August 2, 1993: Apple launches the Newton MessagePad, the first product in the company’s line of handheld personal digital assistants. While it will become the most unfairly maligned product in Apple history, the Newton is a revolutionary device.
It predates Apple’s push toward app-based mobile devices 14 years later with the iPhone. And, while often dismissed as a failure, the Newton ranks near the top of the list of Apple’s most influential creations.
March 24, 1997: The Newton MessagePad 2000 brings major upgrades to Apple’s PDA line, including a far better display and a much faster processor.
The best MessagePad yet by a wide margin, it quickly becomes a critical and commercial success. But it won’t be enough to save the doomed product line.
January 30, 1995: Apple Computer launches the Newton MessagePad 120, the first truly great device in an unfairly maligned product line.
Coming 18 months after the original Newton MessagePad, the upgraded PDA packs more power — and truly shines once Newton OS 2.0 rolls out.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: Which gets you more excited, an AirTag with new AR capabilities, a pink Apple Watch or a black titanium Apple Watch Ultra? This week’s top Apple rumors fuel our imaginations …
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An episode of For All Mankind features some retro Apple tech that real people in the 1990s could only dream of: an Apple Newton with a color screen. And one that can make video calls!
A producer for the show explained the clever trick.
Apple is actively working on a handwriting recognition system. This raises the distinct possibility that you might someday enter text by writing words on your iPhone or iPad screen, rather than tapping out letters on a virtual keyboard.
Some will remember that Apple’s tried something similar before and it didn’t go well.
Grant Hutchinson has never owned an iPad. He does, however, own some 15-dozen Newton devices, a few of which he uses every day to help manage tasks, a schedule and software clients.
Why would Hutchinson cling to and even rely on a clunky obsolete digital message pad, an Apple failure so big it inspired f-bomb rage in Steve Jobs and a week’s worth of damning Doonesbury comic strips?
Hutchinson is just one of a few thousand people worldwide who collect and even use Apple’s first mobile computing device, discontinued in 1998 after a number of incarnations over a rocky five-year run.
Apple Watch owners have had some time to play around with the wearable’s custom faces since the feature launched with watchOS 2, and some creative tech and sci-fi fans have come up with delightfully nerdy ways to spruce up their devices.
A few users have taken to making specially formatted faces that showcase their love of games, movies, and TV shows, but the really enterprising ones have found ways to include coordinated Apple Watch bands into their designs.
Here are some of the coolest ones we’ve tracked down.
John Sculley, a former Apple CEO who was at the helm of the Cupertino company between 1983 and 1993, has no doubts that it can revolutionize the television set. If anyone’s going to change the experience and the “first principles” of TV, Sculley told the BBC in a recent interview, it’s going to be Apple.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQhUEYvEl3c
It’s retro-future time again at Cult of Mac. These ads, circa 1993, for the ill-starred PDA the Newton sound a lot like the all-singing, all dancing expectations of portable computing expected at tomorrow’s tablet announcement.
Some of the salient claims from the “Who is Newton?” ad:
“Newton talks to fax machines, laser printers to telephones (NB – a landline) and computers!”
And remember, the Newton is for “All you mobile professionals who like cool stuff.”
While the “Where is Newton?” spot promised portability and connectivity on the go:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3ITn5LBU5A
“Newton can get you from the urban jungle to the nearest hamlet…You can send a letter or a memo and faxes from places where there are no fax machine. Newton is everywhere and that’s not a bad place to be.”
And when the Newton did not live up to expectations — handwriting recognition being one of the big flaws in attempting to send faxes from outpost gas stations as per the ad — here’s what one crystal-ball gazing analyst told the New York Times in 1995:
“In the long run there is no doubt people will carry around small computers much like pagers today,” said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, a Narberth, Pa., consulting group. “But it’s still not clear that Apple will be one of the major providers of these systems.”