Amaya Toman Few Apple fans don't know what the Newton MessagePad was. The Apple company introduced the first PDA from this product line in 1993, and just four years later the last ever Newton MessagePad saw the light of day. Apple released it in the first half of November 1997, it was numbered 2100.
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Apple has improved its PDAs more and more with each successive generation, and the Newton MessagePad 2100 was no exception. The novelty offered users a slightly larger memory capacity, faster operation, and the communication software was also improved. By the time the Newton MessagePad 2100 was introduced, however, the fate of Apple PDAs was practically sealed. Steve Jobs, who at that time had just returned to Apple, signed the MessagePad's death sentence and included it among the devices he intends to remove from the company's portfolio.
Several Newton Messagepad models emerged from Apple's workshop:
However, it would be wrong to label the Newton MessagePad product line as poorly made - many experts, on the contrary, consider PDAs from Apple to be unnecessarily undervalued. It was practically the first manifestation of the Cupertino company's efforts to produce a separate mobile device. In addition to mobility, MessagePads boasted advanced handwriting recognition. Several factors contributed to the ultimate failure of the Newton MessagePad. The beginning of the 1990s turned out to be too early a time for the mass expansion of devices of this type. Another problem was the lack of applications that would make the Apple PDA a device that everyone would desire if possible, and in the pre-internet era, owning a PDA was pointless for many users - Internet connectivity would surely give the MessagePad the right direction.
Although the MessagePad 2100 represented the swan song of Apple's personal digital assistants, it was also the best product of this type that came out of Apple's workshop at the time. It was equipped with a powerful 162 MHz StrongARM 110 processor, had 8 MB Mask ROM and 8 MB RAM and was equipped with a backlit LCD display with a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels with 100 dpi, which were really respectable parameters for the time. The Newton MessagePad 2100 also featured a number of smart features including improved font recognition. Its price was $999 at the time it was put on sale, it ran the Newton OS operating system, and the PDA also offered the function of intuitive work with text with the help of a stylus, similar to the Scribble function from the iPadOS 14 operating system. Sales of the Newton MessagePad 2100 ended in early 1998.
