apple’s top executives, he showed off the Macintosh software running on a hand-held computer, long before products like the Newton, Palm Pilot or the General Magic communicator had been introduced.
The technology demonstration was impressive, but Mr. Mercer acknowledged that he was naïve about the reception he would receive for his invention.
Instead of being welcomed with open arms, he received a call from Mr. Sculley noting that Apple had just signed an agreement to work with Sharp Electronics on the Newton technology and that there was no room at the company for competing hand-held computing projects.
And that was the end of the Pen Mac.
There is a picture here of a second generation Pen Mac device called PenLite that Arora tells us was also cancelled. Another picture of PenLite is here. A final picture, also labeled as PenLite, sure does look similar to the tablet that Arora is holding.
Love the happy Indian photo!
he is obviously happy because he knew this photo would be shown in the future.
Is it just me…or does it look like a Kindle?
+1
Yuck, I hate it when people don’t cut their finger nails..
You need something to bite on when you’re developing products
good one:)
There’s no beating the Apple IIc guys!
Can’t wait for Apple to lower their Macbook prices this December. Compared to the newest PC laptops with Windows 7, Macbooks are looking more and more mispriced.
There is an extra ‘h’ in the link for the PenLite picture.
thanks. fixed it.
There is no lore like Apple lore.
Thanks for sharing.
Awsome.
Wow great find mike!
Nice article with nice pic! I wonder what would’ve happened if Apple stuck with the PowerBook model instead of the Newton? Happy to see Arora holding it.
Thanks for sharing!
wow, haven’t seen pics of @samirarora from the 90’s in awhile.
if my memory serves me i believe we were building software on it for pharma company using Rae platform. i remember playing with it to try to get it to understand my writing! so strange to see Rae Technology referenced in a post. Company launched pre mainstream web so not a lot public archive until yr before transition to Neto. Fun!
So you had dinner with Samir Arora and talked about developing apps for crunchpad
?
So you are going to delay the cp launch till apple table launch? No updates for a long time.
One day in 2029 some intern at TechCrunch will write a similar post with a photo of Michael Arrington and the CrunchPad…
Come on Mike, please don’t do the same error of John Sculley !
I hope you will release the CrunchPad with its own apps store just on time for the Christmas shopping frenzy .
What a piece of history. Great find mike! After Steve left in 1986, the Mac team kept working on with people like Paul Mercer and others like Jacobs. Mercer invented Swatch or pocket mac, Rolex and Pen Mac then left Apple to create the operating system that was used for a new device to be called ipod. Arora went on to do web building applications for internet publishing.
Full circle at Apple today with Steve Jobs back, the Apple iPod, iPhone and the new tablet use Mercer’s OS, just took over 20 years to do.
this looks rather like a product Apple _did_release, and i played with, the Apple Newton MessagePad. apart from the cool technology, it also had a nice name.
http://en.wikip...wiki/MessagePad
Its nice .. and tiny .. would love to have it ..
Best,
Daina
FYI, Paul Mercer founded Pixo (original iPod OS) and now works at Palm (presumably on WebOS)
A Pre WebOS tablet would be cool.
Can you imagine being Mercer and receiving that call … that must have been atrocious …
That does look like Kindle
Just as a thought we seen touchscreen tablets stuff almost 20y ago , whats holding the next 20y only Apple knows
once S.Jobs retires 
I hope a new Apple tablet will look nothing at all like that
Look at the interface of the current Displays.
Aaaah!
What’s new is old again.
Incredible. Somehow, never knew a thing about this despite being a keen follower of all things Apple. Interesting to thing that if this tablet had made it to market (assuming it was not dead slow) and used a standard build of Mac OS (nothing risky like Newton OS), it would not only have re-defined computing almost 20 years ahead of the real (early 2010?) Apple ‘Slate’, but altered the creative and technological evolution of humanity.
Computers are still massively flawed in their execution due to their current operational paradigm (iPhone included) that restricts true creative and productive freedom.
Stylus based input is naturally intuitive and if Apple had released this tablet back then and it had worked, humankind may have adopted radically different creative solutions to problems and life today could have been very different – possibly more advanced?
All thanks to a greater liberation of the right brain.
And the killer app to have made that possible would have been a Photoshop / Illustrator / Freehand hybrid from Adobe and/or Canvas – an excellent drawing app from way back when that blended bitmap and vector drawing.
I was the Product Manager for QuickTime at Apple from 1988-1992, and can add a bit more flavor. Newton was in full swing at the time, and had both the original product and a larger tablet on the drawing boards. Paul Mercer was part of the MacOS team and had just returned back from Japan with a small Sony handheld touchscreen device (about the size of the original PalmPilot), that was powered by a Motorola processor. He got the core of the Mac OS running on it (including the smiley Mac), as well as the Newton handwriting code, and was suggesting Apple release this instead of or in addition to Newton. I had talked with Paul about leaving the QuickTime PM role and being the PM for this product (Swatch). Then the call came from Sculley and put the kibosh on everything. The Newton team recruited Mercer, and that was the end of Swatch.
Great bit of history… Newtons still seem to be enjoying some popularity with the older mac crowd
oh so old… this isn’t tablet this only ancient pda with 240×160 resolution, but was too useless
You can generally take the mass market in one baby step in any direction. The pen mac in 1990 would have been a mass departure from how people were used to using computers, and would probably have been too much for people to handle.
That said, I wonder how the markets would have received the iphone in 1990?
So I guess in about 20 years we will be reading an article about the much hailed, but never launched Crunchpad… Right?
I didn’t see this question, but who is the other person on the first photo?
FYI – the PenMac project was openly presented at the 1993(?) WWDC. It was based on a modified PowerBook Duo.