Skip to main content

The classic Macintosh was just redesigned by AI — and it’s beautiful

Many artists love to design alternate versions of original Apple products, including the first Macintosh computer. Most recently, app developer Steve Troughton-Smith made his own renditions of the classic Macintosh using the Stable Diffusion artwork generator.

Stable Diffusion is an AI-based image generator that uses text to develop art that the user wants to create. You can simply type in a description of what you want to create, and the Stable Diffusion generator will draft up an image that matches the text description — and these results are brilliant.

A series of old Macs, re-created by Stable Diffusion.

Troughton-Smith shared some of his favorite outcomes from the generator via a Twitter post last Thursday. Each image has a unique design, imagining the classic Macintosh with different aspects such as a rounded display, a flat keyboard much like a modern Mac, thicker and more elaborate mechanical-looking keyboard setups, a separate module resembling a Mac Studio on one design, and various extra screens, ports, knobs, and buttons on a number of iterations.

“Learning how to get great output from an AI image generator like Stable Diffusion from a text prompt and various knobs and sliders is a whole other way of programming,” Troughton-Smith said in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1573080090963058688?s=20&t=hGkp6hCbStMegfsxdahfaQ

“It takes a lot of tweaking and iteration, trying to coalesce conceptual ideas into meaningful words/phrases,” he added.

Among other designs on the thread include old and new renditions of the iPod, and what Troughton-Smith described as “fever-dream alternatives to the original iMac.”

A mocked-up marketing page of a redesigned original Mac computer.

The app designer isn’t the only person who has been inspired by the classic Macintosh in 2022. Earlier this year, Ian Zelbo, a young concept designer who often works with popular leakers like Jon Prosser, drafted a render of his idea of a modern-day Macintosh, fully equipped with a webcam, as well as updated input and output, such as HDMI and USB-C ports in place of a floppy disk drive.

Editors' Recommendations

Fionna Agomuoh
Fionna Agomuoh is a technology journalist with over a decade of experience writing about various consumer electronics topics…
I’ve seen the (distant) future of AI web search – here’s where it’s amazing, and where it struggles
Bing copilot AI chat interface.

The aggressiveness with which artificial intelligence (AI) moved from the realm of theoretical power into real-world consumer-ready products is astonishing. For several years now, and up until a couple of months ago when OpenAI's ChatGPT broke onto the scene, companies from the titans of Microsoft and Google down to myriad startups espoused the benefits of AI with little practical application of the tech to back it up. Everyone knew AI was a thing, but most didn't actually utilize it.

Just a handful of weeks after announcing an investment in OpenAI, Microsoft launched a publicly-accessible beta version of its Bing search engine and Edge browser powered by the same technology that has made ChatGPT the talk of the town. ChatGPT itself has been a fun thing to play with, but launching something far more powerful and fully integrated into consumer products like Bing and Edge is an entirely new level of exposure for this tech. The significance of this step cannot be overstated.
ChatGPT felt like a toy; having the same AI power applied to a constantly-updated search database changes the game.
Microsoft was kind enough to provide me with complete access to the new AI "copilot" in Bing. It only takes a few minutes of real-world use to understand why Microsoft (and seemingly every other tech company) is excited about AI. Asking the new Bing open-ended questions about planning a vacation, setting up a week of meal plans, or starting research into buying a new TV and having the AI guide you to something useful, is powerful. Anytime you have a question that would normally require pulling information from multiple sources, you'll immediately streamline the process and save time using the new Bing.
Let AI do the work for you
Not everyone wants to show up to Google or Bing ready to roll up their sleeves and get into a multi-hour research session with lots of open tabs, bookmarks, and copious amounts of reading. Sometimes you just want to explore a bit, and have the information delivered to you -- AI handles that beautifully. Ask one multifaceted question and it pulls the information from across the internet, aggregates it, and serves it to you in one text box. If it's not quite right, you can ask follow-up questions contextually and have it generate more finely-tuned results.

Read more
Don’t roll your eyes — AI isn’t just another doomed tech fad
chatgpt says it shouldnt write articles open ai chat bot seen on smartphone placed

Stop me if you've heard this one before: "This new technology will change everything!"

It's a phrase regurgitated endlessly by analysts and tech executives with the current buzzword of the moment plugged in. And in 2023, that buzzword is AI. ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, Microsoft redesigned its Edge browser around an AI chatbot, and Google is rushing to integrate its AI model deeply into search.

Read more
Google’s new Bard AI may be powerful enough to make ChatGPT worry — and it’s already here
A man walks past the logo of the US multinational technology company Google during the VivaTech trade fair.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, but it will soon have a formidable rival. Google has just announced that its new "experimental conversational AI service" called Bard has now entered the testing phase.

For Google, perfecting this AI model seems to be an absolute priority, and it's running out of time to do so. Luckily for Bard, it will have a certain edge over this version of ChatGPT.

Read more