The iPhone That Never Was

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. David Epstein The Big Story May 5, 2026 7:00 AM The iPhone That Never Was In 1990, three former Apple employees launched a company that epitomized the Silicon Valley dream. What they invented looked like an iPhone—more than a decade earlier. The device never came to be.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Imagine a tech company so visionary that it can take an idea public. A “concept IPO,” they called it. Picture the three founders, all former Apple employees, two of whom—software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson—were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh.

Technical Details

Atkinson’s prolific inventions included the double click and the drop‑down menu. The third founder, Marc Porat, had a gift for seeing the future. For his PhD dissertation at Stanford in 1976, Porat analyzed (in painstaking detail) a century of transition in the American labor force and predicted a sea change in work.

An economy based primarily on transforming matter and energy—via agriculture and industry—had been giving way to one based on transforming information. Computers and telecommunications, he saw, were reshaping every industry. “We are entering another phase in economic history,” Porat wrote.

On the first page of the first chapter of his dissertation, Porat coined a term that would become famous: “information economy. ” Porat followed that up by hosting a primetime PBS documentary, The Information Society , in 1980. In it, he positioned information technology as disruptive on a scale matched only by the plow and the steam engine.

Industry Implications

He delved at length into the power of new technology, as well as emerging problems with privacy, information overload, misinformation, and increasing inequality, and showed that most Americans had no idea that the ground was shifting beneath them. In 1988, Porat joined Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, where he could apply his prodigious foresight to the team’s task of figuring out what the next big thing would be after personal computers. One day, Porat took a Sharp Wizard—a new electronic organizer with a calendar and phone book—and duct‑taped it to a Motorola analog cell phone.

Soon he was making plaster models of a combination phone and digital assistant. In 1989, in a large red notebook, he drew a visionary product that would fit the future he had foreseen with eerie accuracy. He called it the Pocket Crystal.

You don’t need to have seen the sketch before for it to be instantly familiar. Courtesy of Riverhead Books Buy This Book At: Amazon Bookshop. org Target If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.