“I thought the handwriting recognition ‘bugs’ were a PLUS– great way to write surreal stories and poetry, write out your ideas and they got translated to weird madlib gibberish.”
– Boing Boing reader ill ich. I like to remember the early days of this blog, when that’s all I did: poetry translated by a Newton MessagePad 110. Since then, I – how should I put it? – moved on.
[Via NewtonTalk on Twitter.]
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”?