[NTLK] Visiting the Apple Store with my Newts

Riccardo Mori rick at newted.org
Tue Feb 15 07:06:24 EST 2011


quoth Stephan Weber:

> I've several times visited the Apple store when buying accessories for my
> kids' ipods, etc. And like many of you I keep track of my notes and my life
> on the 2100 or the emate, whichever is along for the ride that day. I get
> the same reaction from the employees, and often from other shoppers. The
> last time I was in Best Buy, I had a younger guy ask if he could look at it
> and his hands literally shook when he was holding it.

Yeah, same here. When I still lived in Italy, in 2004, a clerk in an electronics store in Milan even asked me if it was a "new Apple gadget" and he was just astonished when I informed him that, actually, it'd been discontinued for 6 years then. "I thought this thing [referring to the HWR] was a thing of the future, not of the past", he remarked.

Since I relocated here in Spain, I get even weirder looks when I use my MP2100 (or my OMP now) in stores; I gather these devices are even less known here, for a shopper in an Apple reseller store pointed at my MP2100 and said "Apple never stops making great stuff, eh?" and when I replied "Well, Apple has stopped indeed making THIS kind of great stuff" the guy could not believe it.

Another funny anectode: in another computer store, a customer thought I was part of the staff because he saw me writing down the prices of some items on my MP2100 and started asking me things. When I pointed out that I was actually another customer, he said "Oh, I thought... you know... that Apple issued these [looking at the Newton] to their store staff", meaning he thought that the Newton was too sophisticated a device for the 'regular user'. That made me chuckle.

> And for the guys who mock the brick, about a minute of exploring how good
> the handwriting recognition is with no training, and another couple to find
> out how intuitive it is, and they don't really want to give it back.

Which is why I don't even try looking for other devices to replace certain functionalities that are uniquely Newton-esque. I mean, I hugely appreciate all the efforts to keep the Newton OS alive, and it's something that must be done, but for me it's also about the hardware. As limited as it may be for today's standards, I don't even look for surrogates. I own an iPhone; I will buy the (hopefully forthcoming) second iPad iteration; but I use those devices for what they're meant to do and I get the best out of them.

I've tried some other Newton-like devices over the years, but I've soon realised that there isn't any such thing as 'a Newton-like device' :)

Cheers,
Rick




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