Leaving aside the somewhat creepy Jobs-worship in this article, I don't think this is right:
The problem with the Newton wasn’t any physical or technical problem. Those are easy to surmount. The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it. There was no mental slot in people’s heads that the Newton could glide into. Nothing like it had ever existed before. It was revolutionary. It was a total surprise.
Didn't the Newton appear in the middle of a fad for little PDA-type computers which busy-looking executive types would pull out to painstakingly type their appointments on? I seem to remember them being quite popular for a little while in the early 90s.
Ooh, here's an article from 1993 about the launches of various PDAs:
However the keyboard-based Casio etc versions outsold the Newton for pretty much the reasons dismissed in the article -- the Newton was too expensive and the handwriting recognition didn't work very well.
Scully oversold the Newton idea to the extent that the MessagePad 110 seemed inept. By the time the 2100 was released, the Newton brand was sullied enough to ensure its transformative ideas would not take hold. We settled for a decade of calendar/address book PDAs and incremental laptop evolution, to arrive somewhere in the same neighborhood as the 2100.
Mac OS X, iPods, and iPhones seem to be evidence that Apple and Jobs overcame the need for revolutionary, high-risk-high-reward leaps in favor of ratcheted, stepwise refinement that draws the market toward the same location in design space without risking quarter-after-quarter of red ink, product shortages, blown deadlines and vaporware saviors. I don't think it's a coincidence that the underlying software is (openly code-named) "Darwin".
Can't disagree with you regarding Scully, either… which is probably part and parcel why Jobs has never deviated from pre-announcing only when the products were completed, just not shipping.
Re: Darwin specifically, Apple actually owns (or used to own) mammals.org, well before the acquisition of NeXT. That type of reference is definitely an Apple thing.
Apple even coined the term "PDA", when they announced it in 92, either simultaneous to or predating the announcements of those other devices. The Zoomer was also announced in 92.
Whether one outsold the other is pretty irrelevant, since it's a contest between losers.
More importantly, the mere fact of their existence doesn't compare to having held similar devices in their hands and used them daily for 3+ years prior to the introduction.
It will be interesting to see if anyone else's slate-type computer can match Apple's this time around.
The problem with the Newton wasn’t any physical or technical problem. Those are easy to surmount. The problem that broke the Newton was that nobody was prepared for it. There was no mental slot in people’s heads that the Newton could glide into. Nothing like it had ever existed before. It was revolutionary. It was a total surprise.
Didn't the Newton appear in the middle of a fad for little PDA-type computers which busy-looking executive types would pull out to painstakingly type their appointments on? I seem to remember them being quite popular for a little while in the early 90s.
Ooh, here's an article from 1993 about the launches of various PDAs:
http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Business-general/PDA-devices-s...
However the keyboard-based Casio etc versions outsold the Newton for pretty much the reasons dismissed in the article -- the Newton was too expensive and the handwriting recognition didn't work very well.