It takes a certain amount of nerve to court the education market with an entirely new computing device, part PDA and part laptop, quite unlike anything that has come before. However, that's nothing compared to the colossal amount of nerve required to keep pushing that weird and wonderful little slab (known to you and me as the eMate 300) after announcing that all further development of the device has been scrapped. Nonetheless, if anyone's doubted Apple's place at the top of the Nerve-o-meter, we now have proof that Apple reigns supreme. Yes, according to a TechWeb article, Apple continues to hawk the orphaned eMates in the K-12 market, in a move that defines "chutzpah" almost as clearly as claiming that Internet Explorer is part of an OS, and not an application.

Steve Zalot, an advisory systems engineer at Apple who is responsible for supporting the educational market, showed up to the Pennsylvania Education Technology Conference calling the cancellation of Newton a "painful decision," but claiming that Newton devices such as the eMate were "still a viable part of our offerings." And while we at AtAT would have to agree on a purely technical level (those eMates are cool), we're hard-pressed to imagine a school that would invest several thousand dollars in computers whose manufacturer had essentially said was a dead-end purchase, no matter how cool and useful those computers may be. If Apple really wants to pick up where it left off, it's got to hurry up with those Mac OS Lite-based eMates.

But given that Apple currently doesn't have those Mac OS Lite-based eMates, and no NC's, and no Artemis, it's not entirely surprising to find they're still pushing the only education-suited computer they've got that costs under $1000. We're just sorry that they didn't have anything more viable to show. We know they can produce the goods, but it's all a matter of time, now. The clock's ticking, guys...