iPod Touch 3 Almost Had A Camera With An Odd Location
Before the iPhone, Apple's most iconic mobile device didn't even allow you to communicate. The iPod was, for many years, the gold standard for portable music players. Then along came the iPhone and, later on, the iPod Touch was born to catch up. The two worlds would come together a couple of times but there was a time when the iPod Touch almost went off on its own direction again, putting a camera on the back of the iPod Touch 3 where no iPhone or iPod Touch ever would.
Given the visual and functional similarities between the two, the iPod Touch was almost like the poor man's, WiFi-only iPhone. That similarity would again be made when the iPod Touch 4 launched with front and rear cameras in the exact place as the iPhones. It turns out, Apple may have had other ideas back then.
Twitter user Giulio Zompetti shared on social media a prototype of the iPod Touch 3 that no one has ever seen before. At first glance, it looks exactly like what came out save for one small but important detail. That iPod Touch 3 prototype not only had a camera, it was also placed right in the middle.
It would take another iteration of the iPod Touch for Apple to give it a camera so the discovery that it did actually play with that idea is definitely interesting. Even more so that it even considered placing it right in the middle. Of course, that never happened and the rest is, as they say, history.
Best unit of my whole collection.#prototype #iPod touch 3 with rear camera, a feature that wasn't present on the related production device.#AppleInternal #Apple #AppleCollection pic.twitter.com/SeVxBvTL8w
— Giulio Zompetti (@1nsane_dev) May 27, 2020
It could have been a very different world for the iPod Touch if Apple pushed through with that design. Then again, it would have also been one of Apple's biggest blunders considering how that camera's position would have made it more difficult to take photos when the phone is in landscape mode. Perhaps it's for the best that it remained only that, a prototype.