There was the Senior (probably not something you want to call your tech device), which was bigger, more powerful, and way, way more expensive, and the Junior, which was a smaller, less powerful take on the Newton concept. A battle played out among managment regarding which version of the Newton they were going to release. What happened next is really interesting, especially considering that Apple's most recent hit is the iPad Mini. The only problem was the price - the original Newton prototype cost around $6,000, way more than any consumer was going to pay for an unproven handheld computer. If Sculley hadn't been enamored with the device, who knows what would've happened to Newton? By the early '90s, Newton was starting to morph from a research project into a real, marketable device. It would have to contend with buggy software, rival products, and the departure of its 'parents,' Gassée and Sakoman, who went on to found Be, Inc. Like the Mac before it, Newton was developed in seclusion by an unbelievably dedicated few. Newton's development was a long and drawn out process, and right up until release, its fate was uncertain. The Newton MessagePad 120, the more powerful version of the Newton released at launch, was designed by Jonny Ive, the man behind the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and just about every Apple gadget from the last 10 years Named for the figure that appeared on Apple's original logo, the project would be called Newton. When it looked like they were going to get sued over that, the two almost relented, but not quite: Gassée managed to convince Sculley to let him start a new skunkworks project at Apple to work on a new portable device. He tried to recruit Jean Louis Gassée, Steve Jobs' successor as head of the Mac team, to launch a new company focused on portable computers. Steve Sakoman, who'd originally been brought in by Steve Jobs to develop a portable Macintosh, was none too pleased with the direction Apple was going in after Jobs' departure. It would provide the seed for Newton.įollowing the buggy first version, Newton was praised for its handwriting recognition As it turned out, though, the world of 1986 was not prepared for a sleek tablet with amazing graphics and an intelligent speech-recognition system, and the plan, if there ever was one, fell apart. The Newton had its roots in Knowledge Navigator, the theoretical pipe-dream of Apple CEO John Sculley that found a new lease on life when the iPad was released. But let's just ignore that for dramatic effect, shall we? What you're left with is the Macintosh line, Apple's full scale desktop platform, gradually trying to inch its way into the TV market, and the newfangled 'ultra-portable' Newton line. Sure, the Apple II had been left on the sidelines to die a sad, slow death, and Cupertino was starting to experiment with some bizarre side projects like the Philipps-produced PowerCD, and they were actually making a product with the words 'low cost' in the title. Apple's product line circa 1993 had some surprising similarities to Apple's product line circa 2012, at least on the surface.
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