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By Root 212 0

Newton into Apple’s wholly-owned entity called Newton Inc., perhaps to set it up for sale. Several months later, when Steve Jobs took over, he brought the unit back into Apple. It was an expensive project, which some considered central to Apple’s future. Was that still the case, or would Steve shutter it so that he could write a new future for Apple? That was the question Adam Tow posed to Jobs by e-mail in 1997. For the developer of Newton software, Steve’s response was encouraging.

Adam,

The Emate has a bright future - and it is for this reason that I am pulling it back into Apple -which has the resouces to market and sell it much more broadly. You can imagine that a small spin-off company would not have such a large sales force or marketing budget. With the appropriate investments in sales and marketing, we hope that the Emate can become a great success.

We are a little more confused about the MessagePad. Since it costs more ($1K or more vs $700-799 for the Emate) and has no keyboard, its market seems more limited than the Emate. However, sales of the current MessagePad are brisk, so who knows... What do you think?

Don’t worry - we are pulling this group back into Apple so that we can invest even more sales and marketing resources into these products, rather than dumping the products into a small spin-off which lacks such resources.

Best,

Steve

The arguments are logical. The MessagePad was expensive, which limited it to a niche market. And the whole Newton Inc. endeavor could have been stunted by its orphan from Apple. Steve apparently had a change of heart five months after writing this letter, which is when development and production of the Newton was cancelled. Apple, having grown into a powerful but flailing giant under Jobs-less business leadership, had a legion of development teams working independently on unrelated projects. The situation may have forced Steve’s hand to streamline the products and reduce expenditure.

In a way, the eMate did have “a bright future” in the form of the iBook, a notebook computer introduced in 1999 that runs the Mac operating system. Though they ran different software, the iBook and eMate look similar. That Steve dismissed the MessagePad because it “has no keyboard” is laughable now because the same criticisms were lobbed at him when he introduced the touchscreen iPad. Steve began conceptualizing the device just a few years after killing the MessagePad.

Yet, while Steve went about working on a tablet without a keyboard, he continued to publicly pan tablets and argue that computers need to have physical keys. “It turns out people want keyboards,” Steve said. Thanks to the Newton, Apple “has the best handwriting software in the world now,” but “it doesn’t matter. It’s really slow to write stuff. You know, you could never keep up with your e-mail if you had to write it all out.” The handwriting-recognition technology was incorporated into Mac OS X, but the feature has been largely ignored.

Perfecting the PDA became central to Steve’s mission. In 1997, he orchestrated an attempt at buying the PalmPilot unit from 3Com, and by the next year, he was talking about an Apple palm computer in Fortune magazine. Still no PDA from Apple on the market by 2002, a fan named Ben said he wrote Steve a letter asking about the project and mentioning websites that had published mockups of what an Apple hand-held might look like. Steve had an assistant call Ben to thank him for the letter and ask how to locate the prototype sites. During the call, the assistant handed the phone off to someone, who, according to Ben, said: “Hi Ben, this is Steve Jobs. Your talk of mockup sites was all news to me. What are some URLs so my people and I can look at these?” In addition to the rare opportunity to chat with Steve Jobs, Ben received a free Apple t-shirt.

By 2003, Steve had determined that cell phones would supplant the PDA. “You're going to have to have a phone in your pocket. So that’s going to have to be the device that carries this information,” he said at the All Things Digital