Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most revolutionary product yet, theNewton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare, but as a product, it was a flop. TheNewton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets when it was mocked in popular culture. The device failed to gain market share and was discontinued in 1997. The failure of theNewton galvanized Apple engineers to create something better, and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone.
In 1983, Steve Jobs succeeded John Sculley as the new Apple CEO. After a bitter power struggle, Jobs resigned from Apple two years later. Although Sculley made Apple profitable by cutting costs and introducing new Macintosh models, he felt lost without Apple's visionary founder. Alan Kay burst into Sculley's office and warned him that we wouldn't have Xerox next time.
In 1986, Sculley commissioned a team to create two high concept videos for a new type of computing device that Apple could build in the future. TheKnowledge Navigator was shown as a foldable, tablet-like device with a humanoid virtual assistant. Some derided the impracticality of these sci-fi vignettes, but they got Apple employees thinking about the future of computing.
After launching the Macintosh II, Apple engineer Steve Sakoman was bored. He wanted to make a portable device like the one he built for Hewlett-Packard. To stop him from leaving Apple, vice president Jean-Louis Gassee let him set up a project to pursue his dream. He did not want to make a Macintosh laptop. He had a vision of a device that was the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper that could read people's handwriting.
AdvertisementWhen theNewton project began in 1987, the technology to create such a device didn't exist, so Sakoman contacted AT&T and hired the company to design a low-power version of its CRISPCPU, which became known as the AT&T Hobbit.
It wasn't nearly as clever as its name suggests. According to Apple Chief Scientist Larry Tesler, theCPU wasrife with bugs, ill-suited for our purposes, and overpriced. The device wouldn't be ready for at least five years and the end- user cost was over $6,000, all because of the originalNewton design. The key selling point for the device was progressing slowly.
The development of theNewton was bogged down, and the hope that it would ever be finished was lost. He left Apple in 1990 to found Be, Inc., which made its own desktop computers and the BeOS operating system.
At the same time, another secret Apple division was also working on unique portable devices and software under the code name Pocket Crystal. He suggested that Pocket Crystal should be spun off into a separate company and that the project be focused on with new hardware and new leadership.
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