The Newton is a series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc. An early device in the PDA category (the Newton originated the term), it was the first to feature handwriting recognition. Apple started developing the platform in 1987 and shipped the first devices in August 1993. Production officially ended on February 27, 1998. Newton devices ran on a proprietary operating system, Newton OS; examples include Apple's MessagePad series and the eMate 300, and other companies also released devices running on Newton OS. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting-based input.
The Newton was considered technologically innovative at its debut, but a combination of factors, including its high price and early problems with its handwriting recognition feature, limited its sales. This led to Apple ultimately discontinuing the platform at the direction of Steve Jobs in 1998, a year after his return to the company.
The Newton project was a personal digital assistant platform. The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the phrase "personal digital assistant" was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Larry Tesler determined that an advanced, low-power processor was needed for sophisticated graphics manipulation. He found Hermann Hauser, co-founder of Acorn Computers which had developed the Acorn RISC Machine as first ARM architecture device, and put together Advanced RISC Machines, now Arm Ltd.
A smaller design was then designed by Jonathan Ive.
Although PDAs had been developing since the original Psion Organiser in 1984, the Newton has left one particular lasting impression: the term personal digital assistant was first coined to refer to the Newton.
According to former Apple CEO John Sculley, the company invested approximately $100 million to develop Newton.