He’s a German-American industrial designer who is responsible for the look and feel of Apple in the 1980s. In 1982 he entered into a $1 Million dollar a year contract with Apple Computer to create Apple’s design strategy. The result was the Apple “Snow White design language” which was applied to all Apple products from 1984 to 1990 including the Apple IIc and the Macintosh.

While searching around for an image to go along with Apple’s financial quarters I found this link to a company called Fudder. It talks about Hartmut’s son, but displays a gallery of his design work for Apple from the 1980s – and there is some AMAZING stuff here.

Early designs for Apple phone products, some amazing looks at early notebook design, and even a few Apple machines that’d I’d be happy to purchase even today. There’s even sketches for an Apple “cube” design, and a folding notebook concept that looks quite a bit like the previous generation of Macbooks.

Take a look –

Macintosh Concepts

Here are a few concepts of what the Macintosh could have looked like.

Here are a few accessory designs. The first is a concept for a mouse, the second appears to be a phone – but I’m not sure if it was somehow going to connect to the Macintosh, or if it was just something they considered selling to offices in addition to the computer itself.

Macbook Lifestyle

Next up appears to be a concept from 1983 for a portable computer that is labeled in the file names as the “Macbook Lifestyle”. It’s…interesting looking…

Phone Mac

Not exactly sure what the intent of this Apple phone concept was. Is it a digital fax type device? An email machine? Who knows…either way – it looks kinda cool.

Macbook Prototypes

More Macs…

Mac Professional Workbench

Apple today announced the financial results for its second fiscal 2008 quarter, which ended on March 28th, 2008. The company posted “revenue of $7.51 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.05 billion, or $1.16 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $5.26 billion and net quarterly profit of $770 million, or $.87 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 32.9 percent, down from 35.1 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 44 percent of the quarter’s revenue.”

Apple shipped 2,289,999 Macs during the quarter, representing a 51% growth and 54% revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. 10,644,000 iPods were sold during the quarter, representing 1% unit growth, and quarterly iPhone sales were 1,703,000.

“We’re delighted to report 43 percent revenue growth and the strongest March quarter revenue and earnings in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over $17 billion in revenue for the first half of our fiscal year, we have strong momentum to launch some terrific new products in the coming quarters.”

“We’re thrilled to have generated $4 billion in cash flow from operations in the first half of fiscal 2008, yielding an ending cash balance of $19.4 billion,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the third quarter of fiscal 2008, we expect revenue of about $7.2 billion and earnings per diluted share of about $1.00.”

Apple’s live financial results conference call will be streaming today at 2:00pm PDT. It will also be available for a replay. Click here to bookmark the link.

Apple will have its Second Quarter results conference call this Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 2:00 p.m. PDT/5:00 p.m. EDT. Apple will, as always provide a live audio stream of the call which you will be able to access here.

Before the actual call, Apple will release the numbers via a press release, but it is sometimes still interesting to see what gets discussed on these earnings calls.

Now, you may be asking – how the heck are they connecting that thing to ethernet? Well, these guys actually make an ethernet interface for Apple IIs. Although, as of right now they are sold out.

But seriously, does it get anymore geeky than web surfing on your AppleII?