Yeah ok it isn’t that Apple Tablet. But this is a picture, taken around 1990, of the Apple Pen Mac, a little known and never launched Apple tablet project. As far as we can tell there is no other image of this device anywhere on the Internet, and very few references to it at all.
The Pen Mac was a fully functional Mac computer (it even played the Mac startup chime) with a pen based touch screen. The screen itself was identical to the Mac Portable, but with the addition of pen touch. And of course the case was a lot smaller than the Mac Portable. The Pen Mac was supposedly not much more than one inch thick. Users could plug in a keyboard and mouse or easier input.
Holding the Pen Mac in the picture is Glam CEO Samir Arora, who told me about the device over dinner a couple of weeks ago. Arora worked at Apple on the project, eventually going to a spinout company, Rae Technology, which was designing applications for the Pen Mac. Rae Technology eventually morphed into NetObjects.
The Pen Mac project was led by Paul Mercer but was eventually axed in favor of the Newton. Then Apple CEO John Sculley wanted a PDA, not a tablet. From a 2006 NY Times article: