Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
One is an original MessagePad in box, the other a late model, I forget, I'd have to go look.
It's time for me to purge anyways. Prefer these go to a nerd's home who will have fun with them, esp if said person has a history with the Newton.
Please, tell us more.
About 15 years later I walked into my lab and got served with a subpoena by Samsung's legal team for deposition. Everybody's lawyers suddenly wanted to talk to me. They dug through my postings, my software, old files on my laptop, even the old Newtons in my office. Between Apple, Samsung, and the very helpful SFLC legal team, the whole thing was like being dropped into a tank of very nice sharks.
One of the patents Apple was going after Samsung for was 8,086,604, the "604" patent. Hemlock, and my proposals on the Usenet for improving it, predated this patent by quite a bit and easily covered most of its claims. Eventually Samsung decided to argue that they didn't violate the patent, rather than argue that it was invalid. That turned out to be the right decision (they won). But had they gone the invalidation route, I'd likely have found myself on the stand in SF. That patent is still live, and my prior art is still ready to invalidate it.
That name rang a bell so I had to look you up. I just have to say, I love your book!
I wonder how many other invalid patents are out there. It boggles my mind that the patent office will grant anyone a patent without even checking for prior art.
Was "Sherlocked" a term coined yet when you did this? Had Apple started getting inspiration from 3rd party developers yet?
Maybe the most interesting/memorable part of my brief foray into the Newton was being invited to the Apple Campus and meeting other engineers (I was still so young then). We were each paired with a weird development Newton that was some kind of PCB bento.
It was cool to see how the sausage is made (or at least what dev prototypes can look like).
I remember too the one engineer I chatted with in the evening that told me, "You could work here." That really surprised me — I thought you had to have a PhD or something to work for Apple.
(Not too many years later, I would in fact get a job at Apple.)
Dual inheritance for the win... _proto/_parent
> And NewtonScript influenced the creation of JavaScript, with its prototype-based object model, dynamic variable typing, garbage-collected memory, and fast interpreted design. Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world.
The reasons are understandable though (sorry if there are any slight mistakes as I'm writing from memory here).
Brendan Eich was hired to create a Scheme in the browser. Later, the requirements were changed to "make it look like that new Java language". He has said on record that he was familiar with the Self language. JS is often called "Lisp in C's clothing" because under the surface, it is quite similar to Scheme with a prototype object system (Scheme has no object system by default).
Apple created a language in the 1990s called Dylan that was also used on the Newton. It started out as something very close to Scheme + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System though it's more properly MOP -- MetaObject Protocol). Lots of programmers hate the lisp lack of syntax for whatever reason, so they changed Dylan to an infix-style language. OpenNewton is still a thing if you're interested.
NewtonScript kept much of the Dylan-style syntax, but changed out the complex MOP for the more easy to understand prototypal inheritance. I've never encountered even the hint that Newtonscript was on Eich's radar when he started work on Javascript.
There are definitely similarities that become apparent when you look at both language designer's inspirations:
Scheme + Self + C/Java = JavaScript
Scheme + Self + Dylan = NewtonScript
The result is two languages with the same core language ideas from Scheme, the same object system from self, and very different syntax inspirations from C and Dylan.
EDIT: Eich says in an interview he never saw NewtonScript before designing JS
Did you mean Open Dylan?
The first Dylan compiler was written at Apple Cambridge [Massachusetts] Laboratories in Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) which was itself an Apple Product. Later, Apple decided they didn't really want Dylan after all so they sold the Cambridge lab, later renamed Digitool. The MCL product lives on today as Clozure Common Lisp (CCL).
The transition from MCL to CCL is a dramatic story unto itself. I should probably write down what I remember about it someday.
Those were amazing days. We even managed to have a couple of members of the Newton team give us a sneak preview of the Newton (NDAs required) a couple of months before it launched.
Our group helped with the rollout at MacWorld Boston—we were upgrading OMPs early that morning with the latest firmware that had just come out.
Of all of the user groups and tech communities I've participated in, the community around the Newton was second to none, in terms of their vision, foresight and camaraderie.
The Newton Hall of Fame [2] is worth checking out for anyone who was part of the community back then, with many names that will bring back memories, including yours truly.
In 1996, money to keep things going was important: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/28/business/apple-expects-it....
Finally, foreshadowing arguments about why it was important to use 64-bit computing in a handheld device, Mike Culbert explains 32-bit advantages in Newton over the incumbent 16-bit of the time: https://beepdf.com/wp-content/uploads/newton/COMPCON-HW.pdf.
> Newton was not successful, but Newton actually made $800 million dollars because Apple eventually sold the 43 percent it owned in ARM, which, by the way, kept the doors open at Apple, just before Steve Jobs came back. It was one of the really important decisions that Gil Amelio [the last CEO before Steve Jobs returned] made, and it gave them the cash to buy NeXT.
Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time.
Not if you view the transaction as a package deal.
Apple's biggest problem at the time was bad management, followed by credibility.
They solved both problems and got some technology (ObjC, what would become Darwin, etc) as a free bonus.
The complete NeXT takeover of management made it more like a reverse acquisition in any case and the results speak for themselves.
Yes, there was the OS, but there were other OSes, notably BeOS, and NeXTstep/OpenStep ran on other OSes, notably Solaris.
Yes, there was Steve Jobs.
But NeXT had a core thing that nobody else did: the state-of-the-art development tools.
Apple needed to get Mac developers on-board with the new OS. Sun had a great OS. Be had a great OS. Apple itself had A/UX. OSes abounded; there was lots of choice. Jobs' vision was very important.
But without the NeXT developer tools, notably Interface Builder and Objective-C, the deal would not have saved Apple.
One thing that changed was IOKit, rewritten in C++, but there actually wasn’t a good reason for that and I think everyone agrees sticking to ObjC would’ve been better…
for example, NSString, NSApplicationMain, etc.
I was pretty young during this era of computing…but it felt that handwriting input was going to be The Thing in terms of next-generation computer interaction. Mind you, all I had access to was MacWorld and whatever PC mags were at the bookstore, but handwriting was seemingly going to be the text input method of the future. I swear you could even buy what amounted to a teeeeny little Wacom tablet to plug into your computer for handwriting recognition.
All of which seems funny to me by 2022 standards. Computers were supposed to adapt to our “natural” input method of handwriting…but instead everything is a keyboard, be it a soft or hard keyboard, and then voice recognition for short on-the-go messages or for individuals with accessibility constraints. I mean, I literally cannot write any more. If you put me back in 4th grade, I’d flunk a cursive test so hard they’d hold me back a year.
I was taught cursive in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade... and it hurts my hand, and looks terrible, so I don't do that. My usual writing is a modified drafter's font.
Of course, I also had a Newton MP2000 (later upgraded to 2100) that I used in labs to input data to the native spreadsheet program, imported the resulting graphs into the native word processor for the writeup, and stopped by on the way back to the dorm to print it out wirelessly, all before anyone else sat down at their computers. That felt like magic.
Depends on the school.
Low-end public school? Probably not. But private schools, and my nephew's Catholic school do.
I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's pharmacy?
It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically it's also faster to write than block characters, but the speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give here are not especially stylized letters and that Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo, generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said, I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when scanning words we already know.
The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.
In my experience it is much more comfortable to write cursive. You do not have to lift the pen for every single letter. It is quite annoying to have to do that, quite honestly. My hand feels much more happier to be able to just follow a flow.
I also do not understand the hate, it is much more comfortable. It is like hating touch typing. Sure, you can type with two fingers but not very efficiently.
To each their own I guess.
The hate stems from when we were taught it (poorly) in elementary school, where it was slower, physically painful and the result was illegible.
Now I go weeks between writing anything physically at all (and even most of that is Kanji now as I moved to Japan) so learning a new way of writing seems pointless
Cursive is unrelated to quills and ink. Quills and ink existed for a thousand years before cursive was invented.
Cursive exists to relive the strain of writing a lot. Printing is much harder on the hands that cursive. If cursive hurts when you write, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to hold the implement very loosely and gently, not like you're holding on for dear life.
the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable
The cursive "r" is an "r" with a bit on the right linking to the next letter.
The cursive "s" is an "s" with a bit on the left linking it to the previous letter.
The forms have evolved over the centuries, but they're still there. Even the weird capital F makes sense if you write it enough times. It's an "F" made without lifting the pen.
I went to public school early in life, and so didn't learn cursive. When I joined a private school, everyone was already writing cursive, and I had to catch up. It took me maybe three weeks. I remember getting g and q was hard for me. But people are able to learn new things every day.
I don't think anyone suggested otherwise?
I think the conversation might be slightly hung up on the specific example of a quill (reed stylus, sharpened bird bone, charcoal stick, brush all encourage a flowing character), nor is the only reason to prefer cursive writing to relieve hand strain, although that's true for informal long-form and for some hands and for some alphabets. My general point here is that the medium of writing tends to dictate the common forms of writing and with the common medium now being mechanical -- computer, printer etc -- we're seeing a shift in how people form their characters, if they even form them by hand at all.
I definitely find writing a nicer experience with a pencil, a fountain pen, or a felt-tipped pen - ballpoints require too much pressure to be comfortable.
Isn't the whole point to handwrite faster, which people don't even do anymore? I for one didn't write fast in cursive so even that's not true.
On the other hand it's harder to read, harder to OCR.
Given text is read way more than it is written, the choice is clear.
I even went through a period where I used the “long s” in my script, and I was able to get that to OCR just fine after some training.
Pocket PC Devices, especially the iPAQ 2000[1], changed my career and sling-shot me from a Magazine Cover designer to building HIPPA Compliant Programs for these devices. If you see doctors, in the USA, ticking off stuff holding one of them during the early 2000s (perhaps till the 10s), they might be using one of the programs I wrote.
[2000-2002] I used to always carry an iPAQ and I was kinda showing off. Fellow commuters on the BEST buses and the Domestic Western Railway in Mumbai thought I was a Japanese, surveying things with cool gadgets to be introduced in India soon.
The fix was to swap those two ARM instructions. It's simultaneously the hardest and the most trivial bug I have ever fixed.
Years later, I was cleaning up the closet in my home office and ended up throwing away all Newton materials - my general rule that if I haven’t used something in a few years, I like to get rid of it.
I told him about my experiment of using GA to train small recurrent networks (using what I called variable weight size, that would increase during training). He said that it was a very cool idea but it wouldn’t scale. A few weeks later I agreed with his almost instant analysis. I did use the code as an example in my C++ Power Paradigms book.
Another thing was text selectors, where you could do things with random text, depending on what it was supposed to represent (open the web browser when taping a link, open the phone app when tapping a phone number, track parcels, show a place in Maps, things like that). Nowadays, it is everywhere, but it was a nice feature on the Newton.
http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Ja...
[0] https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
A chap called Adam Tow gave a talk where he showed us an email he got from Steve Jobs about the future of the Newton.
Basically, one day in 1997 or 1998 Adam was walking past Homma's Brown Rice Sushi in Palo Alto, and saw Steve Jobs getting some takeout. Adam wanted to ask him about the fate of the Newton, but managed to hold his tongue.
Instead, he went home and emailed jobs using the subject line "Homma's Brown Rice Sushi", because he figured that since he was just there he'd open the email.
It worked!
Steve replied, and they got into a discussion on the future of the Newton. You can see the exchange here on slide 61: http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/2004/program/adamtow/slides-adamt...
Merging them with cell phones, cameras, and music players also turned out well.
And that ARM CPU turned out to be a good investment, in more ways than one.
But the NewtonOS user experience was very much based around an occasionally-connected model, with syncing between the PDA and a "master" device or beaming between PDAs, and built-in support for inbox and outbox stores that would accumulate items to be dealt with once connectivity was lost or regained.
So although there ended up being a bunch of TCP/IP-based Internet stuff for Newtons, it was very much "bolted on the side", even more so than MacOS and Win95 around the same time, because the interaction model was hard-wired against constant connectivity.
Newtons also supported an infra-red version of AppleTalk, using an adapter connected to the built-in AppleTalk connector. This supported the usual AppleTalk network services -- wireless printing was the most useful.
Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple. But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.
> Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple
:(
In the bad old days you'd have to restart your web browser because it crashed.
Now you have to restart your web browser because it has consumed all system resources, spun up the fans to maximum, and slowed performance to a crawl.
And those weekly severe security vulnerabilities don't crash your browser anymore - they just enable it to be taken over by criminals.
While MS did do some crazy stuff to kill Netscape, IE was just a better browser.
IE 3.0 for the Mac was native code and the most standards compliant browser in existence for awhile.
What makes you believe that?
> But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.
If the iPhone had supported stylus input from day 1 touch wouldn't have evolved nearly as well. Developers would say "just use the stylus" and been done with it. Modern mobile had to go through an evolutionary phase where touch was the only input method to get where it is today.
At the same time it's really easy to see their limitations and why they failed to take off. The Newton was aimed squarely at the concept of a late 80s early 90s jetsetting executive. A small device that replaced a briefcase and purchased on the company AmEx.
Unfortunately for the Newton that's a pretty rarified market. Even within that market a contemporary laptop was vastly more capable for only 2-3x the price. Because the Newton seemingly aimed at such a narrow market it just couldn't support itself let alone a third party ecosystem.
I was in love with the idea of a Newton, they were the PADD from Star Trek! The price put them out of reach until I bought a 2000 second hand. I'm glad I started with that one because the 2000 and 2100 were the most capable Newton's released and had the best expansion options. I was able to get some use out of it for years. Between NUGs and the NewtonTalk mailing list die hards were able to keep Newtons useful for a while.
My love for them aside I can understand why Steve Jobs axed them. Like the $4500 PowerBooks (the base 3400c cost that much in 1997 dollars!), the Newtons were just way more expensive than their utility could justify. The Palm Pilot market was an order of magnitude larger than the Newton and it was selling for half the price. There wasn't much reason to fight two entrenched platforms in two different markets (Windows/PC and Palm/PDAs).
The jetsetters the Newton was targeting (or I posit they were targeting) did end up getting Palm Pilots in the late 90s but in the early 90s likely either went with electronic organizers like a Sharp Wizard or a full laptop if they went with any electronic PIM/organizer device.
It also seems to have a high-contrast reflective screen that you could use in broad daylight, something that challenges even my rather bright MacBook Pro.
As you note the iPad is something of a successor to the Newton both in hardware (e.g. ARM CPU, Apple Pencil) and interface (e.g. shape recognition/drawing, long press.)
Apple apparently prototyped larger Newton tablets (VideoPad) as well as pen-based Mac OS devices (PenLite) but never brought them to market. Though macOS does work as a pen based system if you plug in a Cintiq, or an iPad with Sidecar.
Thomas Meyerhoffer designed the eMate 300. Jony designed the second-generation Newton MessagePad, the Newton MessagePad 110.
(If HN didn't have its stupid edit locks I could edit it to read "say what you will about 1990s Apple.")
In any case, the eMate looks like an amazing design and now I want to see more Meyerhoffer designs!
I'd still like to hear more about Thomas Meyerhoffer though.
I can’t help but think it would make a really good Raspberry Pi casemod, but it feels like sacrilege to gut a working device.
Incidentally, if anyone has any broken eMates I’d be interested…
I'm glad the author mentioned the knowledge navigator concept video/s (were there two or just one? I can't remember any more). The iphone handily picked up that baton, but wisely didn't try to do so right away. But the NN vision was almost 20 years too soon.
Sure QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, etc. might have been “innovative”. But they weren’t what consumers wanted.
The iMac on the other hand especially running pre-OS X was technically crap at the time. But it saved Apple.
I think this clip when Jobs killed OpenDoc explains it all.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
One would hope it isn’t - the problem with component systems is they’re a Conway’s Law violation, which is the reason the app model works so much better. (in terms of actually shipping, not technical correctness)
This was years before Steve Jobs' (in)famous big unveiling events.
After that, I wanted a Newton so badly...never did end up getting one. Alas.
†Excepting the iPhone, this has been the case for virtually every device I've owned. Palms (after the discontinuation of Palm Desktop), Smartphones prior to 2007, Android phones. 3rd Party vendors make a genuine strong attempt to make everything work, but first-class support really makes using a device normal, instead of a chore.
My newton turned in to my first e-reader. Having "books at my fingertips" I really enjoyed, although it was all fiction.
I later ended up buying a Palm VII, I think, off eBay. It was all fancy with some wireless connectivity that was obsolete when I bought it, but it had a backlight and cost $20. That was a really nice little e-reader.
They are going all-in on HMO plans. Of course everyone remembers how unpopular HMOs were in the 90s, deservedly so or not.
The Apple Newton figured prominently in their presentation. Like the Newton, they argued, the HMO was premature to the market, and suffered from lack of supporting infrastructure, despite being ahead of its time in many ways. Today's HMO could be the iPhone.
I wasn't convinced, but it was cool to see the Newton again, out in the wild.
Myself, I grabbed a 130 shortly after release. Combined with a PCMCIA modem, and serial cable connector to my Motorola Flip, I was one of those obnoxious nerds in coffee shops checking my email, before WiFi and smart-phones.
NewtonScript was amazing, such a great language - and the promise of an operating system with built-in database-like/searchable storage was amazing. Which was also one of the reasons I fell in love with BeOS a little later.
In what form? Just curious.
Includes help enabling nice things like WiFi, modern Flash memory, dates after 2010…
It's time for the Millennials to start scheduling their colonoscopies.
Welcome to old age!
The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 - Feb 2020 (37 comments)
Newton Storage History (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 - March 2017 (11 comments)
Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 - April 2016 (1 comment)
Soup (Apple) – the Newton storage system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 - Feb 2016 (1 comment)
Why I Carry a Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877256 - Jan 2016 (138 comments)
Dash Board for Newton OS: a Comic Tragedy in Nine Acts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083181 - Aug 2015 (6 comments)
A Guide to the Apple Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079507 - Aug 2015 (20 comments)
The “personal organizer” we had before the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635168 - May 2015 (11 comments)
Patching the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125296 - Aug 2014 (17 comments)
Talking with Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS from Apple - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7781265 - May 2014 (19 comments)
Steve Wozniak on Newton, Tesla, and the original Macintosh - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955583 - June 2013 (2 comments)
Ask HN: Is there a FOSS implementation of Apple's Newton OS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5643063 - May 2013 (1 comment)
Newton OS running on an iPad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703130 - Sept 2010 (6 comments)
Apple Gives Tribute to Newton with New 'What is iPad?' Ad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343523 - May 2010 (4 comments)
The iPad, the Newton, & the "Of Course" Model of Innovation Diffusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290914 - April 2010 (31 comments)
A bit of vaporware (or "Microsoft's Secret Newton Killer") - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838496 - Sept 2009 (1 comment)
Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320646 - Oct 2008 (5 comments)
It still works, and I’m going to take it to EMF Camp this weekend and send a fax using it!
Does anyone have good links for modernizing a MP in 2022? Up to date/usable networking etc.
Newton had lots of ways to share information between applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much smaller memory footprint of the device.
I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting measures.
Users getting a document could always see it (there were essentially graphical previews built in to the format), and you only had to have the Application to modify content in that section of the document.
As an example: a single document that had one area that was a spreadsheet, another area that was a chart derived from the data in that spreadsheet area, and then other areas that were images or text areas.
For those that have used Adobe's InDesign with embedded images from Photoshop or Illustrator, this is much the same idea (except using plugins rather than the original app to do the rendering).
It was a neat idea, but needed a lot of different places to buy into it, and it would have needed to have a killer InDesign replacement as part of the OS, and it never had that. Plus all of the apps like Word and Excel would have had to buy into having that as their hub, and I am not sure that Microsoft (or others) would have ever given up that much control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-BH8j06pM
(lol, macintosh)
It had stroke recognition: it literally learned your handwriting. The code was bought in from a Russian company called Paragraph.
I had a play with a friend's Remarkable last month. It is tragic. It's a lobotomised Newton with all the clever stuff removed.
It is absolutely heartbreaking to see how profoundly dumb 21st century kit is.
There are multiple reasons why not. Have you read the rest of the discussion? Did you not wonder why people are commenting "egg freckles" and "eat up Martha"?
[1] Little to none of the Newton's design was continued in later Apple products, because it was a product from the period when John Sculley ran the company. When Steve Jobs came back, he cancelled all the Sculley products, notably the Newton, which he described as "that scribble thing".
[2] The tech was not used further because it didn't work very well.
[3] It didn't sell because it was impossible to try before you buy, and impossible to borrow a friend's.
The Newton needed weeks to learn that single user's handwriting. If you let a friend use it, it tried to learn their handwriting, making it worse at its owner's.
So you couldn't try it in a shop, because it didn't know you or your writing.
Newton OS 1.x only understood cursive ("longhand" as we non-Americans call it). As the many comments here show, a lot of people don't really know how to write in cursive any more.
So Newton OS 2.x added support for block printing, but it was too late, the damage was done. That's why the device was parodied in "Doonesbury" (which is the source of the 'egg freckles' line) and the Simpsons ("Eat up Martha") and so on.
[4] The tech was not adopted because it failed and because it wasn't a Jobs product. It wasn't good at synching with a parent device (the Palm Pilot did that) and it wasn't good at standalone (because ubiquitous wireless Internet didn't exist yet) and it competed with the Mac rather than being a partner to it.
But the critical point to grasp here is that the mere fact that it didn't succeed does not mean that it was not good. It was very very good. I own 2 of the devices. The tech is amazingly good at what it does; the problem is that what it does wasn't essential and wasn't very useful.
The iPad was too big and too radical when it was devised. Which is why Apple miniaturised it and launched the 2nd generation product first: the iPhone. The iPad came before the iPhone.
The iDevices are technologically conservative. They are existing tech, simplified and miniaturised. They are very small pocket-sized UNIX machines.
This is well-known tech so the result was polished and worked well and was a hit.
The original Newton design was a pocket-sized battery-powered Lisp Machine, and was amazing radical tech... but arguably tried too soon.
So the result was flawed and inconsistent and didn't work all that well, and so it flopped.
Which is why 21st century computing is flooded with iterative refinements of existing successful products, resulting in vast complexity and hard-to-understand failure modes, rather than bold innovative experimental new tech.
In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!
The sad/interesting part is, that some of those dark moments seem so unnecessary - at least in hindsight. But I suspect that the underlying psychology of ruthlessness may be a requirement for much (all?) larger achievements.
Was it similar to the Nissan case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
But I can't find any references to it anywhere.
Much of the outrage at the time was: Hey, Apple, you already have Apple.com, why aren't you using apple.com/newton ? The owner of newton.com seemed to have as much right as Apple did to use the domain (it seemed to be his legal last name), and IIRC he had it for years before Apple released the Newton.
A bulk of the remaining animosity at the time was HOW Apple went after it. They didn't offer to buy it or negotiate with the guy that had it. Instead they went with: "This is ours now." through ICANN or whatever it was at the time.
Very similar to the nissan.com situation, except, you know, the individual still has nissan.com.
This was probably around the time that an article came out about domain squatting, which ended with: Does this mean that I could just go out and register mcdonalds.com ? E-mail me with your thoughts at: ronald@mcdonalds.com :-)
On the other hand, it was awesome. It could do things that nothing had done before, and weren't done by anything else for years (even to today) after.
You can argue that Apple made the wrong compromises, and the success of the Palm Pilot suggests that a lot of people agree with you. But then the Palm had a crappy screen too, so maybe that wasn't as much of an issue as you think.
And it was smaller than an iPad Mini. The Newton group had plans for smaller and larger models that were never brought to market. It was hard to get the battery life and CPU power into a smaller device back then. Still, the Palm, iPaq and various PocketPCs clearly hit a sweet spot of size.
Consequently, it was much cheaper to make, and could fit in a smaller package.