I'm still finding great irony in the forthcoming Apple iPhone. I mentioned in my post about the keynote that back in the late nineties, Seve Jobs killed off all the peripheral, non-computer (i.e. non-Mac) divisions at Apple to get back to the company's roots. Of course, the iPod released in 2001 changed everything because this peripheral turned out to be a huge money-maker for Apple (in fact, Q1 sales turned out to be far beyond expectations according to the report released yesterday).

But it's ironic not just because Jobs would introduce yet another peripheral, but instead the irony lies in the kind of peripheral introduced. The new iPhone incorporates not just an iPod (really just an iPod nano) and a phone, but also a device that will contain calendar, contacts, and email much like the Apple Newton canned a decade ago by Jobs (although Newton holdouts are claiming that spec for spec the Newton does more). The iPhone also incorporates a 2 megapixel camera, even though one of the products killed by Jobs when he did away with the Newton was Apple's Quicktake Camera.

Regardless, I've been waxing nostalgic the last few days thinking about the parts of Apple's history that I missed. I only jumped on the Mac bandwagon in 1998. So I never had nifty gadgets like the Newton or the Quicktake camera. I started using a Palm Pilot in 1998 and that has evolved into the Treo I carry now. But the Newton's features still seem to be ahead of their time. You can even still buy refurbished ones from places like J & K Sales here in Kentucky (also check out NewtonSales.com). Ironically, you can still natively sync a Newton with Windows XP, but not Mac OS X although a couple of third party conduits have been created. From what I've read, Jobs hated the Newton because it was a project introduced by John Sculley (also the coiner of the term "personal digital assistant") who fired Jobs in the late eighties from the company Jobs had founded. So Jobs, in turn, after coming back to Apple killed the Newton and denied any native access in OS X. Not quite eye-for-an-eye, but somewhere close to it.

I have to admit that it's tempting to purchase a refurbished Newton from J & K, but it's hard to justify the $150 price on something that might end up becoming simply a collectable novelty than something of practical use. I carry my laptop with me everywhere as it is and sometimes wonder if I even need the PDA functions of my Treo.

So while there are lots of Newton users still out there, I don't see any "underground" group of Quicktake Camera users. The Quicktake was one of the first commercial digital cameras. It's pictures were only 640 x 480, but at the time it was a robust little device for what it was. And while they are supposedly collectors' items, it's very difficult to get pictures out of them because no modern computer can read the images, let alone connect to them. Still I'm surprised. Since there are cult photography followings around the quirky Holga camera, why no aficionados of the Quicktake, the Model T of digital cameras?

Or maybe I haven't found them yet. Are there any secret Quicktake photographers still out there?

Tags: Apple, iPhone