---------- ---------- PC Pro Realworld Computing: Paul Lynch - PDAs

Newton: In or Out?

In May, under Gil Amelio's chairmanship, Apple finally spun off the Newton division as a separate company, Newton Inc. This was extremely popular with Newton users, as they felt that the Apple logo on the Newton was positively putting off potential buyers from outside the community of Macintosh owners. They also felt that Newton was under a cloud of Apple's relatively poor performance with Macintosh, and that it was time Newton should be freed from all these restrictions in order to prove what it really could do. However, the main effect of this split off was that the Newton web site appeared with a new DNS alias (as http://www.newton-inc.com, as well as the old http://www.newton.apple.com/). Unfortunately the new Newton Inc also reorganised the web site, making it much harder to find new items, and seemed to stop making updates.

The only black spot for Newton was that Steve Jobs took over from Gil Amelio as the de facto CEO of Apple, following his vitriolic anti-Newton speech at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in early May. But now, without any fanfare (or any other form of public announcement) Apple have taken back Newton Inc as a division of Apple again. This has lead many people to believe that Apple might kill off the Message Pad, which has been selling less well than the eMate, Apple's surprise success (and utterly gorgeous design) of this year. For now, Steve is denying that he intends to kill off the MessagePad, but he is known to change his mind far more frequently than wash.



eMate - easy to like, hard to buy
eMate - easy to like, hard to buy



Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: September 12, 1997

[PDA Columns | Home Page | Company]