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Apple dusts off Newton

by on29 September 2009

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Nothing like success


After losing
cash over its Newton project, Apple thinks that now it is so popular with its legions of black-shirted goose-stepping fanboys that it can repackage the project again.

While it has been known that Apple was going to release a tablet for a while, it seems that it is going to stubbornly do it the same way it did last time. Apple has rehired Michael Tchao, one of the original developers of Apple's Newton personal digital assistant. Tchao will be the vice president of product marketing for the project. Tchao spent 10 years at Apple, overseeing product marketing for the Newton. He was supposed to have twisted the arm of former Apple CEO John Scully to including the company's handwriting recognition technology into what would become Apple's first consumer device.

The gear was a lemon and was plagued by poor reviews that pointed to the difficulty in its handwriting recognition capabilities. Newton and the tablet failed to catch on and Apple abandoned the project in 1998. With Tchao on board it seems to suggest that Apple wants the same ideas that lead to the Newton fiasco repeated.

However there are a few differences this time. The first is that Apple has got a better hardware skillset than it had in the 1990s. It is better at creating gadgets than it is at making PCs, which was not the case in Newton's day. But perhaps the biggest difference it that Apple is more popular than it was then. It has people who believe that what ever the company makes should be “ground breaking” and technologically superior.

This time it has Steve Jobs behind the project. He might have something to personally prove to Scully and is therefore focusing all of Apple's efforts into the project.
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