Cracking Open the Apple Newton

Bottom

Here's the bottom of the unit. Nothing much to see except for the battery door.

Model H1000

Our Newton is the H1000, which is also known as the Newton MessagePad. This is the original unit made in 1993. As you can see, it was made in Japan.

The Control Panel

The Newton is basically one large tablet. You can write anywhere except at the bottom, displayed here. These are touch buttons which launch applications.

The Stylus

The stylus stores in the side of the case. Unlike modern styluses which are usually little pointers, this one is full size, equivalent to a ball point pen.

The top

Here's the top of the unit. The black box on the left is the IR window. Next to it is the card slot for a PCMCIA memory card.

On/off

The button in the middle is the On/Off switch. It's springloaded. At the far left is the button to pop the PCMCIA card out with. It's mechanical in nature and takes some pressure to release.

Power and synch

These two connectors, below the stylus holder are hidden beneath a rubber gromit. The one on the left is for an AC/Adapter. The one on the right allows you to synch your Newton with your Mac. Your OLD Mac.

Memory!

You can expand the Newton memory using a PCMCIA card. This card contains a whopping 2MB of memory. Lots by 1993 standards.

Powered up

Here's the unit powered up. You can see the greenish reflective LCD screen common on some low powered devices in the 80's and 90's. No backlighting here. The screen is useless unless it's well lit.

Preferences

You have many choices to configure your Newton, including training it to learn your handwriting. It is supposed to recognize regular writing, not special kinds like Grafitti on the later Palms.

Party like it's 1994

By default the Newton thinks that it's January 4, 1994.

2008

The Newton is Y2K compliant. It understands 2008 as being a valid date. There's no direct date input though. You must scroll through 14 years of dates.

On screen keyboard

You can write freehand and the Newton will do OCR or you can bring up an onscreen keyboard like this.

Handwriting style

You can specify how the Newton recognizes your handwriting.

Handwriting

The Newton will allow you to write freehand like modern Tablet PCs

Feedback!

One of the Newton's downfalls that it was ridiculed for was its poor handwriting recognition. It rendered the word TechRepublic as feedback!

Calculator

The Newton includes an on screen calculator

Newton vs iPod Touch

Here you can see the size of the Newton relative to an iPod Touch.

Similar dimensions

As you can see the Touch is much smaller, but rotated into a landscape mode, the screen width is identical to the width of the Newton.

Battery Compartment

The Battery Compartment is on the bottom of the unit.

AAA battery pack

The Newton runs on 4 AAA batteries which sit inside of a removable battery pack.

Backup battery

There's a lithium battery for backup purposes to keep data in the Newton in case the 4 AAAs die.

To the left there's a red switch you set to remove the backup battery and the 4 AAA battery pack.

Model and Serial Number

Inside the battery compartment is the model and serial number for the Newton.

Backup Battery removed

Slide the red switch to Remove Backup and it unlocks the lithium battery.

Back cover screws

There are two screws accessible from the outside, and 5 inside of the unit. Remove these first.

Snap apart

Once the 5 screws are removed, the back of the case snaps off, with a little prying.

Main system board

With the back off, you can see the clean system board. It's a very clean design, mostly all ICs.

RAM

This is the main RAM for the Newton. The H1000 comes with 640K of RAM.

Apple LSI chip

This chip handles most of the bus activity on the Newton. It provides the interface for RAM, DMA, Real time clock, PCMCIA card, audio, and video.

CPU

The Newton uses a 20Mhz ARM610 CPU. It was one of the first mobile processors.

Apple ROMS

These two identical chips (to the lower left and bottom of the CPU) are the system ROMS for the Newton. It comes with 4MB onboard ROM storing the Newton programs such as Calendar, Calculator, and so on. The chip in the upper left hand corner is another RAM chip used for parity checking on the others.

Upside down serial controller

This inverted chip is a Zilog Z85C3008VSC CMOS serial controller. It's the chip that controls the serial port on the Newton and allows you to connect your Newton to a PC. Unlike most serial controllers which are RS232, this is an RS422 standard chip.

The LT902SC chip to the left is a driver/receiver chip for the RS422 chip. The AD7880AR chip to the right is an Analog to Digital converter chip.

IR

This is the IR port for the Newton. You can use it to beam information to another Newton or IR capable device.

Speaker wires

Here's the wires that run to the speaker. They're soldered in place, so you must be careful with them.

System board screws

There are lots of little screws to remove to take the system board off.

Hidden screw

There's a screw hidden deep in the machine you have to remove to get the system board off.

Butterfly

Once you remove the crews, the only thing holding the front cover to the system board is the speaker wires.

Touchscreen

Here's the touchscreen for the unit with the cover off.

Assembly date

Here's the assembly date for the unit.

October 29, 1993.

Removing the cover

There are two large screws which connect the speaker to the front cover. Remove them and cover disconnects.

Shielding

Here you can see the shielding between the system board and the LCD.

Ribbon connector

The LCD connects to the system board with a ribbon connector.

PCMCIA socket

Here's where the PCMCIA expansion cards sit when you put them in the machine.

Disconnected

Here's the ribbon cable disconnected from the system board.

Ribbon edge

Here's a closeup of the ribbon connector. you can see the trace wires in the ribbon and the exposed card edges.

Ribbon connector

Here's where the ribbon plugs in.

Beneath it, you can see the blue Reset button which is inside of the battery compartment.

LCD

Here's the LCD removed from the Newton

Cracked open

The Newton Message Pad H1000 (OMP) completely cracked open.