Apple was doing pretty good with the MacIntosh but everyone was waiting for the future of computing, tablets! The Newton was really cool but I never saw or touched one. I remember reading how some guys were doing BBS's on them, cool stuff in the 90's right before the internet went ballistic. When Ebay was fresh and new I was on the hunt for one of these but, like gold, they never went down in value.
The first non Acorn product to use an ARM processor. Apple contributed (I don't know whether financial, technically, or both) to its development. After using later versions of ARM processor in all their iPhones they are about to ditch Intel and put them in Macs.
I'm pretty sure Apple was tied with Motorola Chips for a long time for the Macs are you saying currently? It's interesting about the ARM chips, sometimes I think it would be fun to virtually sit in on those meetings. There's a lot of great videos popping up on YouTube, Amazon Prime and a little on Netflix with some of the big engineers, I just watched one about Atari, and have watched 8-Bit's Commadore Series on YouTube. Here's a cool Atari Webpage... http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/articles/longevity/longevity.html Five bucks says Techmoan does something about the Newton next!
I found the story, which also says the Newton was a flop. https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/yarns/637395-2019-07/ The first major success was probably the Game Boy Advance. If you remember the original ran off a couple of AA batteries but, because of the ARM processor, still had a decent battery life.
I'll have to find something more about why it was a flop, within seven years the Palm Pilot, Handspring and a few other small tablet organizers where everywhere. I was deep into HP and for my sales job at the time I loved it, a laptop would have been better but my boss didn't have the insight to see the advantage.
