Occasional glimpses of early iPhone prototypes have cropped up on eBay, in court documents and the like, but most of the earliest prototype photos were rare peeks at models that came after 2007.
That's changed now thanks to the folks at Ars Technica, who have received photos of an early iPhone prototype from 2005. Ars Technica notes 2005 was a time in which "the iPhone started to look like a phone-like object."
Ars Technica's source declined to be named in the article published on Monday, March 11, but he was an "Apple employee who worked on various Apple hardware projects in the early 2000s and was thus exposed to some of the earliest versions of the iPhone."
The images show the super-early iPhone prototype had more ports than in the kinds of mobile devices we're used to seeing today (making the prototype more like a computer in this way, Ars Technica points out). This prototype had a USB port, Ethernet port and serial port.
"Our source said that because this was a development prototype, ports like Ethernet and serial were included simply to make working on the device easier," Ars Technica says, adding that the source claimed the extra ports were never intended to be used in the final device.
"[A]t that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be," the source says.
The iPhone prototype's 5 x 7-inch size dimensions makes it a hefty contender against, say, the iPhone 5, whose size dimensions are approximately 4.5 x 2 inches. Whereas the iPhone 5 is a slender 0.30 inches thick, its ancestrial prototype was 2 inches thick.
"Seems large now, but at the time it was really impressive seeing basically a version of OS X running on it," the source says.
Another big change since those primordial days is in the iPhone's ARM chip. The early iPhone prototype "clocked in" at 200-233MHz, compared to the iPhone made in 2007 whose 620MHz chip underclocked to 412Mhz.
"This chip is also an ARM9 chip, while the original iPhone eventually ended up using an ARM11 chip, but obviously Apple intended to use Samsung-manufactured ARM chips even this far back," Ars Associate Writer Andrew Cunningham says.
Ars Technica's photo gallery also includes earlier iPhone prototype leaks, many of which came out of the Apple v. Samsung trial.
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