The Original ‘AppleVision’ Lineup

I quipped in my post linking to Apple’s updated style guide that if Vision Pro had been a product from the 1990s, Apple might have named it “AppleVision”. Turns out Apple did make products under that name — a short-lived line of CRT displays. From a little birdie who worked on them:

It was an ill-fated (and largely disgraced) line of CRTs with automatic color calibration built-in. [...] The on-screen brightness and volume controls that still grace macOS today are there largely because of the AppleVision product, though an earlier form of them showed up on a 14” CRT just prior. Also, DigitalColor Meter (now styled as “Digital Color Meter”) came out of that software effort as well.

But the AppleVision displays were, despite a huge amount of innovation, extremely unreliable. It was the first time Apple had attempted to build a multiscan CRT on their own, and it turns out that multiscan CRTs are really, really hard to get right. Apple took a large (for the time, in the mid 90s) financial hit on the AppleVision 1710 and 1710av, in particular. The name was eventually abandoned as it had been tarnished beyond usefulness.

★ Monday, 25 March 2024