Apple eMate 300

» see apple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the emate was a us-school-district product at the procurement layer. you could not really just walk into a store and buy one as a consumer. you had to be a school in north america putting in a purchase order through apple's education channel, which is a path that did not exist for schools outside the us. so the green clamshell was effectively invisible everywhere else on the planet, including turkey, where apple was barely present in 1997 and the school computers were beige pc desktops running windows 95.

apple released the emate 300 on march 7 1997 for $799, aimed entirely at us schools. jony ive designed the green clamshell case for kids who would drop it. inside was a 25 mhz arm 710a chip, one megabyte of ram expandable to four, a 480x320 grayscale touchscreen, and a battery that ran twenty-eight hours of typing on a single charge. it ran newton os 2.1 with the standard newton handwriting recognition plus the keyboard input that the rest of the newton line did not have. for a school looking to put a notetaking device on every desk, the emate was the cheapest way to do it.

steve jobs returned to apple in 1997 and started cutting product lines that did not fit the macintosh roadmap. the newton group was high on his list, since the platform ran its own operating system that needed its own developer ecosystem, and apple in 1997 could not afford to maintain a parallel platform alongside macos. on february 27 1998 apple announced the discontinuation of the entire newton line, including the messagepad models and the emate. the green clamshell had been on the market for eleven months. it was the only newton form factor that had really worked in the field, and it died because the brand it lived under was the wrong brand to live under in 1998.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the green clamshell ~

the emate is a beautiful piece of industrial design even now. jony ive's pre-imac translucent plastic with the metal hinge and the curved base is the same design language that would become bondi blue in the original imac later that year. the handle on the back was meant for a kid to carry it. the keyboard was scaled small for child hands but worked for adult typing too. it is the kind of object that turns up on a hacker news front page every few years when someone restores one.

~ how it ended ~

jobs killed newton because the platform was a parallel branch off the main apple roadmap, and apple in 1997 could not afford parallel branches. the emate's specific death was incidental to the larger decision. it was the form factor the newton line had needed since 1993 and it appeared right at the moment the whole platform was about to be cut. apple's tablet bet was over for twelve years. the next time apple shipped a portable touch device aimed at education was the ipad in 2010.

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