Filed under: Retro Mac
Blast from the Past: Getting Started with the Newton
So how much ahead of its time was the 1993 Apple Newton? This video may give you a good idea. In a world where the Palm did not yet exist, where PocketPCs were still a dream, the Newton blazed the path that many other PDAs would follow. Handwriting recognition, transformation of sketches into high-quality graphics, device-to-device information beaming, and printing/fax capabilities were just some of the features that were built into the Newton. I still look back at the device and wonder what might have developed from it were it not rushed too fast to market, at the wrong price point, with unfinished and buggy software, especially when the world was just waiting for the right PDA. The right PDA turned out to be the 1996 Palm, with all its pseudo-handwriting Graffiti, lower price-point and less ambitious technology. What a pity.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Mark said 9:25AM on 1-29-2007
The real pity is that NewtonOS 2.0 fixed all the Newton's previous inadequacies -- the Newton MessagePad 2000 and 2100 were amazing devices that continue to be useful to this day -- but it never got a chance to catch on because the Newt was killed off. I wish Apple had sold it off or open-sourced it instead of killing it. Even now, 10 years after the Newton was killed, a MessagePad 2100 is still a better PDA than anything else on the market. A modernized version with a smaller form factor, hi-res color screen, and built-in Wifi would be really nice. The iPhone comes close to being what the Newton could have evolved into, but it's not quite there.
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jg3 said 9:54AM on 1-29-2007
So help me out here, because I wasn't a Mac guy yet back then. This is really an impressive machine with capabilities my PocketPC still doesn't have (or have as readily). Is Job's current hatred of pdas and the stylus just bitterness over the Newton's demise?
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LKM said 10:12AM on 1-29-2007
>Is Job's current hatred of pdas and
>the stylus just bitterness over the
>Newton's demise?
No. It was Jobs who killed the Newton.
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Richard said 10:13AM on 1-29-2007
Jobs doesn't hate PDA's, he hates John Sculley, whose baby the Newton was. Sculley was the one that had Jobs ousted from Apple in the first place, so there's no way he would embrace something created by him. That's why it was one of the first products removed by Jobs when he returned.
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eric f. said 10:13AM on 1-29-2007
Holy...
I've been a Mac user for 10 years and I've never seen a Newton in real life. This is the first time I've seen a video demo of it too. I can't believe how advanced this thing was. It could be released as a product today. jeez.
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Stephen said 10:27AM on 1-29-2007
I use a MP 2000 to this day. I can do email, contacts, calendars, notes and more, and with a Lucent card, I check email over wifi, even sync to my Mac running Tiger
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Mitch said 10:27AM on 1-29-2007
Well - i own(ed) two newts - actually still have them and have been thinking of selling because i just don't use them any more - but i did up until about 4 years ago.
And there's still a whole world of newton users out there... they've even had 2 or 3 world conferences...
If the newton could browse the net as fast as the iPhone, i'd probably still use it... the handwriting in 2.0 is very very good and i wish Apple still developed the newtons.
Some info from the newton email list:
Got a question? Check the Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
or WikiWikiNewt: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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SomeOtherGuy said 10:29AM on 1-29-2007
Yea, it's still got the "Wow" - effect
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Electric Sheep said 10:57AM on 1-29-2007
I used a Newtwon 130 for years and years, truly a wonderful PDA that is still in many ways unmatched today.
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jg3 said 11:36AM on 1-29-2007
Thanks for the info. So it's still basically an issue of personal bitterness instead of marketplace wisdom. What a shame.
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thegerman said 11:59AM on 1-29-2007
The newton got only one real bug: compared to todays device it was way too big. But there's not one device (maybe including the iPhone) which got such a clever Operating system. It's not only the handwriting recognition but the the newton uses copy and paste functionality (just drag the things to the side of the screen) and things like this. But one thing of the newton survived: when you delete an item out of the macs dock a small explosion/cloud appears - that was exactly the same which happened when you deleted something on the newton...
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John said 12:03PM on 1-29-2007
I'm surprised that so many tech savvy folks aren't familiar with the Newton. As Steve was introducing the iPhone, the whole time I kept thinking, "Oh great, they're finally releasing Newton 2.0." It's just a shame and shameful that Steve's resentment over John Sculley has led to burying this obvious connection.
(Although, in fairness, I can entirely understand how being driven out of a company you passionately sunk your early career in would lead to anger that would be mighty hard to burry.)
If nothing else...
Lisa : Macintosh as Newton : iPhone
By the way, while the iPhone has all sorts of new features, capabilities, and design elements, from what we've seen so far there are still some places where the iPhone can't match it. I hope someone does a Newton vs. iPhone feature comparison once the iPhone is released. If nothing else, harness the rivalry to help the iPhone become a better product/tool.
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Wheels said 12:07PM on 1-29-2007
There must be at least one Apple developer doggedly dedicated to the Newton having a place in Apple's lore since that little cloud poof that shows up when you're deleting something is written into OS X. That had to be a conscience decision on somebody's part because that animation wasn't anywhere I recall in OS 9.
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Mitch said 12:14PM on 1-29-2007
I seem to recall that in one of the SteveNotes he mentioned the newton technology and poof of the dock as being from newton... isn't inkwell also newton?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/inkwell/
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T.D. Shadow said 1:20PM on 1-29-2007
The Newton came out of a time when Apple Computer, Inc. was a beige box maker chasing after The Enterprise, instead of making things "for the rest of us".
The iPhone is the Newton for iLife activities.
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Unearthed Ruminator said 2:52PM on 1-29-2007
Is it just me or shouldn't Apple make a Newton-like App for the Nintendo DS Lite?
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Derek said 3:37PM on 1-29-2007
I think your shortchanging jobs if you think he's passing up a profitable opportunity for Apple (and by definition, himself) because of a personal grudge.
The Newton was the Wrong Product at the Wrong Time. It was never profitable. It was marred by lackluster handwriting recognition in the first version of it's OS, and it took entirely too long for apple to release version 2, which corrected many of the faults with version 1.
Apple started to spin off the Newton division into its own company, but when Jobs resumed control (smartly) pulled it back in. While Jobs knew the Newton would never be profitable for Apple, he also realized that the latest models of it were ready to ship. Why should Apple spin off a product that is ready to ship? Apple had put in all the R&D on the product already - it'd be silly to let the sales go to the spin off.
The Newton isn't around anymore because the palm was a better product for the vast majority of the market.
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Matthew said 3:51PM on 1-29-2007
I remember using the first Newton. Apple was and is the shi*.
Bring on the rumored Utra-Portable MacBook.
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Mac Lover said 7:32PM on 1-29-2007
When are they gonna have a thought interface so a pen or keyboard isn't necessary? :-) The iPhone which is a lot like a Newton is still too big and has too cumbersome of an interface to be totally cool. But it will still probably sell millions 'cause it from Apple. I'm waiting for a product I really need and can easily use.
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Rick Ludwig said 10:55PM on 1-29-2007
The ONLY reason Newton wasn't profitable is because, oddly enough, Apple didn't invest the proper resources. In some circles, it's said that Apple (Steve) came to a choice: Newton or OS X. Given the PDA histaria, and the marketing around the other Macs of the late 90s and early 2000s, I think that Apple could have brought out a smaller, Newton 3.0 unit (plans were always in the works, just like the suspected Intel version of OS X) that would compete heads and toes above the others. Apple would have had what became Pocket PC years before Microsoft and Compaq had the iPaq.
The problem, though, as always, came down to money. To anyone who says revenge didn't play a part at all, then you don't know Steve or the Newton story. Steve Jobs HATED the Newton. The ONLY thing he liked about the Newton was the eMate, which later became the iBook (Rumor has it that Newton might have lived on as the eMate OS where the eMate was a Wireless Network PC).
Really, there are 3 reasons that the Newton was killed off (in no particular order):
1. Money
2. Revenge
3. iBook
The problem Apple was looking at is that, at the time they were looking at the iBook as a $1500 machine, so how could they continue to justify a $1000 Newton Message Pad? The Newton had gotten to the point where it was difficult to distinguish between where the PDA stopped and the computer started. Early on, Apple asked "What is Newton?" and the question was never answered. It was more than a PDA, but less than a computer. How do you market that? Do you take away features to make it more like a Palm? Do you add features to make it more like a Powerbook?
Quite simply, the Newton was, and is, the "missing link" of the computer world.
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