iWalk... Apple laughs at the hype, why?

SOUNDS GOOD

SOUNDS GOOD
But i would never buy one.. PDA's suck.. If you cant play Unreal on it, I dont want it !

Amen, Bill!

Bill,

You got it right. Those functions you mentioned are exactly what I'm looking for too! A color PDA / MP3 player / HD / mobile phone (w/speaker, of course). One digital appliance to handle everything! I guess we'll have to keep on dreaming for now....

an mp3 player? why? apple has ipod, if iwalk had an mp3 on it ipod would be useless, so apple wouldnt do that, iwalk would be color, it would contain games on it and take notes, and be able to tranfer files from iwalk to your computers through a program, why a program, to make sure you dont put mp3s on it so ipod is still useful.

Palm and Pocket PC and the Newton

I was talking to a guy who came into our store today about the long and wild ride of the Newton. He owned every single Newton Apple ever put out and I was grilling him about the 2000 and the 2001 series. These models were absolutely the coolest PDA's ever, 160Mhz ARM chips, 4Mb RAM/ROM and two PCMCIA slots (in the 2001 series, 1 in the 2000) for RAM upgrade cards and/or Ethernet/Modem card. Noone, I repeat: "Noone" has captured the breathtaking features that these Newton Models carried. These models still kick Palm, and (to a lesser degree) PocketPC's butts!

I guess a half-billion dollars in R&D should get you somewhere, huh?

My point is, Apple invested almost 9 years and a half billion dollars into the Newton. Why kill all that history and brilliance that spawned a whole industry and never touch it again. That would be like if Steve Jobs left Apple, and John Scully took over again and decided the iMac was the worst idea ever and trashed the line. That leaves companies like Compaq or Gateway to pick up the scraps. You see what I'm getting at?

The iWalk is a good idea (if it exists). A MacOS for the road when you're hiking, biking, jogging, in a subway station or all those places you wouldn't normally take your shiny TiBook out in. I live in Seattle and I love to jot notes, but when I'm downtown I'm not going to tote my $3000 portable all around town with me. I bought a Handspring Visor Edge, but I want a Newton 2100... or even better: an iWalk.

Peace ya'll.

iPod as a PDA Killer?

I think you have it exactly backwards...eventually, probably soon...there will be PDA's that completely eliminate any advantage that the iPod has. Face it, the iPod is temporary technology. It is cool, and I love it, but to think that Apple wouldn't include MP3 functionality in a PDA simply to safeguard the iPod is ridiculous.

Oops! I meant 2000 and "2100" series Newtons.

Oops! I meant to say 2000 and "2100" series Newtons. Take a look on Ebay, you can get them for under $300.

Originally posted by nerveosu
http://www.thinksecret.com/features/mwsf02iwalk.html

Apple makes money by selling us stuff we want ...and we want the iWalk. They should do a little less laughing and alot more developing.

Click to expand...

Sooo... Let's see. The reason Apple should make an iWalk is because you really really really want one. Did that work on your parents when you were a kid? I mean, I'd really really really like a mansion on the moon, but I don't see Apple coming through for me anytime soon.

My suggestion, if you want an iWalk, is to figure out how the company can make a device that's significantly better than anything out there currently, but costs about the same, and then send in your job application.

Re: ?

Originally posted by nerveosu
$600 and for sure around $800 like the Newton was.

Click to expand...

But see, you're already talking about a device (iPod + m105) that isn't THAT much different from existing Palm devices (a Palm device with the storage capacity of an iPod), but costs a couple hundred dollars more than a top-of-the-line Sony CLIE. And the more you refine it, adding the cool features you would expect from an Apple product, the more expensive it's going to get. And for a PDA, you better hope it has better battery performance than an iPod. Even at its most conservative 10-12 hours of battery life, the iPod is shorter lived than the biggest PDA power hogs currently on the market.

What you don't seem to be grasping is that profit margins on PDAs are paper-thin, yet people still think they're expensive. There are a flood of devices out there and Apple could not compete effectively in this market. Of course Apple would produce a PDA if they could do so without breaking the company.

To sum up, consumer demand is necessary, but not sufficient. If the average set of features consumers want would cost more than the average price they'd be willing to pay, then the consumer will just have to do without until some part of the equation changes. Companies kill themselves trying to get into this sort of market, and I'd rather Apple didn't.

Who want`s a iWalk anyway? I sure dont!!
What I want is POWER, and lot`s of it!

(Steve stop making this consumer crap and give us something that truly blows me away)