Filed under: Hardware, Portables, Odds and ends
The Apple tablet that wasn't
So why weren't we all using tablet computers 20 years ago? TechCrunch blames John Sculley, who apparently thought the tablet idea was out, and the PDA idea was in, and we ended up with the Newton instead. I won't second guess him -- while it's easy to think that anything could have beaten the Newton, would the current Apple touchscreen tablet craze even be here if it weren't for the iPhone? And isn't Apple's smartphone just a hop, skip and a jump from their original PDA?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
David L Good said 6:47AM on 10-29-2009
I'm not sure why people speak so poorly of the Newton. Sure, the early versions had their share of issues, but by the time the 2000 and 2100 hit it was a very powerful machine. I have a 2000 that I used right up until the iPhone came out. Why? Because it worked better than any of the current PDAs on the market, for most of the things I did (I also had a BlackBerry at the time).
I finally realized my Newton was a bit "dated" when I tossed it on a conference table to at work to record the audio of a meeting and someone looked at it and asked me if it was a flat bed scanner. They were serious. They had no idea what it was. I guess it is a bit large and thick by today's PDA standards.
The Newton failed because of poor marketing, support for development and, of course, it cost WAY too much -- about as much as a 'real' computer.
To this day I still think the Newton is a sweet machine. Remember that the Newton broke ground (like so many Apple products do) in areas no one else had touched before. If it weren't for the Newton I'm not sure we'd be where we are today with PDAs... nor the iPhone.
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glo said 9:22PM on 10-29-2009
I'm assuming that the confidentiality agreement that I signed in '91 or '92 is no longer enforceable. I saw it! I was allowed into the Cupertino lab to discuss their project and review possible requirements to turn the Nortel PowerTouch 350 from an ADSI/CAS tone based software application into a REAL touch screen.
Apple Newton stylus fell out of the holder and without the stylus, you were pretty well screwed. But other than that, I agree with your assessment of the Newton's utility.
xobmo said 8:43AM on 10-29-2009
Under-promise and over-deliver...This is what Apple does. Just look at the recent quarterly earnings compared to their forcast. While the initial new Tablet may or may not be a quick thrown together job based on the current rumors, Apple has a way of surprising us all. Version 2.0 and the "Tablet 3GS" per-se four or so years from now is really delivering a product that most companies wouldn't have even dreamed of producing -- this is Apple's forward thinking...A slight change from the Nineties...
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Gene Cowan said 1:28PM on 10-29-2009
I'm with David - the Newton may have been a "failure" in the market, but the reality is that there WAS no market for such a thing. Newton was many years ahead of its time, a sci-fi device in a world that was still using fax machines. I mean, it had email built in for criminy's sake - how many people had email in 1992, much less on a mobile device?
As for the harping about the handwriting recognition, it had the same problem as the iPhone: people didn't trust it. Just as the iPhone works well when you just type and don't think about it, the Newton worked well when you just wrote and didn't worry about your every stroke or curve. People tend to change the way they write thinking they'll help the process when in fact the recognizer worked with REAL handwriting. And it worked almost completely perfectly for me...
I love my iPhone, but I love it as a descendant of the Newton, which whet my appetite for a new class of devices (which, incidentally, many many other companies are STILL not caught up to).
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