Apple ships the Newton MessagePad

Background

Apple announced the device in a press release dated July 30, 1993, shortly before it was due to go on sale. In that release the company set the shipping date for the first product built on its Newton technology, the Newton MessagePad, at August 2, 1993^[1].

The wording of the announcement did not present the MessagePad as a smaller version of an existing computer. Apple described it as a handheld communications assistant that creates a new class of personal digital assistant devices^[1]. In other words, the product was being introduced together with a category, and the category was part of the pitch.

What shipped

The Computer History Museum's Apple timeline records that the Newton MessagePad shipped on August 2, 1993 as Apple's first handheld computing device^[2]. That places the launch at the start of Apple's move into handheld computing, several years before the company's later mobile products.

Key details

The feature Apple emphasised most in the release was what it called Newton Intelligence, described as a combination of software and silicon that lets the product learn the user's preferences and requirements^[1]. The company said this intelligence actively assists users by learning their work habits and patterns and then implementing them on cue^[1]. The claim was less about running applications than about the device adapting itself to the person holding it.

The release also sketched the communications side of the device. According to Apple, the MessagePad could send faxes, use wireless messaging, exchange e-mail through NewtonMail, and beam notes to other Newton devices over infrared at a distance of up to one metre^[1]. Those functions put the MessagePad in the same family as later handheld and mobile devices: a small machine whose main job is to send, receive and carry information rather than to compute in the traditional sense.

Expectations inside the company were high. Apple chairman John Sculley said he believed Newton would be seen as the defining technology of the digital age^[1].

Impact

The launch did not go smoothly, and the Computer History Museum notes that the troubled launch contributed to John Sculley's replacement by Michael Spindler as chief executive^[2]. The Newton therefore sits at an awkward point in Apple's history: a product announced as the beginning of a new class of device, and a launch that became entangled with a change of leadership at the top of the company. Both halves of that story — the attempt to define personal digital assistants and the commercial difficulty that followed — belong to the same August shipment.