Retro chic: Apple's original Macintosh reimagined

The rumour mill didn’t see this one coming! In fact the item on the right is not Apple’s latest fab gizmo, it’s from a German tech design outfit called Curved/labs and it’s a hat-tip to the now 30-year-old Macintosh on the left. I think it works so well that Apple should just snap it up and pay Curved Labs lots of money for the privilege.

According to Curved/Labs this is no plastic dummy but a fully realised, one-off computer complete with an 11 inch touchscreen (if you don’t mouse), an SSD flash memory with 128 gigabytes of storage, and an Intel  i7 chip. The casing is Apple-style aluminum.

The Curved/Labs design somehow retains the Mac family resemblance - the new one being much like an impressionistic line drawing of the original.

“30 years ago Steve Jobs wanted to make computers more user-friendly, so he gave the original Macintosh a face,” says the online blurb. Yes he did. And thinking about it properly for the first time he clearly reinforced the face by giving the hardware a head and neck to go with it. That might part account for the warm feelings many of us have for the original upright design - we subliminally thought it was a person. And it might part-account for why the ugly ones that followed when Jobs was ousted failed to catch fire with the using public.

The protruding tongue, by the way, is an SD card - a welcome upgrade to the original Mac’s single 3.5 inch hard-jacketed floppy disk drive, which sported a full 400 kilobytes of storage!