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Comment by keyboardCowBoy | Hacker News Reader

BEAT UP MARTIN

EAT UP MARTHA

Ah, I remember my Newtons fondly. It was really, really great for the era -- a far smarter device than the Palm, but also much bigger and MUCH more expensive.

They justifiably took a hit for the efficacy of the v1 HWR, but v2 was really, really great. I used the MP2000 model daily for about a year and a half before finally migrating to Palm.

Funnily enough, I found that with a Newton I could actually take meeting notes on the device, but the small size of the Palm made that task really unpleasant despite the high-speed possible with Graffiti. The screen was just too small. OTOH, the seamless sync with Outlook was the killer app there.

I had a Newton and a very similar experience. I loved the Newt and used it for a year and a half (I bought it used) but ended up migrating to Palm for compatibility. The Newt just got too hard to use once I no longer had a Mac with a serial port. I upgraded to a Palm (a Visor IIRC) that had a USB cradle.

I had the same issue with note taking on the Palm vs the MP2000. I never internalized Grafitti so writing notes for me was painfully slow. On the Newt I could take notes at normal writing speed.

The danger (for those who never experienced old PDAs) is they had to sync with a wired connection before Bluetooth. The internal state of the device could have content that didn't exist on your computer. All kinds of problems on the device could make it lose its internal state erasing notes, contacts, or whatever other data between the last sync and then.

I learned Graffiti on the Newt, actually; everyone pretty much bought it to use on the v1 rev of the NewtOS because of how iffy the HWR was. Using G meant you had a floating input window and an insertion point, which made it usable.

Even on v2, with the VERY good native HWR, I still had Graffiti on the Newton for editing. On a screen full of text, popping up the G window allowed for easier text entry w/o messing with existing text.

So when I went to Palm, I knew Graffiti very very well.

Sync for me was super stable for Palm, but one thing that really hurt Apple was that they more or less IGNORED the desktop. On Windows -- where I lived at the time -- all you could do was back your Newton up. It wouldn't sync to Outlook or a native desktop tool or anything, which is precisely the wrong choice. Palm's easy, simple sync was deadly to the Newton. I'd drop it on my cradle when I came in every morning and hit the sync button before getting coffee.

> Sync for me was super stable for Palm, but one thing that really hurt Apple was that they more or less IGNORED the desktop.

Apple definitely ignored the desktop with the Newton. At the same time I think that just reflects different philosophies between Apple and Palm with respect to PDAs. Apple saw the Newton as it's own device while Palm saw it as a loosely tethered satellite device.

This difference I think contributed to Palm's success over the Newton. The Palm's more limited scope allowed it to be much smaller and cheaper than the MessagePads and (as you point out) required it's desktop integration to be much better.

Had WiFi been available (802.11b spec, not the pre-spec versions) by the time the MP2000 came out it might have been able to survive as it's own non-desktop platform. The necessity of wired connections and the lack of good desktop sync was a huge drawback for Newts. With the Network Connection Kit they had cool networking capabilities.

What's weird is to consider how unusual in the whole history of Apple for it to get the market so fundamentally wrong, as they did with the Newton's connectivity. The platform was sound (if expensive); if they had realized that sync was the future, it still would've had an uphill battle vs Palm's ubiquity and low price, but they'd have had a shot.

I think it's important to remember this was Sculley's Apple which was not at all good at judging market viability. I think the problem with the Newton platform, as it actually shipped, was sort of designed (and priced) for the jet setting executive. There was no real content creation, "office" capability, or even long-form input. It was an electronic briefcase with a built-in secretary. The Newton didn't synchronize with desktop PIM apps because executives had people to do that for them.

The Palm Pilot was designed for people that actually have work to do so it synchronized with the software on the desktop they used. It was also priced to be affordable by someone that didn't have the corporate black AmEx in their wallet. It was a handheld extension of their PIM software with a calculator.

>I think it's important to remember this was Sculley's Apple which was not at all good at judging market viability.

Oh, 100%. My comment is really more about "they've been so good for so long..." than anything else.

BTW, though, the Newton DID sync with the Newton Desktop in v1. It wasn't as nice as the Palm desktop, or sync with Outlook, but it was usable. Then they dropped it for v2, which was just dumb, dumb, dumb.

That was the Newton, not Palm.

That was the Apple Newton.

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