Who would have thought that yesterday's throwaway reference to the Newton's unlikely return would actually generate some discussion? We took a highly suspicious online claim-- somebody said that Apple was having new Newton boxes printed at his place of business-- and tacked it on to the long list of fun but deliriously sketchy tidbits that collectively make up the Apple Handheld Apocrypha. The idea that Apple would actually revive the Newton, a product it publicly put to death, is so ludicrous we hardly thought it worth mentioning. But is it so wacky after all? Remember, even after Apple shut down the project, the company stubbornly refused to sell the technology to any interested parties. Plus, consider Apple's less-than-zero marketing efforts throughout the Newton's last few years of life; every time a new device shipped, there'd be a deafening advertising silence, and stories would filter out of Cupertino indicating that this latest Newton would be the last ever because Apple was nixing the project. Heck, the Newton was clinically dead to Apple numerous times, and then revived only to be kept on life support. So why not again? Granted, shipping Newtons again after a two-and-a-half-year death would be more extreme, but it's not exactly out of character.

Faithful viewer Steven Weyhrich, however, had a more likely explanation for Apple printing more Newton boxes (assuming the claim is true in the first place). Apparently Apple has contracts with at least a few huge companies to keep supplying them with Newton MessagePads for an unspecified length of time. And that makes a good deal of sense; if you're an enormous corporation and you're about to rely on a single-source technology like the Newton to power crucial business tasks, you'd better ensure that the manufacturer is contractually obligated to provide you with new units when your existing ones die. We seem to recall that Intel is still making 386 and 486 processors for the federal government under the same kind of agreement.

But faithful viewer Paul Langley had what we consider to be the best explanation of all. So this guy claims that the printer where he works just got an order for new Newton boxes, huh? Says Paul: "What the author failed to mention was the pictures of cookies on the box... the Newton boxes will hold Apple brand Fig Newtons." Well, Paul, we only have one criticism with that scenario-- cookies on the box? Tsk, tsk-- everybody knows that a cookie is just a cookie, but Newtons are fruit and cake!