Garry Trudeau also mocked the Newton in a weeklong arc of his comic strip Doonesbury, portraying it as a costly toy that served the same function as a cheap notepad, and using its accuracy problems to humorous effect. This was parodied in The Simpsons episode ' Lisa on Ice', where a scene makes fun of the Newton's handwriting recognition turning 'Beat up Martin' into 'Eat up Martha'. The handwriting software was barely ready by 1993 and its tendency to misread characters was widely derided in the media. The Newton was considered innovative at its debut, but it suffered from its high price and problems with the handwriting recognition element, its most anticipated feature. Īccording to former Apple CEO John Sculley, the company invested approximately $100 million to develop Newton. Īlthough PDAs had been developing since the original Psion Organiser in 1984, the Newton has left one particular lasting impression: the term personal digital assistant was first coined to refer to the Newton. Ī smaller design was then designed by Jonathan Ive.

He found Hermann Hauser, who had developed the Acorn RISC Machine that utilized what became known as the ARM architecture, and put together Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm Ltd. Larry Tesler determined that an advanced, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the phrase 'personal digital assistant' was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. The Newton project was a personal digital assistant platform. The original color Apple logo on the Newton This led to Apple ultimately discontinuing the platform at the direction of Steve Jobs in 1998, a year after his return to the company. The Newton was considered technologically innovative at its debut, but a combination of factors, some of which included its high price and early problems with its handwriting recognition feature, limited its sales. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting-based input. Newton devices ran on a proprietary operating system, Newton OS examples include Apple's MessagePad series and the eMate 300, and other companies also released devices running on Newton OS. Production officially ended on February 27, 1998. Apple started developing the platform in 1987 and shipped the first devices in August 1993. An early device in the PDA category (the Newton originated the term), it was the first to feature handwriting recognition. The Newton is a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc.

The Apple Newton MessagePad 2100, a 1997 model, running Newton OS, alongside the original iPhone from 2007 running iOS

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