Braun × Apple

Announced April 4, 1984 on the opening day of the Hannover Messe, ten weeks after Apple showed the Macintosh in Cupertino. Braun had been one of the studios invited into Apple's Snow White competition in 1982 and lost to frogdesign; Steve Jobs, who kept an ET 55 on his desk, offered Kronberg a European Macintosh as consolation. Braun would draw the case, Apple would supply the logic board and drive, and Jerry Manock flew out four times to keep the tooling compatible with the Fremont line.

Rams kept the Mac's upright proportions and the grip in the top and flattened everything else. The front is one plane in Braun light grey; the screen sits in a matt black surround, and below it a square field of round holes, taken from the T 3, covers the speaker. A second field on the top replaces Apple's chimney slots, so the machine still runs without a fan. Rams would not accept a power switch on the back, so Manock designed a steel push-rod that runs 240 mm through the case from the green front button to the supply. Lubs drew the keyboard: 58 convex round keys in anthracite, the modifiers a step lighter, Return in the same green as the power button, in a German QWERTZ layout with its own umlaut keys.

The rear is brushed aluminium laid out like a regie receiver. Apple's port pictograms by Susan Kare survive, printed in black, each captioned beneath in 6-point Akzidenz-Grotesk, the only place the two type systems share a line. The clear acrylic lid, cut like the SK 4's, clips over the keyboard for carrying; its underside is printed in white with Kare's pictograms for inserting and ejecting a disk and a list of the menu commands, a habit borrowed from the T 1000.

Chip praised the build; c't praised the build and complained about the round keys, which touch typists found slower for the first fortnight. Inside the case, where Apple moulded its team signatures, the MC 1 carries none. Rams declined to sign, and the tool was cut instead with a single line: Kronberg 1984.