Chris Barylick from O’Grady’s PowerPage, on upcoming Apple announcements:
Also likely is an introduction of iTunes 9, which has widely been rumored in recent weeks to make its debut with a handful of social networking features. Nothing is expected to be heard about the much anticipated Newton Web tablet, which isn’t expected to surface in any form until the first calendar quarter of 2010.
Hilarious. Apparently Barylick doesn’t agree with me or any other Newton fan who realizes that the rumored Apple tablet will not, in fact, be called a Newton.
[Via splorp.]
What these people don’t seem to understand is the reason it couldn’t be called the Newton. If it was simply a name, it would make sense. The Palm Pre has absolutely nothing in common with the Palm Pilot, and even using the name “Palm” was a risky move, because Palm was associated with an extremely outdated operating system largely based on the original from 1996, resulting in a product that was unusable with most current technologies (My dad had a Palm Treo 650 for several years, and no web browser at all would be better than the one that came with it). Using the name Newton would be just as risky, because people would associate the name with an advanced but ultimately unsuccessful PDA from the 1990s, but if it was as good as the rumors would have you think, no one would care. It all boils down to this: Steve Jobs hated the Newton and many other once successful Apple products because he was not in charge when they were created. As soon as he returned to Apple he canceled the Newton, QuickTake digital camera line, Apple printer line, and many other long running projects. In the iPhone introduction from MacWorld 2007, he never mentioned the Newton even though the iPhone owes a great deal of its existence to it, while he did choose to mention the iPod, which only shares some basic functionality with the iPhone. You could even go so far as to argue that he created the idiotic names “MacBook Pro” and “Mac Pro” to sever all ties with Apple’s past of PowerBooks and Power Macs. Is it a coincidence that the only name left is “iMac”, the first new computer that he introduced? Bottom line: the name Newton is dead because according to Steve Jobs, it never existed.
Wow, that comment ended up longer than I intended…
Posted by obi1kenobi1 on August 28th, 2009.