On: Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

[musicale]

Say what you will about Jony Ive but the eMate 300 is a beautiful design that also looks pretty functional.

It also seems to have a high-contrast reflective screen that you could use in broad daylight, something that challenges even my rather bright MacBook Pro.

As you note the iPad is something of a successor to the Newton both in hardware (e.g. ARM CPU, Apple Pencil) and interface (e.g. shape recognition/drawing, long press.)

Apple apparently prototyped larger Newton tablets (VideoPad) as well as pen-based Mac OS devices (PenLite) but never brought them to market. Though macOS does work as a pen based system if you plug in a Cintiq, or an iPad with Sidecar.

[CharlesW → musicale]

> Say what you will about Jony Ive but the eMate 300 is a beautiful design that also looks pretty functional.

Thomas Meyerhoffer designed the eMate 300. Jony designed the second-generation Newton MessagePad, the Newton MessagePad 110.

[musicale → CharlesW]

Good to know - this is why HN is so great. Did Jony Ive head up Apple's design group at the time or did that come later after the iMac, etc.?

(If HN didn't have its stupid edit locks I could edit it to read "say what you will about 1990s Apple.")

In any case, the eMate looks like an amazing design and now I want to see more Meyerhoffer designs!

[mrpippy → musicale]

Jony was ID director by WWDC 97

https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500

[musicale → mrpippy]

Ah, so that would place the eMate 300 during the Jony Ive era, making my edit unnecessary.

I'd still like to hear more about Thomas Meyerhoffer though.