Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years later
Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product to date, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to much fanfare a year later, but as a product it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a benchmark for expensive but useless high-tech gadgetry. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share and was discontinued in 1997. Yet, while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized the engineers of ‘Apple to create something better and, in some ways, led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.
The Vision Trick
Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976, had courted marketing guru John Sculley away from PepsiCo to become Apple’s new CEO in 1983. However, their relationship broke down and Jobs resigned from Apple two years later. late after a bitter power struggle. Although Sculley made Apple profitable by cutting costs and introducing new Macintosh models, he felt lost without Apple’s visionary founder. So when Apple Fellow Alan Kay burst into Sculley’s office and warned him that “next time we won’t have Xerox(to borrow ideas), he took it seriously.
In 1986, Sculley commissioned a team to create two “high concept” videos for a new type of computing device that Apple might possibly build in the future. These “Knowledge Navigator” promotions showed a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid “virtual assistant” that interacted via voice instructions. While some scoffed at the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, they fired up Apple employees and got them thinking about the future of computing.
Meanwhile, Apple engineer Steve Sakoman was bored after launching the Macintosh II. He wanted to make a portable device like the Pioneer laptop he had built for Hewlett-Packard. To prevent him from leaving Apple, Vice President Jean-Louis Gassee let him set up a “skunkworks” project to pursue his dream. But he didn’t just want to make a Macintosh laptop. He had a vision of a tablet-like device, the size of a folded sheet of A4 paper, that could read people’s handwriting.
The dream begins to slip away
The technology to create such a device did not exist when Project Newton began in 1987, so Sakoman contacted AT&T and hired the company to design a low-power version of its CRISP processor, known as the AT&T Hobbit .
Unfortunately, the Hobbit was not as agile and intelligent as his namesake. The processor was “full of bugs, ill-suited to our needs and too expensive”, according to Apple’s chief scientist, Larry Tesler. Newton’s original design required three Hobbit processors to operate, the end-user cost approached $6,000, and the device wouldn’t even be ready for at least five years. Handwriting recognition software, a key selling point of the device, was also making slow progress.
Development of the Newton had stalled and Sakoman was beginning to lose hope that it would ever be completed. In 1990 he left Apple with Gassee to found Be, Inc., which manufactured its own desktop computers and the BeOS operating system.
At the same time, another “top secret” division of Apple was also working on wearable devices and unique software under the code name “Pocket Crystal”. Larry Tesler was asked to evaluate this team to see if it could replace the Newton. Instead, he suggested turning Pocket Crystal into a separate company (which became general magic) and refocus the Newton project with new material and a new direction.