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.
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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.