There’s also at least one tangible thread that connects the Newton to something you likely use every day (and that indeed drives the entire mobile industry): the ARM processor. Handwriting recognition was supposed to be Newton’s killer feature. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, he raged against the device for its poor performance (and because it was Sculley’s innovation) and mocked its novel input mechanism. “The one stumbling block had become a joy to use, but it really never got a second look.”īut as bad as Doonesbury was for its image, Newton had an enemy much bigger than Garry Trudeau.
“Character recognition got revisited and was just flawless and phenomenal,” laments Ivester. They went back to work, and eventually got it right. 2) It was a blow to the team, who had put their lives into the Newton.
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(Steve Capps would later license a new Doonesbury cartoon and build “egg freckles” into the MessagePad 200 Newton software 2.0 as an Easter Egg. A panel in which Michael Doonesbury writes “Catching on?” that the Newton translated as “egg freckles” became the shorthand joke for the device. But he wanted to lampoon boys with their toys, and the Newton’s handwriting recognition–which was already receiving bad press–seemed an easy target, as did the idea of replacing a perfectly good $5 notebook with a $700 computer. Trudeau would later tell the Apple team that he had not even tried it when he wrote the series. As it turned out, the Newton was a tangental target. Garry Trudeau devoted an entire week of the strip to making fun the handwriting recognition in Apple’s new device. Newton’s character recognition problems became the butt of jokes, most famously in Doonesbury. “We barely got it functioning by ’93 when we started shipping it.” Handwriting recognition was supposed to be Newton’s killer feature, and yet it was the feature that probably ultimately killed the product. “We were just way ahead of the technology,” laments Capps. The result of all that work was a completely new category of device running an entirely new architecture housed in a form factor that represented a completely new and bold design language. Handheld computers were still largely the stuff of science fiction. It had a stylus, and could even translate handwriting into text. It could take notes, store contacts, and manage calendars. By modern standards, it was pretty basic. It was Apple’s handheld PDA–a term Apple coined to describe it. The company would announce it the following year, and the first product in the Newton Line, the MessagePad 100 1 went on sale twenty years ago this week in August of 1993. That’s where Michael Tchao pitched the idea to Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, in early 1991.
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The first computer designed to free us utterly from the desktop. And yet it was a remarkable device, one whose influence is still with us today. The Newton wasn’t just killed, it was violently murdered, dragged into a closet by its hair and kicked to death in its youth by one of technology’s great men. Yet in the history of those killings, nothing compared to the Apple Newton MessagePad. The Kin, the HP TouchPad, and the Edsel are all case studies in failure–albeit for different reasons.
In product lore, high profile gadgets that get killed are often more interesting than the ones that succeed.
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