All that being said, I loved my Newtons. They were a fabulous device that still is unmatched, feature for feature, today. It had, at least for me, great handwriting recognition, a very long battery life, a backlit screen, infrared printing (I was blown away the first time I used this), great apps (remember SilverWare?), wireless data or faxing, and the capability to be used as a telephone (crudely, but it worked). It was way ahead of its time. I hope Apple comes up with a new device that is as far ahead of its time as the Newton was back then.

PS: notice that the iPod uses one of the Newton fonts. Also, weren’t those Easter Eggs cool? (Where’s Elvis?)

Cheers
JMH

I don’t underestimate Apple’s desire to stay focused. For the next year or two, they have their hands full. But in time Apple’s current growth vectors will run their course. Then Apple will go looking for growth areas, if they aren’t looking for new growth already. Because Apple tries to stay focused, did I look at possible growth vectors that ovrlap with current technologies and products. By building upon existing
technologies, Apple can amortize their investments in research and development into new areas of growth. Apple has been quite efficient in their use of engineering talent, in spite of having creating so many products; the vast majority extremely successful commercially.

Apple will continue to look for growth. Apple is doing so well in education & consumers, that eventually they will have such a large portion of these markets that they will get to a point of diminishing returns.

Apple could then cut their prices as some have suggested to try to reach out to every last person. However, before undertaking such an extreme tactic, Apple can find better profits by looking for opportunities for growth outside of their current growth markets instead. Getting into price war chasing the market to the bottom would not necessarily be the best strategy for profitability. Deploying technologies that have already been developed, into growth vectors adjacent to Apple’s current core markets would be the wisest place to grow.

I think you underestimate Apple’s desire to keep focussed. Focus is what they’re all about at the top, and down to the bottom. Gruber put it well in his recent anti-Adobe merger article:
http://daringfireball.net/2008/05/why_apple_wont_buy_adobe

As for the home desktop: I think laptops are well underway in their takeover. Apple are leading that assault with a truly massive share of high end laptops, as well as a solid showing with the new iMacs:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/05/19/report-apples-focus-on-premium-computers-is-paying-off

The MacBook Air leads the Macs sold at Apple’s webstore, another sign that they have their finger on the pulse of a whole lot of consumers.

A Windows gaming friend of mine recently got into an argument where he assured me that in ten years time desktops will still be more popular than laptops. I subsequently showed him statistics proving that isn’t even the case TODAY! It’s easy for some to forget that what feels like their own mainstream is in fact a vanishing niche.

Consoles are doing to Windows gaming the same thing laptops and increasingly the iPhone are doing to the household Internet Explorer email+surfing box of yore. Just look at the chart:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080513-dell-xps-phase-out-symptomatic-of-declining-pc-gaming-sector.html

Yes, your point is correct, with a caveat.

Apple is in much better shape with all of their hardware categories sharing the same base OS with an adapted appropriate user interface for each type of device.

The Newton OS would have needed a rewrite to bring it to OS X. However the Newton OS was not compatible with OS X or with Classic. Bringing Newton OS to OS X would have required an entirely separate Rosetta type compatibility layer bridging Newton OS to Mac OS X.

Newton OS was one of the most advanced OS’s of its time. It was a complete ground up rewrite and was not necessarily based on the Classic Mac code which was brilliant but a bit aged and not quite up to the task of powering a small mobile device. Newton OS used many modern OS technologies that the Classsic Mac OS had not been built with.

It turns out that dropping the Newton was the right call. The problem for Apple was that they needed every last bit of engineering resources to transition mac to OSX. Having to also worry about a Newton transition would have been a needless distraction.

@ ericdano

Yes, emates were selling well. Combined with the promising sales figures of the eMate and the excellent technologies in Newton, many were surprised by the drop of the Newton product. The surprise was so great that many pundits blamed it on Jobs himself; saying that he killed of the project because it was the pet project of Sculley of had gotten him thrown out of his own company that he started.

In reality though, the transition to OS X was such an undertaking that it wouuld take all of Apple’s energy. The call to kill the Newton division was likely due to the desperate need for the engineers, combined with the problems inherit in successfully launching a new platform, that you would have to kill and transition to OS X eventually.

It seems to me a wise move strategically from a company perspective. Put your resources where you’ll get the best return from your efforts. Getting OS X up and running with the Classic compatibility layer became critically important. This was especially important when many large legacy third party developers, like Microsoft and Adobe insisted on a compatibility layer, and were balking at rewriting their large applications with large installed bases and lots of code much of it custom tweaks and even machine language subroutines.

And although this problem came later than the Newton termination, the folks at Apple could probably guess that backwards compatibility was going to be an issue. The folks at Apple at first were not planning so much backwards compatibility with Classic. They figured that most apps would be rewritten in the new superior tools. They are still dragging Adobe and Microsoft kicking and screaming and trying to get them off carbon and onto Cocoa, even today.

The smartest thing Apple did was provide the compatibility layer. In fact it was so good that the Classic layer lived on for many yeard with OS X. The Classic apps worked side by side with OS X apps. The experience they received in the transition to OS X and the earlier migration to PowerPC from the old Motorola chips served Apple quite well. Their recent recent transition to Intel was executed flawlessly nad ahead of schedule.

The reality is that Apple now has a modern OS at the core of all of their products. They have a great design team on both the software and hardware sides, and can adapt their core OS X into whatever device or solution that is needed for whatever product they feel the market will adopt.

Not only do I see the strong probability that Apple will dominate the mobile Internet device category with devices that will be built on the touch platform that they are now deploying; but also the core OS X is so powerful and versatile that they will many options for growing into new markets. In a couple of years when Apple is dominating mp3, moblie Internet, cell phone, laptop and making strong inroads into the personal computer market, they will feel a need to innovate other markets. They will find themselves keeping many plates in the air, but surprisingly with a bit of extra time on their hands.
I can see Apple then growing into the embedded markets. Over time, we will lose the treasured experience of walking up to an ATM or kiosk and seeing a Windows error screen. These solutions are mostly self contained, and become a great entry point for OS X into many businesses. Plus, OS X can access the internet and large industrial databases just as good as any other platform out there. For example a large nation or internation bank could easily migrate all the thousands of ATMs to OS X without having to worry about what the desktops in their offices are running. Each ATM is an island into itself. As long as it can communicate with the bank’s secure central servers without difficulties, it can have OS X at its’ core. ATMs can be transitioned to the new platform one a t a time over the period of a year or two.

This is just a crazy example, but a very real possibility. OS X is a great core and can be adapted for this or almost anything. iMacs or the Mac mini or a new form factor that Apple can develop could be the core that many VARs could build into robust solutions for myriad industries.

The OS X tools are easier and more powerful than much else out there. Developers are not running to support Vista , yet. There is an opening for either Linux or OS X to not only steal the embedded but also the PC market. The PC desktop market is a bit harder because of the training issues and legacy support. But as many apps and solutions are moving to the Internet, even the desktop market is in play. But as I’ve said above, the embedded market is available for takeover today.

Apple is wisely putting their energies into the iPhone and its’ offspring and whatever portable Internet devices that are working on currently. That is the segment that will give Apple that biggest payback most quickly. My point is that all their work in OS X, media players, cell phone and portable devices and touch will transition to a blossoming market in the kiosk/ATM market with little extra work on Apple part.

Losinf the Newton, which was great, allowed Apple to concentrate on OS X. Doing so has opened up so many possibilities.

As far as I’m aware, the Newton’s OS would have needed the same kind of comprehensive rewrite that still awaited the Classic Mac OS at the time. In other words: the original Newton was a dead end.

It took Apple longer than anticipated to finish Mac OS X. They concentrated everything they had on that project, which only really bore ripe fruit with Tiger in 2005: notably the same time the Mac’s sales really took off and *before* the Intel machines debuted.

The iPhone / touch platform *is* their next gen Newton; redesigned, engineered and imagined for a market far bigger than the original addressed. It took until now for many reasons, not least of them the software at the very heart of the machine.

That’s why the touch platform is in another league when it comes to longterm potential. It is based on solid foundations. There’s no looming rewrite coming up for its whole inner core, unlike the classic Mac OS, the Newton or indeed Windows…

Oh, and Symbian too!

“Apple’s Newton Operating System 2.0 won Byte Magazine’s Best of Comdex-Fall ‘95 award in the operating system category.” Imagine in the same year that Windows95 came out, there was much critical acclaim for Newton and the Newton OS.

I had been disappointed that the Newton had been discontinued, because the technology was cutting edge. I never owned a Newton, but ended up buying several Palm over many years. At the time, I was convinced that the Newton would have been successful if the there had been a Newton with a form factor closer to the Palm Pilot. At the time I saw an opening that was later filled by the Palm V, which others have lovingly remembered above. Had a slim Newton been introduced prior to the Palm V with the great Newton software, Apple might have stolen Palm’s thunder back then. Instead, Palm just squandered their precious market lead. Apple is just stepping into a vacuum that Palm has left behind. Windows has been unable to take a market leading position that Palm has lost. Blackberry was making an effort to take the lead in North America and Nokia was taking a stab at a leadership role in the world outside of North America.

I am convinced that Apple will assimilate this smart phone market, which is the modern day descendent of the PDA of yesteryear, over the next 3-5 years.

Between the iPhone and other touch devices, Apple will dominate the smart phone market. Then, in a strategy similar to the branching in the iPod product line, Apple will take over the most lucrative parts of the cell phone, portable computing device marketplace.

Dan, you’ve trash-talked the Newton quite a bit, and you’ve overlooked much of the positive of the Newton. Had Jobs not cancelled the Newton, Apple might have found a way to make it successful. In fact the eMate was making great inroads into the educational market. I’m not a Newton apologist. I’ve never owned one.

It was in Apple’s DNA to lead the PDA market. They are taking over the smart phone/ portable computing device market. Even without the Newton, Apple is taking the leadership role in the industry that was invented at Apple. Apple invented the portable computing device, as they had earlier invented the personal computer.

It is fitting that Apple is showing great leadership in both categories.

Its the fantasy appeal of the tiny gadget that has us in its grip!

The iPhone seems to be cautious in its avoidance of being a Palm or a Newton, as if the curse of the magical Star Trek device that never exists properly in reality scares Apple.
So it should, if history has a lesson.

The ‘failure’ of the Newt will be avoided because today there is:

(a) a 2.5/3g network and lots of public wifi
(b) absurdly cheap components and huge memory chips
(c) absurdly small components and huge memory chips
(d) beautiful colour multi-touch screen tech.
(e) OSX
(f) Apple’s superb design team.

..and its a phone, with all the inherent usefulness that a phone always has.

I dream of Apple designing a car, or a car manufacturer seeing the brilliant design lessons of the iPhone and applying them to automobiles.

I believe we suffer from shockingly bad vehicle design in our world, the way we did until last June with phones…..