In the iPhone announcement keynote Steve says they toyed with Linux at one point before deciding to fork Mac OS X into iPhone OS.
I wouldn't be surprised if they just ran a skinned full Mac OS X on this one, because it was already there, and it would mean the UI guys could get to work right away on cool stuff (like rubber band scrolling as mentioned). The fact that it's so fat tells me it probably just had a G3 or G4 inside, basically a MacBook with a touchscreen and no hinge.
> In the iPhone announcement keynote Steve says they toyed with Linux at one point...
You sure it was in the keynote? I seriously doubt that, I've watched that presentation (his best, no doubt) several times. He wouldn't ruin his biggest product announcement mentioning Linux :)
I think it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs bio. A team (Tony Fadell & iPod team) wanted Linux and Scot Forstall wanted OS X. Scott won.
Since they refer to it as a "mockup", I assumed these had no actual hardware and were just tests of size, form factor, weight, etc.
If it had any hardware, it'd be easiest to just reuse existing stuff - basically an official Modbook[0], only with a capacitive instead of resistive touchscreen.
At the time, only a Public Beta of Mac OS X had been released, which certainly didn't have support for multitouch gestures. Geez, the iPod hadn't even been announced yet, and all Macs had PowerPC processors.
The industrial design doesn't have any bearing on what components are inside.
If this ran software at all (Apple tends to develop the two in isolation: no doubt around this time some people were working on touch interfaces, but nowadays the two don't tend to meet until they're quite far down the line) then I suspect it would have been test software similar to Switch Board, which they install on prototypes at the moment) unless it's pretty close to production.
I would be surprised if this was running G4. Apple's dissatisfaction with IBM was growing circa 2003-04 and if they were noodling around with the form factor they would have been under no pressure to put in a production CPU; they'd have gone with the best technical solution to the problem (which I doubt is a G4. Might have been another IBM chip).
That can be an advantage of "timeless" industrial design; it doesn't matter how long it takes to bring it to market. The G5/Mac Pro cheese grater hasn't changed since 2003, but what's ten years when you're borrowing from the 1960s?
It also helps that the vast majority of Apple's customers aren't even aware of what the Mac Pro is if they have even heard of it before. Many Apple stores don't even have them in the drop-in area anymore. I can't count how many times people have assumed I own a MacBook Pro and just said it wrong.
If it was a higher profile machine it would have gotten a redesign by now. Hell, the only machine that spent more time in its final form factor was the Xserve, which literally can't be redesigned because there are only so many ways you can build a 1U rack mountable server.
Judging from appearance alone (which isn't much to go on, admittedly), it seems like the device could have been a hit in 2004. Likely the OS and other software was nowhere close to where it needed to be, but it's interesting to imagine where we'd be like right now if the tablet wars started in 2004 (or if Apple had launched then and totally failed).
