Apple from Newton Pad to iPad

Although this board is used for making our product announcements, I could not help reacting to the news.

Steve Jobs departure from Apple is a well anticipated event since his leave of absense back in 2004. Although I do not personally own any Apple devices (except the company owns a few for testing purposes) and not too many of my friends do (yes I am branded out of fashion and opted for open android), I still could not part with my, now unusable, Newton Pad. I had hoped that Apple would bring back Newton after Steve Jobs came back as CEO and felt sad when he killed it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

It was revived many years later with iPad, which was a category creator, and I would say is “Newton done right”. Then we saw the years of copycats (per Steve Jobs)! There were windows based tablets before iPad but nobody understood the opportunity of bringing it for masses for a resonable price before Apple (Microsoft failed a few times!). It was a combination of innovation, think different branding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different), vision of Steve Jobs and well executed marketing machine.

Now looking at how investor confidence showed up in the market post Steve’s departure, it seems that Apple is under pressure to continue to innovate for the next few years to shift the brand focus away from Steve Jobs as continuous innovator and CEO. We all expect from Apple to come up with innovative products every two years or so. If they stay with +1 improvements it will create opportunities for other competitors to come closer.

Maybe HP killed their tablet too soon!