Newton Poetry

Bryan Lunduke at Lunduke.com:

The Newton was, for those who can remember back that far, revolutionary. It was a huge deal. The company had some serious problems with it (marketing being one of the big ones), but the devices (and the Newton OS that powered them) were many years ahead of their time. Case in point: it still holds up strangely well against a current iPhone (Newton’s had multi-tasking, etc. way back in the old days). And, of course, there was the eMate 300 (which was a Newton-powered laptop that featured a rechargeable battery that, I kid you not, lasted through 28 hours of continuous usage).

This after rebutting whether Apple would’ve done fine without Steve Jobs’ return in 1997.

Lunduke probably assumes that the Newton platform could have, somehow, become profitable for Apple somewhere down the road. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but one fraught with unknowns.

If Steve Jobs hadn’t returned, would Apple still have avoided a buyout/bankruptcy/total meltdown? Would we be using bMates and cMates?

As seen during the iPhone OS 4 keynote.

Two words: Hail, hail.

“Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother’s going to have one, and you’re going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don’t think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals.”

- Steve Jobs in a great Rolling Stone interview from 1994. Lots of quotable Steve in there.

Steve Jobs and crew have some great ideas, but not all Apple innovations have come under his watch.

That’s the basis behind Mac|Life’s “Top 10 Innovative Apple Products – That Steve DIDN’T Dream Up” post.

Two items on that list are familiar: the Newton platform, and the eMate 300. Dreamed up by Apple’s Steve Sakoman, Steve Capps, and Larry Tesler (with help from then-CEO John Sculley), the Newton MessagePad and eMate were creations Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.

Mac|Life wonders: “And if Jobs hadn’t come along and killed it, who knows what might have been?”

[Image courtesy of State of the Ark.]

From Esquire, by Tom Junod:

Like the iMac, the iBook was designed not to be an instrument of utility but an object of desire; like the iMac, it was designed to be a pleasure both to look at and to use; like the iMac, it was designed to be designed, and by introducing it a year after he introduced the iMac and two years after coming back to Apple, he made it clear that he was not going to play the same game as those whose idea of technological innovation was beholden to the number of transistors that could fit on an integrated circuit.

Amen. The iBook G3 clamshell is still a joy to behold, even though the translucent plastic look has been gone since the G4 series. It was rugged, truly portable, and very Apple.

Later in the article, Junod quotes someone on the Newton:

“Like Newton. Remember Newton? It was the first PDA. It might not have worked, but it was the first. That’s not what they do now. Now they start with what makes an existing experience crappy. And that’s where Jobs is a genius. That’s where his ruthlessness comes in. He’s ruthless with himself, ruthless with other people — he’s also ruthless with technology. He knows exactly what makes it work, and what makes it suck. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but they sucked. So he’s like, Okay, what do we have to do so that they don’t suck? Same with the iPhone.”

“It might not have worked” is a pretty strong statement, don’t you think? Is the Newton experience “crappy”?

“This is Steve Wozniak. You think I’m a fat lazy billionaire who cuts the line at Apple stores and hasn’t done anything serious with my life since 1982, and I think you’re a shit stain on the underpants of journalism. So can we talk?”

Quoted by Dan Lyon (formerly Fake Steve Jobs), on his new blog “RealDan,” from his phone call from Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak.

It’s all thanks to the Steve Jobs opening line generator.

Fun! But I often think about that “haven’t done anything since 1982″ part. Woz was the “good guy” back in the proto-days of Apple, and since then he’s become a teacher and a bit of an inventor, but not much else. I guess when you’re worth millions, you can do whatever the heck you want. Like call Dan up.

At times, Steven Levy’s tone in The Perfect Thing: How the iPod shuffles commerce, culture, and coolness winks and nods at the reader as many Apple-inspired blogs do: he’s one of us, and he’s intimate with the subject.

Levy’s voice makes The Perfect Thing a breeze to read, and not just because of the book’s modest lenght. In revealing the software, hardware, and philosophical origins of the most popular MP3 player on the planet, he easily makes the case for the iPod’s overwhelming popularity.

More… »

But a quick note: we’d add another sticker there.

Rhymes with “Putin.”

> Courtesy Fake Steve Jobs.

Off topic:

Steve Jobs was interviewed by the New York Times the other day.  He was worried about how the iPhone would work.

“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”

Well, sir, my Newton seems to be working…err…hang on…