Ever see the movie ‘2010: The Year We make Contact’? It was the belated (1984) and somewhat lacklustre sequel to the superb ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, (1968), based on (recently deceased) SF writer Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name. The central character Heywood Floyd (played by Roy Scheider- also recently deceased, alas) is seen at one point (before he goes off to space) sitting on a beach working on a laptop. Of course, no such things as laptop computers existed then, but this film went to great lengths to try to portray how America might look a generation later (the Ford concept car seen in the film is actually similar to many production models today, for instance). So the viewer only sees the ‘laptop’ from behind: the screen (I’ve read) was just a blank piece of metal (it was impossible to manufacture flat-displays back then, beyond calculator size anyway) but the keyboard was a (necessarily unpowered) Apple ][! I haven’t seen this film for a while, but from memory I think it looked quite similar to this mod! What a pity Scheider and Clarke won’t be around to use it in two year’s time….

I love the look; it’s very Apple - it doesn’t seem very 80s though. I think it would look at home sitting next to a modern iBook. Which is not a bad thing - if there’s one thing Apple knows, it’s cosmetics.