Arm, Intel, and the vengeance of Newton

Arm’s attempt to purchase part of Intel’s computer chip business may have been declined, but it once again demonstrates the important role played in the evolution of today’s tech by Apple and its handheld Newton. 

While it isn’t quite clear what Arm would gain by buying Intel, Bloomberg claims it tried to do so all the same. (And Apple hasn’t).

What makes this a little confusing is that Arm and Intel have such different businesses: while Arm is a chip design house, Intel is both a designer and manufacturer that uses an architecture cross-licensed with AMD. It is also fair to observe (as The Register has here) that while Intel’s star may be fading, it’s still worth billions of dollars.

Is this a melting point?

All the same, the story reveals something else. It shows the extent to which the tech industry has been transformed by the mobile productivity philosophy articulated in the early days by Newton.

You see, Newton strove to be the perfect assistant for business users. It offered handwriting recognition, natural language support, and though there was no ChatGPT (or even Siri), it hinted at the pervasive AI entering daily existence today.

Newton also used a true mobile processor from Arm (then known as Acorn). This was capable of delivering computational performance for very low energy (at the time) — just like the A-series chips inside iPhones and some iPads, or the M-series silicon inside Macs and iPad Pro.

Getting the team together

The decision to work with Arm reflected Apple’s early recognition that energy consumption and computational performance would be vital if it were to overcome the barriers against next-generation computer design. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he closed the Newton project — but in other ways, he continued to lean into what the company had learned. The data detector technology used in Mail arguably owes a debt to the PDA, as does handwriting recognition.

Many of the ideas Newton heralded appeared a decade later in iPhone — eventually, including that Arm-based processor. 

The Arm-based Apple Silicon chips now used across Apple’s products are so performant that competitors struggle to keep up. The closest current rival (at least in the low-energy, high-performance stakes) is Qualcomm, which may well be trying to snap at Apple’s heels and has been forced to adopt Arm reference designs to do so. Even Microsoft is moving to Arm, while Intel’s processor design unit is spending more than it makes, prompting pain across the company.

You could argue that all of this illustrates how ahead of its time the Apple Newton was, and the huge influence it still wields today. Because today we have fully networked, high-performing devices in a myriad of different forms (Mac, smartphone, tablet, watch, glasses, more) boosted by AI with user interfaces to match.

Arguably, many of these devices were made possible by design decisions Apple reached when building the Newton. It took decades to accomplish it, but that means we are now living in Newton’s future, and the chutzpah of Arm’s overture to Intel reflects this. While what Arm would gain from any such deal isn’t clear, the alleged attempt illustrates that truth. Several decades later, revenge seems sweet.

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