alt Hacker NewsIt’s even worse than nobody having seen the Newton: it was actively ridiculed in the press, so a lot of people had never seen it but knew it as a joke.
This was a time when newspaper comic strips were still culturally influential because they were syndicated in newspapers across the US. Doonesbury spent several strips making fun of the Newton:
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/...
One of the more interesting corners of history is the Palm guys settling on honesty as a reaction to that.
You make a system that can do enough that you can teach users to meet it in the middle, and you don't pretend it is magic.
PalmOS and Graffiti in particular is a rare example of tech literally not pretending it is more magical than it actually is. It could do what it claimed, with high accuracy, you had to learn how to use it but it was not burdensome. And with the rest of the Palm Pilot, everyone knew they were carrying around a finely balanced device; useful enough, insane battery life, friendly.
One of the high water marks of tech culture in that decade.