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Newton Won't Die
Superman writes "Wired just published an article about the continuing popularity of the Apple Newton MessagePad, with props to Mad Max (a Newton MP3 Player), the new ATA driver, and Newton's 802.11 capabilities. Definitely an interesting read, and more proof that just because technology may be a little bit older, doesn't mean it's not useful." I still have my MP2000, and still think it has the best UI around. I keep meaning to convert it into a wireless MP3 player. I am currently hoping for Apple to make an iPod with AirPort and Rendezvous, though.
Good technology never dies I guess. I wonder if Apple is planning to fill the space left by the Newton. They can't be developing Inkwell for nothing can they?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Apple users are cultist fanatics who buy anything Jobs blesses.
Yes, that explains the phenomenal success of the Power Mac G4 Cube.
...and I bet Apple knows *exactly* how many colors it displays. 2?
I'm angry, and I Meta Moderate!
Apple: Though I fell off of that tree just as hard as I could, I could not overcome 32 feet per second squared. Thus, Newton would not, and could not die.
I regret this, my brothers, and hope that one day if enough of us fall on his head, we may kill him yet. If it comes to it, we may even coerce an entire branch to snuff him out!
Yours,
The Apple
Actually Jobs wasn't a driving force behind the Newton.
John Scully championed the early PDA as the CEO of Apple during its introduction. Michael Tchao, Steve Capps, and Walter Smith were among the team members who worked with the OS and Stepan Pachikov developed the cursive recognition technology know then as Calligrapher.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
At the last LinuxWorld Expo in New York, I noticed that every booth had a newton with a card reader attached to it, so they could swipe guests' badges and get a record of who visited their table. They must have had 100s of newtons.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
You don't have to listen to your wireless MP3's on a Newton with a dim, old, scratched-up screen - a pal of mine has put together a display upgrade kit and is currently taking orders!
(sorry buddy!)
but seriously, if there is "news" that is remotely Apple related, Wired, is all over it. They love to report Apple news and culture, it tends to be of this type: Gee, Apple stopped doing X long ago, but look, these hip trendy, user groups are doing it themselves!!!! Yay Apple!
Don't believe me? Try this story or this story or this story
Or maybe I'm just missing something? Is there really a well dresses, over educated, hip Apple underground that I have never seen? Wired just tends to report these user groups and people as trendy, San Fran artist types. They have swallowed more than just a bite of Apple's marketing message. (bad pun, I know)
Kind of like Slashdot reports on Linux types... Think about it, it is easy to come up with stereotypes of Wired readers. And slashdot readers for that matter.
but I digress, I do think the Newtons are cool.
.....
Which begs the question, who'd be interested in building it?
The HWR system then known as CalliGrapher is still known as CalliGrapher today, also under the name Microsoft Transcriber on PocketPC and PenOffice on desktop Windoze. At Newton OS 2, Apple dumped the then fairly buggy CalliGrapher, and used their own recognizers that were better, and now found in OS X as Inkwell. CalliGrapher has shaped up in years since, and is pretty decent on PocketPC. CG6 on PocketPC is nowhere near as integrated as Newton HWR was on the Newton OS 2.x, but it beats using a character recognizer any day of the week. :)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
latest Apple jackboot of non-apple DVD players and its software
I don't know the details on Apples legal stance here but I do know that the reason behind the move is to stop software piracy.
The only way to get a license of their iDVD burning software is to buy a Mac with a built-in SuperDrive. That's the only legitimate license there is. The software itself costs nothing - you buy it with the machine. Sooo... if someone develops a hack to allow iDVD to work with non-Apple distributed DVD-burners...ask yourself what is going on here. The only answer I can come up with is that people are wanting to rip off the software.
I have no problem with Apple trying to stop this. If it's true that the DMCA is being invoked then I can't support that particular method, however. I just don't think the "Apple = jackbooting thugs taking away your rights" knee-jerk reaction is as clear cut as some are thinking.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
The Newton was marketed as a "hip" device (as was the Palm) primarily for the "in" crowd. That one cartoon made the whole thing seem terminally absurd, and did in fact kill the entire product line.
sPh
Nelson: Take a note on my Newton to beat up Martin.
Kearny: (scribles "Beat up Martin" on Newton's display
Newton: (converts handwriting to "Eat up Martha")
Nelson: (grabs Newton and hurls it at Martin's head)
om my Mew7on. 1 love this cool hamb writing pecognition. 1 think Cndr Taco yses one to post 5lashdot stories.
The Newton is more than simply nostalgia. Even today, it is still very useful and still has more power than most PDAs people are using now a days with a 162 MHz StrongARM processor.
:(
I personally always *liked* the size of the Newton. Sure, it wouldn't hurt if it were lighter, but I am the kind of person that likes to get a lot of use out of a PDA device- not just use it to keep track of appointments. I took all of my college lecture notes on my Newton, read a lot of ebooks/websites, IRCd, read/wrote email, even wrote full-blown Newton OS applications on the device itself.
Then I switched to WinCE so I dedicate more time to developing and testing my PDA OS/environment, which aims to be Newton OS replacement for me. It's hard to get everything working as smooth as it did on the Newton. I'd much rather go back to my Newton, and I regret switching.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
4 MB of RAM is enough for a Newton. On a computer with a non-traditional architecture, RAM doesn't mean the same thing as on your Win2k box. You don't need 80 MB of RAM on a Newton just to be able to connect to the net.
Nope, can't run Apache+PHP+mySQL. Someone could work on a port, but there wouldn't be much use in it. There does exist a web server for the Newton, including a framework for the creation of web applications; the NewtonScript language is built in; and there is an object database at the heart of Newton OS.
Yes, you can connect to/from the Newton using standard ethernet, serial (PPP/SLIP) or wireless connections.
I agree, no reason to look to other solutions, and I myself recently switched from the Newton to another platform. But, there's also no need to ignore the strengths of other solutions.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
No, Intel never bought ARM, they are still around and still own the rights to the ARM IA. However, the StrongARM CPU was not actually designed by ARM, but rather DEC, who licensed the instruction set from ARM. Actually, if memory serves, DEC designed the StrongARM somewhat at the impetus of Apple at the time the Newton was being developed. A few years later, DEC sued Intel over something completely unrelated: Intel had stolen part of the Alpha design and implemented it in their own chip. Intel basically conceded this, and they reached a settlement part of which included Intel buying much of DEC's semiconductor business, including the 2114x Tulip ethernet chipset, and the StrongARM. Intel basically ignored the StrongARM for a while during which time it became rather popular in embedded devices, and now they have renamed newer versions the "XScale" and started actually marketing them. Probably Intel would love to drop the chip and stop paying royalties to ARM, but their clients would just buy other ARM processors from other manufacturers, and they would not benefit at all.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
It's easy to condemn something with 20-20 hindsight; but nobody had done anything like the Newton before.
How big exactly should the screen be? What resolution? How powerful a processor do people want? What things make a PDA succesful for day to day users?
There is no combination of answers that is right for every user. The Newton combination worked well for certain people. However, there were many other people who didn't need that much screen or processing power.
It did get a lot of things right, like superb battery life. On the other hand, one thing it got resoundingly wrong was connectivity. Connectivity worked OK on the Mac, but Windows utilities were always buggy and unreliable, and Apple had an indifferent attitude towards Windows users. So, you either had to be a Mac user or a tolerant Windows user to be pleased with the Newton's basic out of the box connectivity options.
The Newton screen size is a dividing point for users. Either you love it or you hate it. Most people prefer something you can slip into a shirt pocket and feels comfortable in one hand. Witness the move from clamshell PDAs to palm style form factors in WinCE. I know trying to sell users on my PDA apps, it was always a struggle with Newtons, but put a Palm in their hand and they immediately wanted it.
The Palm was a rare, perfect combination. Good battery life, large enough screen to do what most people wanted but not any larger; and excellent connectivity. By being less ambitious in the screen department than the Newton, and less ambitious in the connectivity department than WinCE, it could be smaller, simpler, more reliable and cheaper.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For a fairly wide range of usertypes, the Newton had the potential to be a desktop replacement. This excludes the kind of people who don't think that a laptop is a satisfactory desktop replacement, namely, 3D gamers. I'm not into that. The only reason I sold my Newton, and the only thing I couldn't do on it that I can on my desktop (er, well, it's an iBook) is program in Squeak. However, I can do this on my Jornada 720, at the expense of everything else working as nicely as it did on the Newton. With the proper knowledge of C and graphics work, I could've had Squeak running on the Newton, but even for that noble cause, having to deal with C for a big project didn't interest me.
:P
Unlike the Palm and for the most part, PocketPC, the Newton didn't need to be teathered to the desktop to be useful. I never sync'd with a desktop, and never needed it to get data or applications. I was able to use a browser and FTP client via ethernet for those sorts of things, just like I would on the desktop. Apple's intent wasn't to completely replace the Mac- true, but it does a pretty good job at it. Most of the missing pieces that are in the work habits of other users could easily, in most cases I'd surmise, be solved by having an application or analog of one that just didn't exist on the Newton.
Again, this excludes hardcore 3D gamers- there is an OpenGL subset available on the Newton- but a 162 MHz StrongARM wouldn't cut it for Quake 3.
The screen is indeed big enough. By "big" I am talking physical dimensions, screensize. I could see why some people would like a larger resolution, but I did fine with 480x320.
For those things, I never wished I had a much larger screen. My girlfriend has a webpad with a 10" 1024x768 screen, and it's much too large to be comfortable for me.
I was a Newton user for a while, but I don't think it's fair to just dismiss stories of well it worked as just reality-distortion-tunneling of "Newton die-hards." My handwriting was (and still is) a big mess, and with the Newton, I was able to get 40-45+ WPM and around 99.4% accuracy. Sorry, but the days of Eat up Martha are long ago, and the Newton 2100 is not the Newton of 1993. Newton HWR *learns* as you correct it, so it works fine even with messy handwriting like mine.
The Newton has the size of screen of a legal-pad- obviously, people manage to use the paper version of those, do they not?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Almost forgot-
Unlike the PalmOS and PocketPC, on the Newton you can program apps for the native API using the native language. The very same API and language you'd use if you were developing for Newton OS via a Mac or Windows host. Complete with an IDE and building GUIs, all on the Newton.
Yes, on PalmOS or PocketPC, you can program using various non-native environments, LispMe, Python, etc. There are similar options to this on the Newton, but neither the other "big players" can you do first-class development. I suppose you can program in assembler on the Palm OS and probably call native Palm OS API funcs, but that's hardly how you'd usually do it on the desktop.
I keep track of self-hosted PDA programming environments on this page.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
John Sculley. It's no secret that a) Steve Jobs has a tremendous vindictive streak, and b) most of the changes SJ made at Apple immeditaely upon his return were to cut or scale back JS's initiatives.
Yes, Newton was ahead of its time. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was poorly marketing. It was too __________ (fill in the blank). And, the Newton division was always in the red. That is, it was in the red until right before SJ axed it. Yes, friends, Newton was making a profit for the first time when SJ lowered the boom (two consecutive quarters, I believe); that more than anything tells me that killing it was an act of vindictiveness.
Of course, it didn't take SJ long to realize the error of his ways. About a year later, it came out that Jobs was offering to buy out Palm, but considering that Palm was mostly comprised of ex-Newtonites who were forced out by Steve (successful ones at that), there was no way it was gonna happen.
What was really crazy was that Palm was wildly successful at the time, but they were only nailing the low-end of the emerging PDA market. Newton was perfectly positioned at the time to nail the mid- to high-end of the market, particularly in vertical applications. I remember a MacWeek article at the time about how the Newton was causing a stir in several vertical markets. Apple had the first mover advantage, and they virtually owned the higher-margin high-end of the market. Killing the Newton was an act of sheer stupidity and short-sightedness.
Now that Microsoft has entered the market, I would say that the odds of Apple owning a big chunk of the PDA market are virtually nil. Palm has saturated the low and mid-range of the market; Microsoft and their partners are going after the mid to high-end. Once again, Apple set the table and Microsoft is eating the meal.
Apple might have an opportunity to add PDA features to the iPod; however, that still only gives them a small slice of the low-end consumer market.
If Jobs had been wise, he would have spun out the Newton division, much as he did the Filemaker Pro division, to create its own brand identity apart from Apple and keep the focus on cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps he might have more shrewdly licensed out the Newton OS and allowed PC manufacturers to build the hardware and sell the systems, thus getting a significant jump on Microsoft.
Ah well.