>The Guy from Apple exits Good Guys, checks it off the list, and proceeds to the next store on his assignment. G-Man is surprised what we was able to do by flashing his Apple badge and adopting some bluster; just walk in, make some demands and start cracking open merchandise. That’s kind of disturbing, really.
It's kind of surprising that a criminal gang hasn't made off with a huge haul of devices on launch day minus one by doing exactly this.
I know that I would probably fall for it or not care enough to stop anyone trying.
I worked at a CompUSA in college. Believe me, any type of fraud or theft that you can think of has happened.
Being brazen is incredibly effective. One time, I was stuck stocking the storage area above the shelving units up near the ceiling, and was sitting there waiting for the next load. I literally watched a guy walk in with a red t-shirt, walk to the back of the store, pick up the most expensive computer, and proceed to walk out the entrance doo without paying.
There was also a gang of people who would work out of Chinatown tour busses. About 30-50 Asian tourist types would flood the store on a weeknight, 3-4 people would engage employees while a partner would raid small valuable stuff. One time we lost every USR external modem.
The patches are applied in the factory, toward the end of the production line, and they fix critical bugs. If the units don’t have these fixes, the Newt won’t work very well.
The patches live in the battery protected low-power RAM of the Newton, and they’re theoretically immortal as long as power holds out. This is why the battery compartment has a wacky mechanical locking system meant to discourage people from simultaneously removing both the main and the backup batteries.
Am I the only one who thinks this is an overly fragile way of doing it? It's almost like planned obolescence. (Apple isn't the only one doing this; a lot of very expensive test equipment back then also had things like calibration constants stored in battery-backed RAM.)
For the first Newton we didn't have much choice. The unit only had 512K of RAM and no flash; we added a single lane of 128K of RAM (one chip) for extra user data storage when it was clear we were not going to meet our RAM budget for heaps and such (that single lane wasn't usable as vanilla RAM, since only every 4th byte was working RAM).
Later units had flash chips, and the wacky battery lockout stuff went away (to everyone's relief).
We might have been able to add flash to the first Newton, removed all the wacky battery stuff and had cost parity, but the schedule was so tight that there was no time to make any changes. (I have a write-up of fake deadlines and bad scheduling practices in the various companies I've worked for, I should really finish that...).
Not if users can reinstall the updates themselves, then it's simply inconvenient. Just like the Palm Pilot, which lost all data when the battery went flat, or when you had to reset it after a crash.
The lithium batteries were typically rated for 10 years, and modern flash devices are also typically rated for 10 years. Or were you thinking of something else?
It's a heck of a lot easier to replace a lithium battery (even under power) than it is to replace most flash devices.
Nice story. I had an original Messagepad (patched, I assume) which was pretty much useless (it sucked a set of batteries dry in a few hours).
I used a Newton Messagepad 2000 for five years or so, and recorded meeting notes and contacts almost exclusively on it. (The 2.0 text recognition engine seemed to have been made for my handwriting.) It was a fantastic (but limited) device -- it ran for about a month on a set of alkalines, and actually had decent connectivity (it was one of the few devices that could print using IRDA). I had both the pretty horrible Newton SDK and even a native dev tool (NewtonBASIC) that I messed with from time to time (although it sucked compared to VB).
It was an amazing mobile experience, better then the competitors windowsCE, Symbian or PalmOS. Perhaps Psion was better. If you are nostalgic you can emulate newtOS with Einstein, runs on android, ios, windows, osx https://code.google.com/p/einstein/downloads/list
Meh, I had a friend using his Netwon as of last year. Not seriously, but he loved the little bastard and ran a shitty old shareware webserver at one point for me. It took forever, but I remember it working.
This was before he caved and used an iPhone smartphone, but we oft discussed how it was just too ahead of its time for the price tag. I think he got it, like other vintage equipment, especially Mac, by going for years to Rutgers University in NJ where his dad works and their IT infrastructure group was selling "this garbage" away because they had it in bulk and could not use it.
How I wish I took him up on his offer to go when we were college buddies. Sadly Rutgers has apparently stopped as he checks every year to check if we have one last shot.
Duke used to do this, too. They had a warehouse and you could just walk through the obsolete equipment and find bargains. Most was beat all to hell, but we used to troll through regularly, as Mac gear was often recent vintage and underused. A buddy got a couple of NeXT cubes for pocket money. I still regret not buying the Pixar rack (literally an entire rack cabinet, the size of a kitchen fridge, filled with... something) for $700.
I think I had a seizure. A PIXAR RACK!!?? I had humbler intentions when I was younger. My dad used to show me old SGi Irix workstations and Sun Microsystems. This was a clear decade before I touched my first Unix clone (Linux), let alone a real Unix (Solaris) a year earlier for gcc-compiled requirement for CS homework. I would hardly say that was "using Unix" because I could barely do anything with Solaris.
Needless to say, I will peruse eBay to see Sparc workstations. I had no idea as a younger teen what my dad saw, but I same a beautiful minimalism in the design that I would later found out masked unique power and crazy price tags.
It would have been really funny if I caved and bought this thing as teen. I would have no idea how to use it and parts costs would have killed me.
I still have my newton and every time I power it up to show it to someone, I'm blown away at how good it is. Even the hand writing recognition is pretty solid. Interface, capabilities - decidedly ahead of its time.
It's kind of surprising that a criminal gang hasn't made off with a huge haul of devices on launch day minus one by doing exactly this.
I know that I would probably fall for it or not care enough to stop anyone trying.