Apple just hired Michael Tchao back from a 15 year stint out of Cupertino as VP of Product Marketing, reporting directly to Phil Schiller, SVP of Product Marketing.
One year ago, the Newton “Virus” for OS X dismantled Mac users’ desktops on video, subjecting icons and menu bars alike to the merciless force of gravity. Now, finally, you can download your own copy of this erstwhile art project.
There’s a lot of hypothesising and App Store creating going on today because the supposedly simple act of cutting and pasting is absent from the iPhone. What’s strange about all this is that Apple sorta had it figured out 15 years ago with the Newton. As the video shows, cutting and pasting with a touch screen or stylus on a Mac product, circa 1993, couldn’t have been easier. Of course, back then it was with a stylus (not a finger); and then there’s the fact that touching and dragging on an iPhone is reserved for the magnifier function… wait, maybe this isn’t as easy as it appears. Back to the drawing board. [Boing Boing]
It’s a rumour, but it sure is a juicy one. According to an Xbox360Fanboy source close to Microsoft PR, the US$200 Xbox 360 Arcade (the SKU with no hard drive) will be sold in a bundle with a motion controller and a few motiony games during the coming holiday season. The possibility is certainly not all that crazy, as we’ve seen plenty of evidence supporting the Xbox 360 “Newton” motion controller, and everyone wants a piece of the Wii’s big, hungry fanbase. Our guess is that if this rumour pans out we’ll hear more around the Tokyo Game Show in October. [Xbox360Fanboy]
Through the fabulously true-to-life magic of machine translation comes word from ZDNet.de that Intel Germany CEO Hannes Schwaderer has confirmed an upcoming, larger (more tablet-y?) “version of the iPhone” based on Intel’s Atom platform. Supposedly, the beefier unit size isn’t due to the Atom chipset, but to the previously rumoured bigger 720×480 display.
Our ground PONG-snorting buddies over at Kotaku have gotten their hands on a potentially legitimate list of new functions coming with the annual Xbox 360 Spring Update. In the list we see more confirmation of the Newton motion controller, as well as hints at a news/weather service, more hard drive game data caching and four-person video conferencing. Microsoft has denied the list by saying, “We don’t comment on rumours or speculation, but what we can tell you is we’ve never seen this list before.” Honest denial or tricky wordplay? You can decide for yourself with the list after the jump.
After MTV News broke the news on Microsoft designing a Nintendo Wii-like Wiimote for the Xbox 360, 8bitjoystick felt it was time to give up their secrets as well. Not only do they confirm that the project exists, but they can give up the codename for it: Newton. Jesus was kind enough to mock up a version of the controller based on MTV’s sketch.
newVideoPlayer("newtonvirus_giz.flv", 475, 286,"");Behold, a video of the Newton Virus. Back in 2005, Troika, the British-based art collective that was behind the Heathrow Terminal 5 sculpture that some of you recently described as a “disco turd,” created a virus for Macs, called Newton. It came on a little USB key that looked like a cross between a malevolent Apple and Pac Man and was aimed at, well, people like you or I, who spend far too much time fiddling around on their computers. The video, made this year, is part of the Design and the Elastic Mind show currently running at MoMA in NY. [Troika and Dezeen]
We published our 20 exclusive iPhone wallpapers collection yesterday, but this one just beats them all for pure comedy effect. Reader Taz Goldstein, one of the first Newton adopters back in 1993, has sent this great background for all other Newton users who have been waiting for an Apple-designed replacement since forever. The question: is iPhone really a Newton replacement?
While Taz is getting an iPhone, for some Newton diehards the Apple JesusPhone won’t be a replacement. Some will say that even if it has color and has a great design, it just doesn’t have the many things that made the Newton an amazing product.
It lacks the concept of “data soup” and it doesn’t have a public SDK, so no third-parties can extend it. Thanks to this, the lively Newton community has developed hacks that have pushed it into the Internet era (no Flash-video support yet, though), showing that the grandaddy of PDAs still can beat them all.
However, the fact is that the iPhone, while simpler than Newton, it’s an extremely powerful device. Much more than the Newton ever was. Its software is more accessible to normal users than the Newton’s; it runs an extremely fast operating system and, most importantly, it has a phone and built-in Wi-Fi, which is reason enough to make it a better communicator than the Newton. A product for the masses, rather than a niche wonder.
And looking at the waiting lines and the media frenzy, I’m going to get my hazy crystal ball out and say that there’s another thing in which the iPhone is better than the Newton: this one won’t flop.
