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Five Years Later, Newton Still Going Strong
CrezzyMan writes "Today is the five year anniversary of Apple's cancellation of the Newton platform. In spite of this, the Newton community has remained stronger than ever: it has even been the subject of academic research. In just the last few days, an IrCOMM stack and a new connection library have been released, on top of OS X syncing and 802.11b support."
I know that most of us have Palm Pilots of some sort, but the Newton was really cool especially when you consider that it was invented many, many years ago and then mass-produced fairly efficiently.
The Palm is great and all, but the Newton was just so innovative for its time. I still have the one I bought several years ago and will give it to my daughter when she gets old enough.
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Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Like I just said in another post to this thread, the Newton is just really, really innovative and is a natural, intuitive handheld to use.
If you actually read the article you'd see that the Newton is still being used by many people, and they're not just super-geek hobbyists on some masochistic joy-ride. Don't make blanket statements about something that you probably have never even used.
It works well what it's supposed to do, and don't cut it down for that. I bet many Newton owners are still pleased about their device, whereas many Palm Pilot folks get a new PDA and then stop using it after the novelty wears off.
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Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Its important to remember that barring failure a piece of technology one buys will always be as capable as when it was the latest technology.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
The devices the users of this "dead" platform [the newton] still work, and are still useful to them.
Can you name a reason why these users should drop their newtons and get, instead, some newer device like a Palm or PocketPC?
Really.. any reason. Perhaps the PocketPC can do better the things that these people do with their newtons? Perhaps there's some fatal flaw or incompatibility in the newton? Perhaps you believe the speed of the Newton is insufficient for their needs? Is there some reason why they would benefit more from using the same platform as a larger customer base such as Palm has? Anything? Do you know?
Because if you cannot come up with any reasons why these people should stop using their newtons, then i will, in fact, assert that you are a troll for saying that they should stop using their newtons.
Well, the point of this story is that while you have gone through *3* different palm pilots, there are plenty of people using +5 year old newtons that do pretty much everything your Palm Pilots can. No, maybe you can't go partying with a newton in your pocket (you need bigger pockets) but you could do a lot more partying with all the money you would have saved not buying Palm Pilot after Palm Pilot after Palm Pilot!
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
- Unleashing a new product category before the product itself was ready.
- Ignoring customer feedback on design issues and pricing.
- Vague and inexplicit value proposition.
- Getting nailed by a competitor who listened to customers, built a more portable platform, hit the market target price, and understood the core value proposition of a PDA.
I was a big fan of the Newton from the Messagepad 120 on -- with the 120 and Newton 2.0, Apple had finally delivered on the promise of the PDA. Unfortunately, after years of fumbling, overpromising and under-delivering, the market had moved on, and simply would not believe anything that Apple had to say -- something I'll dub the Newton Effect. The Messagepad 2000, which was ultimately more capable (thanks to DEC's StrongARM), was also ultimately a step in the opposite direction of what the market was asking for: smaller and cheaper, not bigger and over $1000!I stil have my Messagepad 120, and it still comes out of the case every now and then to remind me that bad business decisions can and will kill superior technology.
...-.-
I still use my Newton, and it's as capable now as it was five years ago when I bought it. Well, ok -- the battery life on my rechargable dropped, but I was able to refurbish it.
My point is I bought the Newton to use as a handheld computer for taking written and audio notes, and for reading books on flash memory. The fact that it's still better at (all three of) those tasks than a Palm or WinCE device is beside the point.
I still use a Performa, too... I bought it to use as a Word Processor. Guess what? It's still a great word processor. Just because there is new hardware out there that fits the bill doesn't mean the non-hardware-junkies out there are going to buy it.
Ooh! Ford just release a new car! It still goes the same places on the same roads, but it's SHINY and NEW. I'll stick to my existing car until it stops doing what I bought it for, and THEN buy a new one.
you could do a lot more partying with all the money you would have saved not buying Palm Pilot after Palm Pilot after Palm Pilot!
While i could be wrong, and it varies, i seem to remember historically the Palmpilot costing about a third of what the Newton cost.
I would be curious to know how much 5n3ak3rp1mp paid for their three palmpilots, and how much Kenja paid for their newton. Depending on which palmpilots and which newton, either one very well could have been more expensive.
That [Palm] is what the market wanted - a *small*, usable, electronic daytimer.
Excuse me, but not ALL of the market wants the same things. That's why there are subcompact cars, sports cars, and SUVs. I used the Palm and the Newton before choosing the MP2000, because I wanted the bigger screen real estate, ethernet option, e-mail, fax, etc. The earlier models were under powered in my opinion, but the MP2K series was (and still is) pretty snappy, performance-wise.
There's room for both. Palm is nice for addresses and calendar, but it's horrible for note taking. I'd love to have the Newton as thin as a Palm (which could be done with today's technology) but I'm happy with larger height and width.
I think Apple was definitely ahead of the curve with Newton. It was a groundbreaking product in many ways, and I feel it was also a fantastic piece of engineering. But from a mass market perspective it just couldn't hold on once Palm introduced the Pilot.
When it was first developed, the Newton's computational power was about on par with typical desktop systems. This translated into higher cost, larger size, and heavier power requirements.
Palm's insight was to simplify what a PDA needed to do. All of the Palm apps were simpler than their Newton counterparts. Even the low level graphics routines were simpler. By relying on hot-sync, Palm offloaded some requirements (i.e. printing) to a desktop computer. Grafitti required considerably less CPU cycles than Newton's handwriting recognition. etc.
By building a simpler system, Palm was able to make their PDA smaller, cheaper, and run for a long time on 2 AAA batteries. IMHO, this was the magic forumla that led to PDAs crossing from early adopters to mainstream.
But I'm skeptical that Palm would have been able to focus their efforts correctly if Newton hadn't already been in the market. It is incredibly difficult to predict what is important and what isn't when creating a new market.
In short, both products deserve a lot of credit for creating the PDA market that we have today.
Of course, you shouldn't forget that the Newton was actually in the black for the first time since its creation when Steve Jobs killed it. There is a distinct possibility that the Newton could have held down the high-end of the PDA market, particularly with vertical apps, and gradually trickled down to the consumer level.
I've always suspected that Jobs killed it because it was a John Sculley project. Most everyone in the Newton division bolted for Palm.
What's even worse was finding out that, within two years, Jobs was offering to acquire Palm, to which they replied, "Thanks, no." Jobs trashed the Newton brand, ran off its engineers, and only realized the error of his ways about the time that Microsoft was gearing up to enter the market. Too late.
Nothing important has happened in the computer technology arena, other than the adoption of the Internet by the casual consumer, since 1984 when Apple introduced the world to the "graphic user interface" (and PnP networking) in a huge way. You think I'm wrong? Then let's make a list of all the "new" stuff people get a stiffy over:
- Fast processors.
- Better monitors.
- A dozen incarnations of MS Office.
- Graphics acceleration and more bits per pixel.
- Bigger hard drives.
- Denser memory chips.
- Consumer Un*x (Linux).
Just more and faster of the stuff that we had from the beginning. Anyone who wants to argue that any of the above is somehow "new" probably was in diapers 20 years ago. OK, cooling technology in consumer machines is new. Didn't have that on the desktop in 1984; only monster mainframes had built-in air conditioning. I don't see this being progress, however. LCDs are new (even though I had one on my Apple IIc, I kid you not). OK then, consumer Internet at the desktop and LCDs are new.Tending now to the topic, if someone wants to use technology from even 20 years ago to do things that you can do today on "better" (but not new) technology, then I say good for them. They can probably avoid a lot of the current hassles (pending DRM, odious EULA, virus-o-the-week, constant hardware upgrades, constant cost) that those on the bleeding edge of the faux-new have to contend with.
As I said, I use a Newton. Nobody has improved on what the Newton did at the time it was cancelled. This is because 1) nobody other than Apple and maybe IBM actually improves anything because that involves risk and delayed profits, and 2) nobody could improve on it if they tried, including Apple and IBM. There just was no room to do so. It was and is just about perfect. If it has fallen behind the times then what of it; that is what software development is for. You stop developing, it falls behind. Windows still sports DOS at the core; does anyone use DOS anymore? Other than you I mean? Of course not because DOS kept on growing and eventually add a really nice command shell called Windows. Is Windows new? Hardly. Is DOS new? Certainly not. What is new this year from Microsoft, anything? Nothing other than the licensing scheme-o-the-week.
The Newton itself was new in concept, a keyboard-less information organizer, and like many new things it was ahead of its time. Apple itself will tell you the Newton's time still has not come. And when it does, it will probably look more like a phone because a phone is what people understand.
And I still say that the only thing that is really new in 20 years is the Internet to the home. I've seen a lot of technology come and go, and even now I still am shocked and amazed at what is made possible by the Internet:
15 years ago I would be tapping out this message on my Mac SE into my private Hermes BBS, which visitors would connect to via a pair of new 2400 baud modems. Cost me a fortune to run it, and I reached maybe 100 users total in several years.
Gol darnit, now that is progress!
Now that I'm all jazzed again maybe I'll contact that guy I got email from a while back who was selling replacement backlights for the Newton, that way I can turn the lights down and still jot notes about tomorrow's tasks and watch GoGo! dance naughty. Some things are still beautiful even after all the years.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Actually, when Company A sells a widget that doesn't work -- and Company B sells a slightly less ambitious widget that works exactly as intended and advertised, for a third of the money, so that tout le monde goes out and buys one and a good network effect gets going -- there's not much incentive for people to pay attention to Company A's announcement that "no, really, it works this time," and saying "are you stupid? We FIXED it" does nothing to help matters.
THAT'S the Newton Effect. If you stomp your customers and fuck them over, they lose interest in anything further you might offer them, and people have long memories. Ask Amway.
And as Newton owners are testifying here, it DOES work this time, and even whips the asses of Company B and Company C's widgets, but who cares except (by definition) the people who never left the fold in the first place?
From the MacWorld where Newton was introduced until Apple killed it, the company I was working for was developing verical market and commercial Newton software.
Apple really missed the boat by trying to force the Newton into the consumer market when it was clearly failing, while at the same time completely missing the fact that the vertical market was taking off. Of course nowadays the vertical market is mostly served by special purpose devices.
The Newton APIs and the NewtonScript programming language were just unbelievably cool. What Java wishes it was. But Apple refused to allow third parties access to a C compiler or a standard way to load and run natively compiled code, which really hurt performance critical routines.
The OO storage system was very cool too. All and all the Newton was almost *too* revolutionary.
Read about the history of pen based computing here. Basically, the Newton seems in part an attempt to commecialize aspects of Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook, and most of the technology had been previously explored, going back to the 1960's.
The Newton was a project of Scully, not Amerlio. Jobs replaced Amelio, but it was a project created by Scully. Scully was the man who kicked Jobs out of Apple- which is where the grudge originates. Apparently.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I have to admit I have completely mis-moderated posts. My only excuse is that I was using a wheel mouse.
Click the drop down, choose the correct option, wheel the mouse to scroll on down (or up). There is just a short delay while the drop down scrolls to the end of the list, then the page starts to scroll as expected. Later when you submit the page, you see the message "One excellent post moderated as trash". Argghhh.
So guys. Remember to click the focus away from the drop down before you scroll.
Mr Taco can we have radio buttons for moderation please?
Mr Gates can we have mouse wheeling restricted to vertical scrolling?
Sorry to be offTopic, but this is important.