This is what someone thought the iPad would look like, back in 2004

Before the iPad or even the iPhone was released, there were years of speculation on what portable products Apple would release.

Just like they do now, people on the Internet created renders back in 2004 of products they thought Apple would release. We stumbled across an old concept from 2004 on the MacRumors forum that showed just how different interactio and technology was at the time.

In the concept image below, the “iPad” (which actually appears to be a smartphone rather than a tablet), features not only a trackpad, but a slim 1″ thick body, a whopping 8 hour battery life and “OS X 2go.”

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What’s perhaps most amazing is that this fan image accurately picked the name for a real Apple product that was released six years later in 2010. Apple was experimenting with the iPad back in 2004 as some prototypes of the device date back that far.

Obviously this isn’t an official render of an Apple product and is little more than a fan’s idea of what the company could have made, but it shows just how much Apple influenced the way that the world imagines both interaction and user interfaces when it released iOS and the first iPhone in 2006.

Image credit: pauliewoll / Flickr