It's shocking how much of a beating the Shrek pad has taken, and still works perfectly.. there may be a bit less space inside it now.. but that was extra anyway.
yea, I feel like older ipads are more durable. I remember watching a video bend testing a 2018 ipad pro vs a 2010 ipad. btw the ipad pro split in half while the ipad 1 stayed together the whole time.
Fun fact the “poof” animation and sound that you see/hear when scribbling out a word on the Newton is the origin of the one used in the MacOS dock until 10.10. (They still use the sound in 12.5) An even better fact is the Apple never stopped developing the Newton’s handwriting recognition and instead ported it to MacOS with a new name of Inkwell. Inkwell was removed from OSX the year before Scribble was released on the iPad which has lead many to believe it’s based on the same handwriting recognition used in the Newton.
I remember trying Inkwell as soon as I got a Wacom Bamboo (back when they were good)… it was better than the Windows Vista one but not by much. The iPad model is quite impressive to me though, albeit it’s clearly related - the gestures, the word matching behaviour when you try to do a proper noun, etc.
Inkwell is indeed the same thing as Newton's engine, codenamed Rosetta. In fact the name easter eggs still work in Inkwell, e.g. if you write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" in the ink pad, it prints out "Rosetta! Rosetta! Hey, that's me!" instead - same as the Newton did. However Rosetta is the newer engine used in the NewtonOS 2.0 onwards - not this abomination that was in this dingus unit.
my dad had a PDA similar to this, but when he got a Blackberry, he didn't need it anymore, so he gave it to me to play with. i spent so many hours writing notes on it, i think it permanently changed my handwriting style forever since i had to train myself to write the way the PDA wanted
The spirit of the Newton's handwriting recognition lives on in Apple's autocorrect, where you can type real words with a real keyboard and _still_ have it sometimes go "nah, mate" and turn them into an unrecognizable mess.
For example, the auto-predict feature: the average cost per person per hour for the company registered to be a total cost per person for each of the four companies
I remember a time when I dreamt about having a PDA. The concept of having a portable computer in my pocket seemed so cool. And here we are. Editing 4k video on a computer smaller than a calculator. And I'm not even that old. I would classify as an early zoomer / late millennial.
I wanted a PDA a bunch too, but I bought a PDA at a Scholastic book fair when I was in elementary school, and yeah it was an absolute nugget. never worked, and the iPad came out that year.
I remember telling someone in high school that I wanted a PDA, and they thought that I meant kissing someone in the halls of the school. :-P I bid on an impossibly low-priced Dutch auction on a Casio Cassiopeia on early eBay, but someone who was a buyer emailed all the other buyers and said that he contacted the seller about completing the purchase and the seller acted all weird and screamed about going crazy. It turned out to be some kid who made a fake listing to try to scam money. His parents were spoken to. Later I bought a Sharp Wizard, hooked it up to a phone line with the modem, dialed into my ISP with the VT-100 terminal, and downloaded a copy of Frankenstein on Project Gutenberg. I proceeded to read it off of my Wizard in class. This was 1998 or so. I guess I was an early ebook adopter.
Even today, it seemed fun to use one of them. If I’m not mistaken, HTC made a few in their early years and they looked quite nice despite the presumed bulkiness.
Apple put stickers in their products as far back as the '80s. I know Macs like the Plus and SE came with stickers, and I'm pretty sure the Apple II series did too.
I distinctly remember my dad acquiring this specific nugget in the early 2000s, proudly demonstrating its capabilities to visitors. He would absolutely nail anything he tried to write on that thing, but every time he handed it to a guest to let them try they would fail miserably. An absolute party trick of a nugget if you set it up correctly. We still have it, even though we stopped showing it to guests over a decade ago.
I actually collected these in the late aughts, early tens, and have experience with the two different handwriting recognition engines that were used between the various models. The model you have here, the OMP, uses what was essentially a bootleg handwriting recognition engine that Newton engineers picked up in Russia of all places, and it is *very* limited as you saw. First, it works based on an in-built dictionary and it won't recognize words outside of that (unless you set it to character-by-character recognition which is... iffy, to say the least). Second, that engine is designed for cursive. I mean that, it's purpose built for recognizing cursive handwriting, not block text. Again, you can see why this causes some issues. The later handwriting recognition engine, which I believe was available from the 130 onwards, was capable of far more accurate recognition of both cursive and block text, though the first engine was still in-built clear through to the 2100. These are nifty little machines, and I'd love to get my hands on a 2100 again someday but they are exceedingly rare and *very* expensive these days. Very, very cool to see a video on the OMP from you though! Keep up the amazing work homie!
As far as I'm aware, Apple does actually allow you to come in for support no matter how old the product, I've seen people go in with 80s Macintoshes and there's always someone who knows what they're doing and can help
I guess it depends. I remember a decade ago my mom went into an Apple store to see about fixing a 90’s era device (I think it was getting a replacement part for her older computer she used for her bookkeeping), and they where all “nope, too old”. Of course, things might have changed since then.
I wonder if it's one of those things that they'll do only at major flagship locations. Meanwhile If you take it to the Apple Store in Podunk, Iowa they'll just be like "Come on, dude, I'm not paid enough to deal with this crap."
What I love about those old devices is that their chonkiness gives you a feeling that you bought something cool and advanced. Especially when you get all those papers and some extras. All those cartridges that have to be put in, hatches to open and close, physical buttons that click when you press them... Sure, modern devices can do much more, but sometimes I really miss that chonkiness
See you got used to new devices so you like the chonkiness, but the consumers that got used to the chonkiness both resented the weight of them and associated size with old technology, so thin devices is what made em feel like they got something advanced Likewise, manuals and such were associated with old tech because old tech couldn't incorporate them inside the device. So consumers associated integrated manuals as advanced and massive booklets with old stuff You'll note that in both cases we have objective flaws of that technology that produces or reinforces the consumer aversion Not to say that thin devices don't hsve their issues, especially the thermals of thin laptops are horrid Basically there's a balance to be struck, but people always associated slimmer less fussy devices with progress because a device thats smaller and teaches you how to use it without a massive manual is indicative of the capacity to have such advanced technology to allow that
@@DimT670 that, and/or it's simply cheaper from a materials standpoint with less used. (after the cost of developing proper miniaturization and economies of scale) Digital distribution wasn't only for "convenience", it was also a way to avoid having to pay for physical manufacturing, let alone retail stocking fees. Also is a form of forcing physical control of the product, especially the right to resale, away from the consumer and disincentivizing piracy but that's less relevant here To give a personal Devil's Advocate to your argument, it is super convenient to combine an iPad Air Gen 4 with a Magic Keyboard as a casual laptop replacement. It's light, somewhat versatile, easy enough to use after adjustment, has decent battery life (beats the crap out of a gaming laptop), and it reinforced my aversion from carrying around my old HP to work. That said though it runs into the issue of "oh crap, can't log in with a smart card, run arbitrary programs off the App Store or plug in headphones without a separately-sold adapter. This lone connector's broken, how do I do this particular task? Wait, the digital manual (sometimes) requires an internet connection and my phone's dead/absent and there's no workplace WiFi. A manual would have been nice and simple, if an Extra Thing." There's tradeoffs with advancement, not all change is consumer-side progress, although much is or can be. Headphone jacks and replaceable batteries are sorely missed. Encountering a dying internal battery necessitating a phone replacement happens more often personally than taking a shower/diving selfie
@@arbayer2 sure you arent wrong but the stuff we lose, we lose because the consumer doesn't raise a massive stink for them to exist. Of course the companies also run campaigns to convince them not to, but still For example would we have lost the audio jack if most ppl refused to buy stuff without it? In the end of the day we are talking about luxury technology products. No one needs an iPhone or they prefer to have one thus we can't really be forced to buy em as consumers. So stuff thar gets worse is a combination of consumer apathy combined with companies trying every dirty trick they can to foster that apathy. Or to make something the new normal Its not coincidence that the things you mentioned are things that have no issue to exist within the current market but benefit companies when they don't. Its the classic boiling the frog thing combined with consumers wanting some element of a product so much they are willing to overlook any flaw, like how apple fans often do just to have the brand and os Ofc it all boils down to "and this is why we need customer advocacy groups and regulations"
If they made it too quickly, they would've lost on millions in updates. Greed is the reason for the slowing of advances in tech and anything else, really.
I bought one of these back in 2008, the 2100 if I remember correctly (it's the one with more RAM)! I got it on the internet and even used it for email in college classes at the time. So much fun stuff on there, but nowadays so many of the utilities I used to make it functional are just dead links now. I absolutely love that the screen has an actual paper texture feel to it though!
My first couple cellular phones had faxing capacity. I worked at a job that still had a fax machine in the back room to receive messages from corporate, and I faxed a short message there to try it out. It was basically like SMS, but the message would be in small lettering at the top row of a huge page. It could also receive faxes as in, if you know one was coming, it could record the signals, and then play them back into another fax machine to print out the fax. So I put my cell number down as a fax number on a few forms, and every now and then I would get a call and hear a squealing fax noise.
I once needed to call some government org and had list of phones to call, one of them had dial up sounds to them. I now wonder if there are some app to prank them.
honestly for 1992/3 this is actually really good, the fact that it actually recognises some words is really neat. but as you said its way ahead of its times
This is just so extremely entertaining. Couldn't stop laughing at all the hand writing attempts. Every time I waited for it to turn to text it was like comedic buildup
I had one of these waaaay back in the day. I found the handwriting recognition to be pretty good, after doing the tutorials, and training it. It learned your handwriting as you used it, and got better at converting it.
OMG. I had an Apple Newton Message Pad 2000 around the year 2000. I thought it was the coolest thing even though it served no practical purpose at the time. To its own detriment, it was way ahead of its time. Little did I know it would be the precursor of what was to come. Great vid Dankpods!
People who write business textbooks love this nugget. I’m too sleepy to rescue those memories. Also my fave grandpa was named Manuel and loved fiddling with electronics.
Been around since the Shrek pod and it’s amazing to see how far you’ve come and how you’re still amazing after all this time, you never fail to make me laugh so thanks for making such great content
I'm assuming the tech behind it is searching a database of words it has to try and find the "closest" to what was written - meaning if you write a word it doesn't recognize, it just tries its best with what it has. Even then, I can't imagine it doing great with words it DOES know, too. I wonder if it'd be any better if it just analyzed each letter independently and added spaces.
On the later Newton OS versions the double-tap correction menu had a "try letters" button that did just that for unrecognized words, and then if it got it right it would add it to the dictionary
It does make me wonder if it could have ever worked, given the hardware constraints of the time. Could we write a robust hand writing recognition method today that could run in under 8K? Probably not.
@@LegendaryKennethWhat we could do and what anyone would bother trying to do are probably very different things :p I spend time with people who "golf" code as a hobby and they've still got all of the tricks they did back then, just no economic reason to use them
Hi, Dank man, Just wanted to say that i love your channel and it is by far one of my favourite channel if not the favorite. I'm honestly not a big Apple fan (I'm mostly Android) or a headphone expert but clearly, you introduced me to those things mentioned ago. Not to mention the drums! And to You, random viewer, I like You too.
I'm not surprised dingus never worked. It's clearly got a set of words that it compares to what you wrote and then basically guesses. Dingus was never going to be an option.
almost made me miss my old PALM PDA. I used the heck out of my IIIC for ebooks and Spacetrader(some one made a greyscale overlay to make the ships look like Wing Commander Privateer). I even had the camera and modem add ons. my Faviourites were the Zire 71 (it had a slide up camera and could do MP3 and AVI's with the TCP app) and my Zire 72 that had a SD-wifi card and bluetooth(did not work with headphones). I also had the IR remote control and loved sitting infront of the Sony store channel surfing till the store assiciates chased me away... (I was working for Radio Shack at time)
the first gen handwriting was bad but the final gen version of it was good enough to be part of macOS until the removal of 32bit support and now it's part of iPadOS under the name scribe. It was also the device that started it's long term partnership with ARM and the creation of high performance arm cores.
I’ve been watching Ashens for a _very long_ time, and it makes me so happy that you’ve made it around to a tatpad. Even with the Newton being a failure, *it has knockoffs*
Awww… this is the first Dankpods video where I actually own the nugget! The handwriting recognition was absolutely the WOW factor for these machines, and markedly improved if you tweaked the settings, corrected mid-recognised words with the double tap, and… well, just *used* it. My Newton certainly seemed to get better with time and more exposure to my handwriting (… or perhaps it was training me!) At the time, the alternative was a Palm Pilot which meant relearning how to write using a letter recognition system called Graffiti… which was a complete pain in the nether regions. I’d love you to review an eMate, if you can get your hands on one; a Newton-based educational laptop sold for schools, which was designed by a young Jony Ive: it looks like a Batmobile had a love child with a MacBook! Keep up the great work, sir.
Depends on which newt you were using. I used to have a MessagePad 2100 and an eMate - they never had any issue with the handwriting aside from when I was using slang or anything, and overall those later models were fairly capable (heck I used to chat on IRC off them over WiFi, it was a stretch on the eMate but flawless on the 2100)
these things are so neat, my fiance's dad has 2/3 of them and they all still work, there is a small but very dedicated niche group of newton enthusiasts out there and some still use them! he still has important notes and other things loaded in his newton and brought it out at Christmas to look something up in his old notes!
The Newton was...very ambitious with the handwriting recognition, trying to OCR whole words at a time with the best consumer grade portable electronics Apple thought they could turn a profit on in the early 90's. Palm's Graffiti system, which did individual characters at a time taking into account what direction the strokes were made worked a LOT better.
I remember you had to do 5 differently than normal, no not the normal way where you do the main bottom part and then add the "hat".. and space as a dash line was annoying.
For those who do not know, 'Beam' is where you could share files with another pda wirelessly. This feature never worked well, it was like the OG airdrop
Interesting that they actually brought back the scribbling thing for the apple pencil. At least the handwriting recognition works now. Impressively well, actually!
Funny thing is, from a software development perspective, Palm OS was _a lot_ like old classic Mac OS. Coding for it _felt_ like coding for a portable Mac OS. It was the Newton done right. If it had an Apple logo on it, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit. I borrowed an original Newton for a month in 1993… it really did suck, but you could get used to it. Burned through SO many AA batteries. I stopped writing apps for Palm, around the time of their migration to ARM, the Treo, the split Palm/Windows CE platforms, PalmSource, etc. It was clear they were on the way out. Oh, the nineties were a weird time…
As soon as you said PDA, I remembered so much from the late 90's-early 2000's! I remember pagers and I was 4 in 2000. My mom's boyfriend (my sisters' father) at the time had one, and he still uses that single ear Bluetooth headphone. It's hilarious to think about.
Im so happy that you did this video. I think that the PDA era was so underrated in the development of the modern smartphone. You could run emulators and jailbreak the fck outta these, particularly the palm variety. I feel like this was the start of truly modular, “app based” personal computing. I used a palm phone until 2014 just for this reason!
It was one of Apple's early attempts at a personal digital assistant, and while it may have been ahead of its time, it still holds a special place in the hearts of tech enthusiasts everywhere
What's amazing is the MessagePad 2000 was released just 3 years after the original MessagePad but already had a literally 10x faster CPU to work with. Just shows how fast portable technology was moving back then.
3:22 Those stickers alone are worth Gold! I heard Xerox, HP and "Mindspring" had their hands in this nugget. I remember a "training process" to make this work properly... Fun Times
fun fact: this product made it into Apple TV+’s show “For All Mankind”, and since in the show technology has progressed faster than our world, you see the Newton with video call capabilities and a better screen-existing at the same time as the iPod (yes, the iPod, it makes an appearance) in 1995!
Dude... that's genuinely the first time I've ever seen a VHS tape without the windows on either side of the label on the front. that was so weird, yet fascinating
I used to own an Apple Newton 120, and the looks I got in 1994 when using it with it's amazing PCMCIA 14.4K modem was priceless!! I had bosses telling me "That will never be a thing, why waste your money?" Simple, it was (and IS) the future Steve Jobs envisioned. I could have seen Apple keep the Newton name for it's IPad and seen something along the lines of: "Welcome to your new Apple Newton M2, this brief tutorial will give you a rundown of the features you can expect. Features like Octo Core processing, 16GB DDR 5 RAM, 4GB LDDR 5 VRAM with Nvidia 3080 micro GPU, IPS 8K display, and of course full handwriting, facial, retinal, and biometric recognition to insure maximum security of your Newton".
It's shocking how much of a beating the Shrek pad has taken, and still works perfectly.. there may be a bit less space inside it now.. but that was extra anyway.
well the ipad 4s were very strong(coming from a ipad 4 user that has had that ipad for like 6 years and it has fallen on hard crap like 15 times
yea, I feel like older ipads are more durable. I remember watching a video bend testing a 2018 ipad pro vs a 2010 ipad. btw the ipad pro split in half while the ipad 1 stayed together the whole time.
@@stargate1552 by that dude and his kid?
Yeah, I have a similar model that is super outdated, but it still works very well, except for literally everything
As if there was enough wasted air space to make bubbles if tossed in an office aquarium.?.
Fun fact the “poof” animation and sound that you see/hear when scribbling out a word on the Newton is the origin of the one used in the MacOS dock until 10.10. (They still use the sound in 12.5) An even better fact is the Apple never stopped developing the Newton’s handwriting recognition and instead ported it to MacOS with a new name of Inkwell. Inkwell was removed from OSX the year before Scribble was released on the iPad which has lead many to believe it’s based on the same handwriting recognition used in the Newton.
I remember trying Inkwell as soon as I got a Wacom Bamboo (back when they were good)… it was better than the Windows Vista one but not by much. The iPad model is quite impressive to me though, albeit it’s clearly related - the gestures, the word matching behaviour when you try to do a proper noun, etc.
In safari if you drag a bookmark away from the top bar to delete it, it still uses that same poof animation
I can see that. Nearly all the gestures for the newton handwriting are on iPadOS now.
Inkwell is indeed the same thing as Newton's engine, codenamed Rosetta. In fact the name easter eggs still work in Inkwell, e.g. if you write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" in the ink pad, it prints out "Rosetta! Rosetta! Hey, that's me!" instead - same as the Newton did.
However Rosetta is the newer engine used in the NewtonOS 2.0 onwards - not this abomination that was in this dingus unit.
imovie mac uses the poof animation too
"Dominance" couldn't be a better word to describe Frank
The revolution has begun.
Dominance is Frank!
No reply? I hate you youtube
I imagined frank typing with her tail on a text to speech child's toy.
D O M I N A N C E I S F R A N K
@@micha4940 her
LONG LIVES THE DOMINANCE WHICH IS FRANK THE SNAKE
my dad had a PDA similar to this, but when he got a Blackberry, he didn't need it anymore, so he gave it to me to play with. i spent so many hours writing notes on it, i think it permanently changed my handwriting style forever since i had to train myself to write the way the PDA wanted
wow 😂
wow that seems pretty fun lol
Sameee, my dad let me use his old PDA. The one he had you were able to play games on it. I used to play Rayman.
@@sebastianfernandez6146DAMN what that is crazy
The spirit of the Newton's handwriting recognition lives on in Apple's autocorrect, where you can type real words with a real keyboard and _still_ have it sometimes go "nah, mate" and turn them into an unrecognizable mess.
this has me dying
Definitely the spirit of Newton is haunting modern apple products..
this happens to me even though my autocorrect is turned off, any ideas?
For example, the auto-predict feature: the average cost per person per hour for the company registered to be a total cost per person for each of the four companies
@@theoneandonlyartyomin the keyboard settings there is one called “show predictions inline”
And maybe you also have some text replacements on
I remember a time when I dreamt about having a PDA. The concept of having a portable computer in my pocket seemed so cool. And here we are. Editing 4k video on a computer smaller than a calculator. And I'm not even that old. I would classify as an early zoomer / late millennial.
They had so many cheap no-brand PDAs back in the late 90's and early 2000's. And most of them were absolute nuggets.
I wanted a PDA a bunch too, but I bought a PDA at a Scholastic book fair when I was in elementary school, and yeah it was an absolute nugget. never worked, and the iPad came out that year.
I remember telling someone in high school that I wanted a PDA, and they thought that I meant kissing someone in the halls of the school. :-P I bid on an impossibly low-priced Dutch auction on a Casio Cassiopeia on early eBay, but someone who was a buyer emailed all the other buyers and said that he contacted the seller about completing the purchase and the seller acted all weird and screamed about going crazy. It turned out to be some kid who made a fake listing to try to scam money. His parents were spoken to.
Later I bought a Sharp Wizard, hooked it up to a phone line with the modem, dialed into my ISP with the VT-100 terminal, and downloaded a copy of Frankenstein on Project Gutenberg. I proceeded to read it off of my Wizard in class. This was 1998 or so. I guess I was an early ebook adopter.
Even today, it seemed fun to use one of them. If I’m not mistaken, HTC made a few in their early years and they looked quite nice despite the presumed bulkiness.
I remember playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and going "UUUUOOOOH I NEEEEEED A PDA, LOOK IT HAS A MAP"
"DOMINANCE is Frank"
words for life
He should put it on a t-shirt and sell it.
@@GROENAASMusic nah Apple would probably claim it lmao
@@someguyonyoutube9279 lol
It’s nice to see that apple was putting stickers in their products even in 1993.
I bought airpods a while back and didnt receive a sticker, very sad day
@@therobertpetty only with iPad, iPhone and Mac.
@@PeacefulAutistic I just got a new iPhone and didn’t get stickers
Apple put stickers in their products as far back as the '80s. I know Macs like the Plus and SE came with stickers, and I'm pretty sure the Apple II series did too.
We've got an SE 512k iirc sitting in the shed with its own sticker on it.
DankPods: *writes "Hi my name is Frank"*
Newton: "dominance is frank"
That's the most replayed part.
Thank you for including "Eat Up Martha." I think about that scene every single time I see the Newton MessagePad mentioned.
I distinctly remember my dad acquiring this specific nugget in the early 2000s, proudly demonstrating its capabilities to visitors.
He would absolutely nail anything he tried to write on that thing, but every time he handed it to a guest to let them try they would fail miserably.
An absolute party trick of a nugget if you set it up correctly. We still have it, even though we stopped showing it to guests over a decade ago.
Me thinks his writing style was blocky enough to be recognized, or he's clever an learned the flicking tricks.
if were me.
You had me at "stopped showing it to guests a decade ago"
does it still work tho?
9:12 I just want to let you know, this made me spit out my drink.
Dominance is Frank!
Dominance is Frank!
It ain't a Thursday evening without a DankPods vid. A little bit of joy after a tough day
Yeaaaa boi
Yes
Heres a bot, make sure not to click on that sussy link, and if you do, tell him hes fatherless
It’s Friday morning on this side of the world fam ✌️
@@ThatUntitledPublisher will do
I actually collected these in the late aughts, early tens, and have experience with the two different handwriting recognition engines that were used between the various models. The model you have here, the OMP, uses what was essentially a bootleg handwriting recognition engine that Newton engineers picked up in Russia of all places, and it is *very* limited as you saw. First, it works based on an in-built dictionary and it won't recognize words outside of that (unless you set it to character-by-character recognition which is... iffy, to say the least). Second, that engine is designed for cursive. I mean that, it's purpose built for recognizing cursive handwriting, not block text. Again, you can see why this causes some issues. The later handwriting recognition engine, which I believe was available from the 130 onwards, was capable of far more accurate recognition of both cursive and block text, though the first engine was still in-built clear through to the 2100. These are nifty little machines, and I'd love to get my hands on a 2100 again someday but they are exceedingly rare and *very* expensive these days. Very, very cool to see a video on the OMP from you though! Keep up the amazing work homie!
Thanx for sharing absolutely awesome insight.
That was interesting thank you.
I was watching and thinking it's probably got a dictionary it uses and can't understand words outside of it.
@@BigBearManyeah, was pretty obvious for me that it uses a dict. instead of a per letter recognition.
The slow "dominance, is, frank" just absolutely sent me, the funniest bit is that's just frank in a nutshell
As far as I'm aware, Apple does actually allow you to come in for support no matter how old the product, I've seen people go in with 80s Macintoshes and there's always someone who knows what they're doing and can help
I guess it depends. I remember a decade ago my mom went into an Apple store to see about fixing a 90’s era device (I think it was getting a replacement part for her older computer she used for her bookkeeping), and they where all “nope, too old”.
Of course, things might have changed since then.
I wonder if it's one of those things that they'll do only at major flagship locations. Meanwhile If you take it to the Apple Store in Podunk, Iowa they'll just be like "Come on, dude, I'm not paid enough to deal with this crap."
@@stevethepocket baller baller, baller,, baller,,, baller,,,, baller,,,,, baller,,,,,, baller,,,,,,, baller,,,,,,,, baller,,,,,,,,,,
go to a store where someone old works, and hope they start smiling when they see it, in a "thank you for making me feel 20 again!" kinda style
What I love about those old devices is that their chonkiness gives you a feeling that you bought something cool and advanced. Especially when you get all those papers and some extras. All those cartridges that have to be put in, hatches to open and close, physical buttons that click when you press them...
Sure, modern devices can do much more, but sometimes I really miss that chonkiness
Definitely agree. I'd love to see some modern stuff use that kinda design choices, but I know it'll never happen
Nah mate, we need paper-thin junk that bends in your pocket and shatters from a 6-inch drop. So COMPACT and SLEEK and FRAGILE
See you got used to new devices so you like the chonkiness, but the consumers that got used to the chonkiness both resented the weight of them and associated size with old technology, so thin devices is what made em feel like they got something advanced
Likewise, manuals and such were associated with old tech because old tech couldn't incorporate them inside the device. So consumers associated integrated manuals as advanced and massive booklets with old stuff
You'll note that in both cases we have objective flaws of that technology that produces or reinforces the consumer aversion
Not to say that thin devices don't hsve their issues, especially the thermals of thin laptops are horrid
Basically there's a balance to be struck, but people always associated slimmer less fussy devices with progress because a device thats smaller and teaches you how to use it without a massive manual is indicative of the capacity to have such advanced technology to allow that
@@DimT670 that, and/or it's simply cheaper from a materials standpoint with less used. (after the cost of developing proper miniaturization and economies of scale)
Digital distribution wasn't only for "convenience", it was also a way to avoid having to pay for physical manufacturing, let alone retail stocking fees. Also is a form of forcing physical control of the product, especially the right to resale, away from the consumer and disincentivizing piracy but that's less relevant here
To give a personal Devil's Advocate to your argument, it is super convenient to combine an iPad Air Gen 4 with a Magic Keyboard as a casual laptop replacement. It's light, somewhat versatile, easy enough to use after adjustment, has decent battery life (beats the crap out of a gaming laptop), and it reinforced my aversion from carrying around my old HP to work.
That said though it runs into the issue of "oh crap, can't log in with a smart card, run arbitrary programs off the App Store or plug in headphones without a separately-sold adapter. This lone connector's broken, how do I do this particular task? Wait, the digital manual (sometimes) requires an internet connection and my phone's dead/absent and there's no workplace WiFi. A manual would have been nice and simple, if an Extra Thing."
There's tradeoffs with advancement, not all change is consumer-side progress, although much is or can be. Headphone jacks and replaceable batteries are sorely missed. Encountering a dying internal battery necessitating a phone replacement happens more often personally than taking a shower/diving selfie
@@arbayer2 sure you arent wrong but the stuff we lose, we lose because the consumer doesn't raise a massive stink for them to exist. Of course the companies also run campaigns to convince them not to, but still
For example would we have lost the audio jack if most ppl refused to buy stuff without it?
In the end of the day we are talking about luxury technology products. No one needs an iPhone or they prefer to have one thus we can't really be forced to buy em as consumers. So stuff thar gets worse is a combination of consumer apathy combined with companies trying every dirty trick they can to foster that apathy. Or to make something the new normal
Its not coincidence that the things you mentioned are things that have no issue to exist within the current market but benefit companies when they don't. Its the classic boiling the frog thing combined with consumers wanting some element of a product so much they are willing to overlook any flaw, like how apple fans often do just to have the brand and os
Ofc it all boils down to "and this is why we need customer advocacy groups and regulations"
It's kind of fun that the handwriting recognition on the iPad is pretty much there now. It only took them 27 years
The newton wasn’t really bad, the tech gust wasn’t there yet for what apple wanted to do.
@@c.j.3404 yeah, even the palm pda's were first released in 1997 and those only recognised specific letter shapes
@@c.j.3404 and Dingus is probably not a recognized word.
Berger
If they made it too quickly, they would've lost on millions in updates. Greed is the reason for the slowing of advances in tech and anything else, really.
Definitely rip the VHS footage and post it online when you get the VHS player back! That's some nugget history that needs to be preserved!
I still have my original Newton. Works just as great as it did on day 1 in 1993!
that bad huh?
I bought one of these back in 2008, the 2100 if I remember correctly (it's the one with more RAM)! I got it on the internet and even used it for email in college classes at the time. So much fun stuff on there, but nowadays so many of the utilities I used to make it functional are just dead links now. I absolutely love that the screen has an actual paper texture feel to it though!
My first couple cellular phones had faxing capacity. I worked at a job that still had a fax machine in the back room to receive messages from corporate, and I faxed a short message there to try it out. It was basically like SMS, but the message would be in small lettering at the top row of a huge page. It could also receive faxes as in, if you know one was coming, it could record the signals, and then play them back into another fax machine to print out the fax. So I put my cell number down as a fax number on a few forms, and every now and then I would get a call and hear a squealing fax noise.
I once needed to call some government org and had list of phones to call, one of them had dial up sounds to them. I now wonder if there are some app to prank them.
I’ve been feeling homesick recently, and you uploading every Thursday makes me feel like I’m with a friend back at home. Thanks, mate.
The first thing I did when the video appeared in my feed was to think of The Simpson's scene... Glad you mention it, mate!
“Eat up Martha”
“dominance is frank” had me in stitches
honestly for 1992/3 this is actually really good, the fact that it actually recognises some words is really neat. but as you said its way ahead of its times
It'd help if he tried actual dictionary words
time for some dankness. you make my day a million times better, honestly.
Shrek
Same man
TH-cam back at it with no notification.
This is just so extremely entertaining. Couldn't stop laughing at all the hand writing attempts. Every time I waited for it to turn to text it was like comedic buildup
I had one of these waaaay back in the day. I found the handwriting recognition to be pretty good, after doing the tutorials, and training it. It learned your handwriting as you used it, and got better at converting it.
6:51 this must be how Dr. Seuss wrote his books.
We love the ShrekPad ❤️
Yep
Shrekpadforever
Shrekpad is love, Shrekpad is life.
Yes
@@a_userMUSIC reddit 🤮
OMG. I had an Apple Newton Message Pad 2000 around the year 2000. I thought it was the coolest thing even though it served no practical purpose at the time. To its own detriment, it was way ahead of its time. Little did I know it would be the precursor of what was to come. Great vid Dankpods!
Being the precursor is the worst!
People who write business textbooks love this nugget. I’m too sleepy to rescue those memories. Also my fave grandpa was named Manuel and loved fiddling with electronics.
The cloud delete animation thing looks good on the Newton. For a first attempt it’s not that terrible.
It’s like having a drunk assistant in real life. Just what I’ve been looking for all these years.
Been around since the Shrek pod and it’s amazing to see how far you’ve come and how you’re still amazing after all this time, you never fail to make me laugh so thanks for making such great content
The "Dominance is Frank" had me dead. 🤣
My dad was an intern at apple when they were developing this thing, he worked on the team that designed it
Neat! What did he think of the Newton? What was his position in the dev team?
8:31 oh my god what the hell was that laugh lmfao
He turned into a little girl at a sleepover
"Dominance is Frank"
Later: Frank is stuck in paper towels.
I'm assuming the tech behind it is searching a database of words it has to try and find the "closest" to what was written - meaning if you write a word it doesn't recognize, it just tries its best with what it has. Even then, I can't imagine it doing great with words it DOES know, too. I wonder if it'd be any better if it just analyzed each letter independently and added spaces.
And considering that the entire software it comes with is only 8kb large, I'd guess it's missing a few words.
On the later Newton OS versions the double-tap correction menu had a "try letters" button that did just that for unrecognized words, and then if it got it right it would add it to the dictionary
It does make me wonder if it could have ever worked, given the hardware constraints of the time. Could we write a robust hand writing recognition method today that could run in under 8K? Probably not.
@@LegendaryKennethWhat we could do and what anyone would bother trying to do are probably very different things :p
I spend time with people who "golf" code as a hobby and they've still got all of the tricks they did back then, just no economic reason to use them
Hi, Dank man, Just wanted to say that i love your channel and it is by far one of my favourite channel if not the favorite. I'm honestly not a big Apple fan (I'm mostly Android) or a headphone expert but clearly, you introduced me to those things mentioned ago. Not to mention the drums!
And to You, random viewer, I like You too.
ok i didn't expect to be liked
: ]
I now fully believe Dank and Red Letter Media are in the same shared universe. Hope your VCR was repaired lightning fast, Dank!
that would be an awesome cross over...but your brain did...
Wheel of the Worst but instead of VHS tapes it's lucky dip nuggets. Plinketto but instead of VHS tapes its...
okay but seeing the newton spell out "dominance is frank" was figgin beautiful
I'm not surprised dingus never worked. It's clearly got a set of words that it compares to what you wrote and then basically guesses. Dingus was never going to be an option.
almost made me miss my old PALM PDA. I used the heck out of my IIIC for ebooks and Spacetrader(some one made a greyscale overlay to make the ships look like Wing Commander Privateer). I even had the camera and modem add ons. my Faviourites were the Zire 71 (it had a slide up camera and could do MP3 and AVI's with the TCP app) and my Zire 72 that had a SD-wifi card and bluetooth(did not work with headphones). I also had the IR remote control and loved sitting infront of the Sony store channel surfing till the store assiciates chased me away... (I was working for Radio Shack at time)
You always make my day better every time you release a video. Keep up the great work!
the first gen handwriting was bad but the final gen version of it was good enough to be part of macOS until the removal of 32bit support and now it's part of iPadOS under the name scribe. It was also the device that started it's long term partnership with ARM and the creation of high performance arm cores.
9:07 Frank, asserting her dominance via 1993 handwriting "recognition"
*dominance is frank* 9:19
I’ve been watching Ashens for a _very long_ time, and it makes me so happy that you’ve made it around to a tatpad. Even with the Newton being a failure, *it has knockoffs*
I never watched ashens but I will sometime
@@Bloxxers_rclNotAClanner Watch some of the Poundland specials
haha i discovered ashen channel when i was looking for Newton vid. best discovery ever.
@Future Pants it's very hard to keep being consistent after 7+ years
@Future Pants well he has been doing this TH-cam crap for *14 years.*
God, I’ve been holed up all day with COVID, nothing to do but scroll. But, just my luck - finally, some DankPods to brighten my day.
Go easy, feel better mate 🙏
Hope you recover soon! I had it a bunch of times, it’s rough.
Awww… this is the first Dankpods video where I actually own the nugget! The handwriting recognition was absolutely the WOW factor for these machines, and markedly improved if you tweaked the settings, corrected mid-recognised words with the double tap, and… well, just *used* it. My Newton certainly seemed to get better with time and more exposure to my handwriting (… or perhaps it was training me!)
At the time, the alternative was a Palm Pilot which meant relearning how to write using a letter recognition system called Graffiti… which was a complete pain in the nether regions.
I’d love you to review an eMate, if you can get your hands on one; a Newton-based educational laptop sold for schools, which was designed by a young Jony Ive: it looks like a Batmobile had a love child with a MacBook!
Keep up the great work, sir.
Depends on which newt you were using. I used to have a MessagePad 2100 and an eMate - they never had any issue with the handwriting aside from when I was using slang or anything, and overall those later models were fairly capable (heck I used to chat on IRC off them over WiFi, it was a stretch on the eMate but flawless on the 2100)
I used and loved palm pilot's for about 10years. You get used to the graffiti, I still know it all today.
Dominance is frank
Also frank: gets stuck in paper towel roll
these things are so neat, my fiance's dad has 2/3 of them and they all still work, there is a small but very dedicated niche group of newton enthusiasts out there and some still use them! he still has important notes and other things loaded in his newton and brought it out at Christmas to look something up in his old notes!
1:57 I love how the paper fell inside the cabinet
'dominance is frank' made me belly laugh so damn hard, lol
The Newton was...very ambitious with the handwriting recognition, trying to OCR whole words at a time with the best consumer grade portable electronics Apple thought they could turn a profit on in the early 90's. Palm's Graffiti system, which did individual characters at a time taking into account what direction the strokes were made worked a LOT better.
Palm's Graffiti influenced my handwriting till today.
I remember you had to do 5 differently than normal, no not the normal way where you do the main bottom part and then add the "hat".. and space as a dash line was annoying.
It's fun to see that in For All Mankind, the Newton evolved into an almost iPhone-like device. The most fictional thing in the entire show
10:49 eyo wade
Elemental pixar movie
@@NikoCubeRoot no, that's dankpods' actual name
I always love it when the gloves come out
12 minutes of DankPods trying to write "dingus" on the MessagePad.
Totally worth it
0:01 that edit is so trippy xD
For those who do not know, 'Beam' is where you could share files with another pda wirelessly. This feature never worked well, it was like the OG airdrop
We had a late 90s Palm Pilot what I got to play with. They had a special recognition game so you could write so it likes your inputs. It was fun lol
3:41 Sounds like a depressed Waluigi going through his bills and taxes
*W A H*
*W A H*
*W A H*
Interesting that they actually brought back the scribbling thing for the apple pencil. At least the handwriting recognition works now. Impressively well, actually!
Ironically 1997 is when the Palm Pilot launched and those things owned the entire market for a good bit.
Funny thing is, from a software development perspective, Palm OS was _a lot_ like old classic Mac OS. Coding for it _felt_ like coding for a portable Mac OS. It was the Newton done right. If it had an Apple logo on it, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.
I borrowed an original Newton for a month in 1993… it really did suck, but you could get used to it. Burned through SO many AA batteries.
I stopped writing apps for Palm, around the time of their migration to ARM, the Treo, the split Palm/Windows CE platforms, PalmSource, etc. It was clear they were on the way out.
Oh, the nineties were a weird time…
As soon as you said PDA, I remembered so much from the late 90's-early 2000's! I remember pagers and I was 4 in 2000. My mom's boyfriend (my sisters' father) at the time had one, and he still uses that single ear Bluetooth headphone. It's hilarious to think about.
The moment he pulled the VHS tape out of the box and when my brain registered what I was looking at I was like ":O"
Frank sure showed Dominance over that paper towel roll
12:19 Yup, that's the visage of pure dominance there
I believe their last versions, like the messagepad 2000 and 2100 have much better handwriting recognition. It would be cool to compare them
This wonderful experience gives a context to just how good Palm's graffiti was, wow.
Special delivery position "Oh wait no! That looks bad!" *concerned Aussie noises*
DankPods, always a great start to the weekend 🤗
4:57 nice junkrat impression
Im so happy that you did this video. I think that the PDA era was so underrated in the development of the modern smartphone. You could run emulators and jailbreak the fck outta these, particularly the palm variety. I feel like this was the start of truly modular, “app based” personal computing. I used a palm phone until 2014 just for this reason!
It was one of Apple's early attempts at a personal digital assistant, and while it may have been ahead of its time, it still holds a special place in the hearts of tech enthusiasts everywhere
10/10
Dominance is frank.
Frank kidnapped me he has dominance send hel-
Dominance is frank. All hail the snek.
Who doesn't love this guy. This man is bat shit insane lol.
"beat up Martin" -> "eat up Martha"
Anything with a vhs instruction video was next level.
The later Newtons had faster processors and better handwriting recognition. It still wasn't great, but it worked marginally better.
If you get the latest model, the MessagePad 2100 with the latest software, the HWR was actually pretty good. I LOVED my Newton.
What's amazing is the MessagePad 2000 was released just 3 years after the original MessagePad but already had a literally 10x faster CPU to work with. Just shows how fast portable technology was moving back then.
6:02 That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the thumbnail for the video
It's astonishing how much of the newton is in iPad OS. Truly, nothing goes to waste 🙏
I would watch a whole episode of Dank just playing with the text feature, it's comedy gold
3:22 Those stickers alone are worth Gold! I heard Xerox, HP and "Mindspring" had their hands in this nugget.
I remember a "training process" to make this work properly... Fun Times
8:59 Dinguß
6:59 ok here I laughed much harder than I thought I would
fun fact: this product made it into Apple TV+’s show “For All Mankind”, and since in the show technology has progressed faster than our world, you see the Newton with video call capabilities and a better screen-existing at the same time as the iPod (yes, the iPod, it makes an appearance) in 1995!
Dude... that's genuinely the first time I've ever seen a VHS tape without the windows on either side of the label on the front. that was so weird, yet fascinating
Too be fair your handwriting didn't look like it followed the font rules even a little.
1:35 I FUCING DIED OMG
😂
Berger!!! 😂😂😂 9:05
It almost sounds like a B U R G U R
Apple should be a channel sponsor just by the raw amount of exposure you grant them. Change my mind.
I used to own an Apple Newton 120, and the looks I got in 1994 when using it with it's amazing PCMCIA 14.4K modem was priceless!! I had bosses telling me "That will never be a thing, why waste your money?" Simple, it was (and IS) the future Steve Jobs envisioned. I could have seen Apple keep the Newton name for it's IPad and seen something along the lines of:
"Welcome to your new Apple Newton M2, this brief tutorial will give you a rundown of the features you can expect. Features like Octo Core processing, 16GB DDR 5 RAM, 4GB LDDR 5 VRAM with Nvidia 3080 micro GPU, IPS 8K display, and of course full handwriting, facial, retinal, and biometric recognition to insure maximum security of your Newton".
10:00 why do I actually wanna play this? 💀 this game actually looks fun.