5 Jul
2012
5 Jul
'12
12:59 p.m.
On 5 Jul 2012, at 19:02, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 07/05/2012 04:22 AM, Mark Benson wrote:
> The handwriting recognition was... inadequate (the cost of being a
> pioneering technology), they never sold in much volume (they were
> expensive and didn't have many applications), they were too heavy (a
> limitation of the technology available) and the screen was hard to
> read in some light or the backlight drained the battery (another tech
> limitation). The idea was sound, the execution not so much. It was a
> common problem at Apple back then.
>
> As a technology it was a good first stab, as a product it tanked.
If by "tanked" you mean "failed to be
purchased by everyone who had
heard of a computer", sure. ;)
No by 'tanked' I mean it really failed to sell (outside your particular clique) as
far as I remember Apple sold way fewer Newtons year-over than they did Macs... when their
market share was miniscule.
Damn near every technical person in my
company at the time had one. (that was a bunch) They were VERY popular
in all the tech haunts in my geographic area at the time (Washington DC
area). From where I sat, everyone seemed to have one. Granted that was
the tech crowd, but that's a lot of people.
Yeah, but it was a *very* small crowd, doubly so at that time. 1996 was before every
company had an IT manager, remember. Geeks like us, and I was still very much a game
playing PFY at the time but I still fitted in the bracket, I think I was on my second
self (with the help of my dad) built PC, still made up a pretty minor part of the
population. Back then there were no more than a dozen folks in a school year of over 70
where I was that played PC games or even knew what a 'hard drive' was.
Professionally speaking yes I suppose big companies were well into multiple generations of
IT infrastructure but outside that widespread PC tech was only just hitting the ground.
It certainly tanked from the perspective of Apple
trying to make it a
household thing for every nontechnical person to own (like the iPad is
now) and while it didn't meet Apples (unrealistic) expectations in that
area, but it's not like they didn't sell a shitload of them.
They didn't sell a shit-load, that was the problem. They were too expensive for all
but the most dedicated tech gurus and hot-shot young execs to want to afford and simply
weren't useful enough to force marginal maybes to buy into them.
I've never been able to find sales figures for
them, but I STILL, as recently as a
couple of months ago, see them popping up in the surplus market. It
takes a lot of sales volume for the surplus market to still be seeing
them almost fifteen years after their discontinuance.
The reason they keep popping up is thus:
They are as hard as all hell (very sturdy design!). My MP130 was third hand to me 6 years
ago and still rocking, it had taken some knocks but they were cosmetic and it had been
*used* a lot, you could tell from the finger-polish on on the case plastics.
They are rare enough and good enough that they still fetch good money, especially the
Strong-ARM powered MP2000 and MP2100 models. A lot of Apple enthusiasts will pay you half
a limb for a good condition MP2100, they aren't that easy to find. The early ones are
more numerous and not that great so people aren't so willing to pay. There are very
few on eBay in the UK or US (comparative to the populations).
I think your opinion of how well they sold may be coloured by the population you hung
around in.
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.