Steve Jobs’ Denial
Steve Jobs appeared at the first D: All Things Digital Conference in 2003 with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossgerg. It was six years after Steve’s return to Apple after forming NeXT. Pixar, which Steve purchased from George Lucas in 1986 (then called The Graphics Group), had released five wildly successful movies: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo (still my favorite). Shortly after returning to Cupertino, Steve killed a number of projects, including the Newton, Apple’s foray into the PDA market and its second pen-driven tablet device.
However, the Newton project’s cancellation didn’t extinguish interest in an Apple-branded PDA, especially one developed under Steve’s supervision. Even Jobs himself seemed to dream of one:
“I think that, to me, what I want is this little thing that I carry around with me that’s got a keyboard on it, because to do email, you need a keyboard. Until you perfect speech recognition, you need a keyboard. You don’t sit there and write stuff, you need a keyboard. And you need to be connected to the net. So if somebody would just make a little thing where you’re connected to the net at all times, and you’ve got a little keyboard, like an eMate with a modem in it. God, I’d love to buy one. But I don’t see one of those out there. And I don’t care what OS it has in it. So, you know, I don’t want a little scribble thing. But that’s just me.”
