If you’ve followed Apple for the past years, you must know that they’re the kind of company to make a couple of prototypes before deciding on a final product. That’s what they did with the first iPad, of course and now one of the prototypes for this slate was found on eBay.
This early first generation iPad prototype comes with two dock connectors instead of one, like the final unit. The two dock connectors allow it to be docked in either portrait or landscape mode, an idea we’ve heard floating around the interwebs a while ago. Early Apple patents pointed towards a dual docking device, but that never made the cut apparently. This is an early 16GB unit with dubios screen resolution and some display problems, caused by the digitizer not working right.
The prototype runs an early build of iOS 3.2 and Apple’s Switchboard hardware testing suite. Some people say it may be a hoax, but the Suite and early iOS are arguments in favour of it being the real deal. The prototype is priced at a huge $4,800 right now and if you’re rich enough you can outbid it, or stop at $10k and get it straight away.