The Gadget We Miss: The Apple Newton
Apple’s pioneering PDA was ahead of its time
The words “failure” and “Apple” don’t go together all that often, but the Apple Newton is one case where these two belong side by side. The Newton was one of the first PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), but this portable platform proved to be an expensive failure for the colossus of Cupertino. Famously described by Steve Jobs as “some really good technology, but it was fucked up by mismanagement”, the Newton was the precursor to the iPad and all of the other iDevices that use touch interfaces. It also, in a rather stealthy way, might have helped save Apple.
The idea of the Newton first arose in the early 1990s out of a small group of engineers within Apple who came up with the idea of a small portable computer that could manipulate graphics, rather than just text. It would treat all input as graphical information, so you could manipulate images and handwriting as easily as you manipulate text. In fact, it would be so heavily biased towards the graphical approach that there would be no keyboard: just a stylus and a touchscreen. One of the examples that the team used was an architect who would use the device to draw a sketch on screen that could be edited and cleaned up later.
New Brains for a New Idea
This idea required a component that didn’t exist yet: a processor that used very low power, but which could throw a lot of data around when needed to cope with these graphics. After abortive attempts with several processors, the then-CEO of Apple John Sculley decided that it had to be made in-house. So, Apple approached Hermann Hauser, one of the designers of the BBC Micro. His RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Coding) architecture produced processors that were small and low powered, but which could do complex tasks like graphics processing when required. Together, Apple,Hauser;s company Acorn and chipmaker LSI created Advanced RISC Machines, or ARM. This company built the ARM 610 RISC processor at the heart of the first Newton, the MessagePad. For more details on the internals of the first Newton, watch this video from an electrical engineer who took one apart.
Software
The software brains of the Newton was the Newton OS, a small and efficient operating system designed by Apple to run in the small amount of RAM that the system had available (early models had 4MB of ROM, but just 640KB of RAM). This included a number of programs built into the ROM, such as a note taking app, a calendar and a contacts manager, as well as a programming language called NewtonScript.
It also included handwriting recognition, initially using a system called CalliGrapher that could interpret cursive or printed text, converting them into text. Later versions of the OS added a text recognition program called Rosetta that only supported printed text, but with a higher success rate than CalligGrapher. Incidentally, the creator of CalliGrapher (Stepan Pachikov) later went on to be a co-founder of Evernote.
Launch
The Newton MessagePad was launched in 1993, priced at $700. For this princely sum, you got a PDA with a monochrome 240 by 320 pixel screen that ran off 4 AAA batteries, with a claimed battery life of 5 to 10 hours. “What is Newton?” the ads asked. “…as powerful as a computer” and “…as simple as a piece of paper” was the answer.
TV ads proclaimed “Newton is for all you mobile professionals out there that like cool stuff.”
Unfortunately, those same mobile professionals didn’t think that the Newton was cool stuff. The battery life was short, the screen had poor contrast and was unreadable in bright light, and the handwriting recognition was, well…unreliable. When it worked, it was slow and clumsy. It had a 10,000 word dictionary, and guessed if it didn’t know the right word. When it did not work, it produced gibberish, which was mocked on the Simpsons. Perhaps the comic strip Doonesbury captured the rather frustrating training process best, with a strip where the protagonist writes “catching on?” and the un-named PDA replies with “Egg freckles?”. Although it must have stung, at least one unnamed Apple engineer took the criticism to heart: with some later Newtons, the last panel of the cartoon shows up when you enter the words “Egg freckles”.
Larry Tesler, one of the people behind the Newton later told how we begged the marketing team to not use the phrase “it recognizes your handwriting” :
A draft of an early Newton flyer said “It recognizes your handwriting”. I insisted that the phrase be removed, and the copy writers promised to take it out. The printed flyers did not arrive at the CES show until minutes before we started the presentation. There, on page 1, it said, “It recognizes your handwriting”. The PR team must have thought that I would forgive this transgression after I saw what wonderful press coverage we received from such a bold statement. But what they had unknowingly done was to hammer a large nail into the Newton coffin by setting expectations we knew we could not meet.
Perhaps a fairer example of what the Newton can do is this demo from an Apple representative on the TV show Computer Chronicles, which shows off the handwriting and graphics capabilities of the Newton.
But clever tricks doesn’t always sell products. Good marketing and positive word of mouth sells products, but the Newton didn’t get either. Apple themselves seemed confused about who the device was for, touting it as a wonder device that would work for everyone, when it really was a niche product that required a lot of thinking and training to get the most out of. Telser recalled that he encouraged Apple to sell it to people like doctors, police and fire departments who write handwritten notes a lot, but Apple declined, focussing on the mobile professional market. So, it was no surprise when it didn’t sell that well. Apple were touting sale figures of 50,000 for the first three months, then went silent on how many were sold. They had, according to reports, hoped to sell a million in the first year.
Further iterations of the product followed over the next few years, with improvements to the screen, battery life and handwriting recognition. Newer models like the MessagePad 110, 120 and 130 (in 1995, 1996 and 1997 respectively) fixed many of the things that were wrong with the original, but the damage had been done.
The only moderate success was a spin-off product called the eMate 300, which was a Newton OS-based laptop for educational use. Launched in 1997, the clamshell-style laptop was tough enough to be used in the classroom, but cheap enough for school budgets. Priced at $799, it was much cheaper than the laptops of the day. It achieved some success in the education and government computing markets because it was tough. The clear colored plastic case was the direct ancestor of the iMac and iBook models that Apple later produced.
The End of the Newton
By 1998, the Newton platform was still being actively promoted by Apple, but things were about to change. When Apple founder Steve Jobs returned to the failing company, he made some radical decisions, including discontinuing the entire product line and reassigning all of the engineers. It is interesting to note that many of these engineers ended up working on the iPhone and iPad over the next few years. Jobs later told his biographer Walter Issacson that the technology was good, but that the product itself was flawed.
“If Apple had been in a less precarious situation, I would have drilled down myself to figure out how to make it work. I didn’t trust the people running it. My gut was that there was some really good technology, but it was fucked up by mismanagement. By shutting it down, I freed up some good engineers who could work on new mobile devices. And eventually we got it right when we moved on to iPhones and the iPad” -Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 339). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition. ”
So was the Newton a failure? In most ways, yes. It never sold as many as the company hoped, and its failure pretty much killed the idea of pen computing for several years. It was still the goose that laid the golden egg, though. Remember ARM, the company that made the CPU that powered the Newton? Apple had sold most of their stake in the company in the late 1990s, supposedly netting them a cool $800 million. According to some sources, this money kept the company afloat while they were struggling in the late 1990s, and gave Steve Jobs the money to design and build the iMac, the computer that saved Apple. So, while the Newton may not have been the success that Apple had hoped for, one of the fruits of the project was the money to build the thing that saved them a few years later.
Do you want to try the Apple Newton? You can still get them on eBay, and tech guru Harry McCracken posted a great article about his experiences using a Newton for 6 weeks in 2012 at Time. If you want to get a feel for how the platform worked, Einstein is a Newton OS emulator that allows you to run a virtual Newton or eMate device. The program is open source, but you will need the ROM from the device you want to emulate, which is definitely not open source. It does include a utility to dump the ROM from a Newton or eMate device, so if you or a friend has one, you can dump it from the device into Einstein.
