Apple's Newton handwriting recognition system was undone by a comic strip
Click to enlarge. Copyright: Gary Trudeau
The signature feature on the iPhone 4S that Apple (AAPL) unveiled Tuesday is Siri, a so-called intelligent assistant that depends on a lot of fiendishly complex artificial intelligence systems -- voice recognition, understanding context and natural language -- working flawlessly a high percentage of the time.
Few companies know better than Apple the risks of counting on applied AI to sell consumer electronics. Apple's Newton Message Pad never quite recovered from the drubbing it took in the popular press -- especially the Doonesbury strip posted above -- because its handwriting recognition software failed more often than it worked.
The Newton, which was released in 1993, was a pet project of John Sculley. Steve Jobs killed it in 1998, shortly after he came back to Apple. We assume he wouldn't have signed off on Siri if he didn't think it was ready for prime time.
But we'll find out soon enough.
A bit of nostalgia -- and some unfortunate associations -- in the new TV campaign
Source: Apple Inc.
For viewers with short memories, the deep-voiced narrator in the "What Is iPad?" ad that debuted Wednesday evening on American Idol might have sounded a bit too much like a Motorola (MOT) Droid commercial ("Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?")
But as several observers MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 13, 2010 6:22 AM ET
The Newton. Photo: Apple Inc.
The killer quote -- or rather paraphrase -- in Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance's properly skeptical story in Monday's New York Times about the new interest in tablet computing is the one attributed to Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs.
Although he killed the Newton -- Apple's early entry in the field -- when he returned to the company in 1997, Jobs allowed work on a new MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Oct 5, 2009 6:28 AM ET
Forgive me if you've already seen this -- and nearly a quarter million people already have, according to YouTube -- but I just stumbled across this video and thought I'd share it on what's shaping up as a slow day for Apple news.
It's a photographic history of the company set to Fiona Apple's version of "Across the Universe" (from the movie "Pleasantville").
The video's provenance is uncertain; it was posted on MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Feb 11, 2009 7:46 AM ET
As Winston Churchill might have put it, an Apple rumor can fly halfway around the world before truth has a chance to get its boots on.
Case in point: the iPhone mini-tablet story that broke Wednesday afternoon in Germany.
It started with a bad computer an English translation of a sloppy dispatch in the German language version of ZDnet. Under the headline "iPhone kommt mit größerem Display und Intel Atom," ZDNet.de MORE
Philip Elmer-DeWitt - May 15, 2008 9:12 AM ET
With three weeks left before the promised ship date of OS X Leopard, the long-awaited and much-delayed sixth major update of Apple's (AAPL) flagship Macintosh operating system, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster is already calculating its impact on the company's revenue stream.
In a note to clients issued this morning, Munster observes that OS X Tiger, Leopard's predecessor, was also released at the end of the first month of a fiscal quarter MORE
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