Apple has been on a roll lately, but every company has its failures and bad ideas, and this site lists a few of Apple’s.
Like…
The Apple Pippin, a game console / multimedia center; their opendoc file format; the Mac TV (Yes, Apple was the first to put a TV tuner card in a PC, imagine that); and the Puck mouse, which was a perfectly round mouse that made it impossible to tell where it was “pointing” which led to all kinds of frustration.
Strangely absent from the list is the Newton, though maybe they just figured it was “ahead of its time” so it wasn’t really a failure.
I think the Newton was just as you said, ahead of its time.
I don’t think it was really openly criticized like some of the products mentioned were, especially that Puck mouse. God that thing was terrible to use.
Way, way, way ahead of its time.
Of course, the first version of it was so far ahead of its time it didn’t work very well… but the last version was fantastic. I have the original and the 2100, and I use them both… the original for comic relief (let’s see what it thinks I wrote this time!) and the other for normal PDA-ish thingsa nd for taking notes. Not often, but sometimes when I feel like something other than paper.
Grant Hutchinson is actually running a webserver on a newton.
http://newton.splorp.com:8080/