A great find from the Apple marketing archives, showing the target market for the eMate: education.
The video may have been produced before the eMate name was finalized, because you never heard it called an eMate through the whole thing. One teacher keeps calling it “the machine,” but no one comes out and says it’s a Newton product.
“It’s definitely ageless,” one of the teacher says.
Ruggedness, flexibility, tons of uses, usability – these were the eMate’s strengths, especially as it was carried around by fifth graders. Apple had that in mind, at least, when they put together the commercial.
On this day eleven years ago, Apple released the Newton eMate to try and reach the education market.
Applefritter has a nice rundown of the eMate’s abilities, but I’ll tell you: they’re so cheap on eBay now I’ve thought about getting one.
I like them because, in a way, they’re the harbingers to the original clamshell iBook G3 – my favorite Apple portable of all time.
Unlike the handwriting-based MessagePads, the eMate is keyboard-friendly. It sports an ARM 710a 25MHz RISC processor (view more technical details here) and hosts a word processing program, a drawing program, spreadsheet, address book, calendar and graphing calendar.
