Apple Newton Teardown - The Electronics Inside 

The original Newton had those issues but the 2000 and 2100 it was pretty damn good.

At one time, Apple licenced the Macintosh OS, and Sony manufactured a Mac clone. I don't recall any Newton clones, however US Robotics, which later became Palm Computing, made a competing device, the Palm Pilot, which was very successful.

According to Wikipedia The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992 by Apple in reference to the Newton

Back in college, I was champing at the bit to get one of those... but a typical dirt-poor student. By the time I had money enough, I'd completely forgotten about it after I bought my first Nokia phone. To be far, Snake is a rather compelling game.

The large manual is a product of the times, where all products tended to come with manuals, and not a reflection of the ease of use of the OS. People didn't bother to read it. In reality NewtonOS was incredibly easy and intuitive to use. The ARM610 was an early step towards a SoC - it combined an ARM CPU core with an ARM memory management unit (previously separate chips). Shortly after it was produce ARM made the ARM250 which combined an ARM CPU, memory management unit, IO controller and video controller, probably the first true SoC.

"Not surprisingly, the 'battup backery' doesn't work" ... Indeed :)

Amusing to me to hear the, well, justifiable complaints about some of the ground-breaking features such as handwriting recognition, but… That recognizer never died. It became Inkwell in macOS, and today all iPad Pros support this write-anywhere capability. Newton OS lives on.

The term "PDA" or Personal Digital Assistant was first used by then Apple CEO John Sculley, at a pre-release presentation on the Newton. Although the Newton was a flop, it did limp along until Steve Jobs returned and killed it in 1998. Given the fact that the final generation of Newtons were enormously improved in every way from the original clunky devices, and were finally delivering on most of the promises originally made about their capabilities (although they remained niche devices), there is speculation by some that Jobs killed the project at least partially out of vindictiveness towards Sculley, who had been hired by Jobs back in the 1980s but had wound up leading Apple (until he was in turn forced out of Apple) after Jobs lost a power struggle and was ousted from the company in 1985. One of the final Newtons was the Newton eMate 300, a very netbookesque folding device aimed at the education market, it was actually seeing considerable interest and seemed to be taking off when Jobs killed everything.

One of Jony Ive’s first designs he was in charge of at Apple.

When i feel nostalgic i turn on handwriting recognition on my Samsung Galaxy Note 9, it feels like an advanced newton 😂

You broke the case because you were not careful. It was not due to deterioration of the plastic. We can see in the video that you pulled the plastic without attempting to release the edge along the side where you were pulling.

9:15 I think MacOS was very, very briefly licensed for other devices after the Newton's failure. I don't think that lasted long. The PalmOS devices were far more usable than the newton, and as good as smart phones that came out a decade later, in everything except the touch screen being capacitive. The first iphones didn't even allow you to install your own software.

Great video! I had one for 6 months through my work, was very cool, ahead of its time. Tried to do some simple programming for it (golf game),. Was new to the idea of data from one app could be shared in another app, via OS db 'soups'. Neat stuff.

I guess our meeting is not happening now..thanks newton...son of a ..malus x domestica

Beat up Martin/Eat up Martha

first he insults the newton then he literally destroys it. you're beating a dead horse.

Apple allowed HP to sell iPods with HP branding. Even the very first iPod had an ARM CPU from Samsung.

Brittle plastic. Snap. Oops. Had a Sony video camera from around that time and even stored well the plastic can snap for random reasons.

No one "in the public" had one, just hardcore techies, some OEM business use and one variant for schools - I had several variants and developed for them. Had psions too which I loved, and others. Journalists hated the hand writing recognition because they have short attention spans/deadlines - it had some adaptive smarts that had to settle into your personal cursive style. It worked pretty good for me, especially with the later models like the 2100, and my handwriting is awful. I used them every day for quite a few years. Lots of additional apps existed - I had hundreds and even used it as a super portable mobile terminal to unix systems with its keyboard accessory. I had a wifi card, modem and more memory. It synced with Microsoft exchange just fine as an example. I was definitely the inspiration for later products, but was too far ahead of its time, including the OS which is object based with a built in database engine and quite unlike the kludge that was early iOS or MacOS pre X. The handbook was needed because it was first of a kind, and well written. Also happened with all PCs of that era - hindsight fallacy to critique it, nothing in tech was "natural" at that point.

Sorry, but the lack of manuals for modern devices has nothing to do with simplicity or ease of use. If they were as conscientious and open about giving you information and instructions about current devices they would be far, far thicker than that Newton's literature. What has happened is that over time they've partly given up keeping up with the slew of devices they're constantly producing, not to mention the updates to both hardware and software. Devices used to last for years and years, now they expect you to buy a brand new $1000.00 device every year and never really get to know it or take advantage of more than a tiny amount of its capabilities. And they really DON'T WANT you to know all the things you can do with it. As for me, I stopped buying flagships about 8 years ago (a Galaxy S4 was my last flagship phone).My current phone cost me less than $300, does everything I need it to do (which is a heck of a lot more than the average person, I'm a major power user), and is several years old already. When it starts having problems or no longer meets my needs I'll replace it, but not before then. Oh, and as long as phones exist that have headphone jacks I will NOT buy a phone that doesn't have one. I use that jack constantly, even though I have lots of Bluetooth headsets, headphones and speakers. Having to charge something besides the phone, and having your headset's battery run low long before the phone itself, is way more hassle than it's worth. Just plug and go. (Not to mention wireless audio is compressed and lacking in quality compared to wired.)

Clunky? Hard to use? I'd argue that UX knowledge has been lost from that time. Smartphones have terrible interfaces and are even more horrible under the hood.

I think both consumers and technology had to be ready for a new device. I think steve learned the hard way with Lisa. You can tell this device wants to do more but the tech isn’t there yet, even if people wanted it. The iphone was that successful combo.

"they can't have put the operating system on volatile memory can they" Yes, yes they did* kind of... *going back to the winCE days here for me, whilst the OS was in ROM, ALL user/config data was in battery backed RAM... Let the battery expire and you'd find your device reset to factory defaults when you next charged and booted it... I'd guess this being the same setup.