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This Apple II Watch is Your Retro Wearable (video)

apple ii watchApple is taking pre-orders today for the Apple Watch, and they’re showing it off in select stores. This is great news for anyone who wants cutting edge 21st century wearable tech, but those of us who value the sleek design of the early 1980s are holding out for the Apple II Watch.

Looking to clad his wrist in something which looks older than he is, Intructables member Aleator777 has designed and built a watch inspired by one of Apple’s early successes: the Apple II computer.

The Apple II Watch features a 3D-printed shell, and runs on an incredibly fast (by the standards of the 1980s) 72MHz Teensy 3.1 SOC. It packs in a 1.8″ LCD screen, a tiny speaker, and an 800mAh battery. Input is limited to just a single rotary knob (no touchscreens here), but to complete the period look and feel Aleator777 also added a couple disk drives. They’re nonfunctional, which is a shame because that would be a great place to add a couple microSD cards slots.

The Apple II Watch runs Arduino software, but without connectivity or a touchscreen there’s not much that you can do with it. There’s a boot animation (complete with period authentic sound effects) and you can use the knob to scroll through a menu, but the submenu options are really just screen images.

I’m okay with that. As we all know, the second iteration of any Apple product is the one where they get it right.

That means that we should probably hold out the next Apple II Watch before investing, but if you don’t want to wait then you should head over to Instructables. Aleator777 has posted a set of instructions for building the Apple II Watch, including the schematics for printing the shell.

TNW

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Comments


puzzled April 10, 2015 um 7:50 pm

I want an IMSAI watch.

Just LEDS and 20 toggle switches to program it…


Mackay Bell April 11, 2015 um 2:22 am

I’ll wait for the eMate watch with a flip top.


Bob W April 11, 2015 um 9:51 am

I used cassette tapes for storage on my Apple ][ clone. Using floppy disks on a watch is just an expensive gaudy extravagance. Typical Apple.

In related news, Samsung released one that looks just like it but they claim they started designing it years ago.


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