The Apple Quick Take Camera 150 (1995) is the well-known company’s first and only camera product, released to market in April 1995, and the first digital camera marketed to consumers (as opposed to professionals), retailed at under $1,000. A point-and-shoot digital camera powered by AA batteries, users could take colour photographs at 640×480 and 320x240 pixels and easily plug the camera directly into a computer in order to manipulate images for use in documents.

The QuickTake Camera was the result of a collaboration between two major design teams, Apple and Kodak. In 1990, Ken Parulski, Kodak’s Chief Scientist at the time, and a team of Kodak managers and engineers visited the Apple team in Cupertino to discuss mutual digital-imaging capabilities, returning two years later with a prototype containing a Kodak sensor. The two teams then worked together to produce the first iteration, the QuickTake 100, with the industrial design lead by Apple’s Industrial Design Group (headed by Robert Brunner, who also notably designed the PowerBook 100 in 1991) which was first shown at Tokyo MacWorld on February 17, 1994.

The next iteration, the QT150, nicknamed ‘Mars’ by the development team was released to the public in 1997. It was an upgrade to the 100, and had a number of improvements on its predecessor, including a built-in LCD screen, a close-up lens, an interface kit for IBM PC computers (in order to make it compatible for Windows users) and JPEG compression so that the camera could store up to 32 images in comparison to 8, with 1MB of total storage. The QT150 kit also came with two pieces of editing software, PhotoFlash 2.0 for Macintosh and PhotoNow for Windows. It also retailed at the comparably lower price of $700 dollars (to the QT100’s $749).

Apple and Kodak’s collaboration ended after the QT150 following the release of the QT200 in 1997 which was bought by Fujifilm.

Due to rising competition from other companies such as Kodak, Fujifilm, Canon and Sony who also released digital cameras in the late 90s, and due to QuickTake Cameras not being a significant commercial success; with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple in 1997, the product line was subsequently discontinued along with the dissolving of Apple’s camera division and other non-laptop and desktop products. In 2018, the QuickTake camera name did have something of a resurrection however, with the release of iOS 13. QuickTake became the name of a camera feature on the iPhone in which a user presses and holds the shutter button to record a quick series of images in a ‘burst’ to take a video while taking a photo.

The QuickTake 150 camera joins the collection as an important object in Apple’s design history, and a significant design collaboration between two major industrial and product design companies. It is also an important indication of the move towards consumer-friendly technology which was previously inaccessible, such as professional imaging equipment. Although short-lived, the QuickTake camera went on to inform Apple’s later innovations as digital cameras became an integrated part of Apple’s other consumer products such as laptops, phones and even Apple Watch attachments. The camera joins a number of objects that chart the museum’s record of Apple’s innovation, including the Powerbook 180 (of the 100 series), also designed under Robert Brunner’s direction (W.12:1 to 5-2009), the Apple II (CD.42-2018), the Apple iPhone 1 (CD.97:1 to 7-2016) and the iMac g3 (W.29:1 to 4-2008).