Apple newton portable#

Actually, Apple had multiple Newtons on hand that, which was good: The first one it unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work. It was a Newton, a prototype of the device which Apple planned to start selling in early 1993. This time, he didn’t just talk about PDAs. Twenty years ago this week, on May 29, 1992, Sculley spoke again at another CES, in Chicago. He announced that Apple would release PDAs–pocket-sized information devices, easier to use than a PC and selling for under $1000–in 1993. Apple CEO John Sculley had coined the term in the keynote speech he made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7. That’s Personal Digital Assistant, in case you’ve forgotten, and even though nobody had one, lots of people were talking about them. (Less than five percent of people in North America had a mobile phone, period.)Īnd in 1992, nobody had a PDA. There were even miniature computers, such as HP’s 95LX. Sure, there were pocketable gizmos back then: The Game Boy, for instance, had been around since 1989, and the Sony Watchman was hot stuff.

Apple newton portable#

When it comes to portable gadgets, however, it’s an era that’s nearly unrecognizable to us 21st-century humans. Follow the grand scheme of things, 1992 is such recent history that it barely qualifies as history.