emate memory expansion

[beachycove]

How big an improvement in eMate performance (not storage, which is an obvious enough improvement) with one of these installed? Apparently the width of the system bus is thus doubled, making the machine more responsive. But how much more responsive? Anyone out there experienced the before and after scenario at first hand?

The eMate is the only Newton you can do this with. Presumably it was engineered into it for the sake of the 'business' model which never made it to production.

[beachycove]

Reporting back: I subsequently found some numbers at http://newtonsales.com/emate.htm which relate to my query.

Further to this, and on a more subjective level, I noticed when doing a web trawl re. the eMate a few weeks ago that some of the reviews spoke of the machine being unable even to keep up with fast typing. I later acquired two emates, and have been able to test one with the upgrade card and one without. Both have been restored to factory settings in terms of installed software, and it's true: the stock eMate indeed struggles to keep up with even moderately fast typing. However, by comparison, the one with the upgrade does very nicely. I cite this as an illustration of what the numbers in the link cited might actually mean.

I have used a MP2000/2100 since 1998, so am familiar with the platform, which I still think a fabulous technology, and I have to say that the upgraded eMate for most uses is far from being crippled. It's still a bit slow, but not at all unusable. I would, however, tend to agree that the stock eMate is best at looking 'purdy', and that it really was a crippled machine that ought not to have made it to market in the configuration that it had. It's the old, old Apple story: they wanted you to buy the add-ons, when at least the most important of the 'add-ons', decent memory, should have been included from the outset.

[madmax_2069]

i think the eMate should of had the same CPU as the 2000/2100, with the same number of PCICMA slots ( as in 2 of them and not just one) and the 2000/2100 should of had some capability's the eMate had.

it would have been sweet to have more ram then what came with a 2100 (like 16mb insted of

[Patrickool93]

I don't know much about the eMates but I doubt Apple would want them to "be there best" because it was for an education market...

[equant]

Due to the popularity of the eMate with reporters and certain business types, Apple was designing a version of the emate for the business world that used the StrongArm. I've heard it called the bMate, but who knows.

My eMate runs too slow even with the upgrade, but the extra ram and storage space is wonderful. "Too slow" is better than "Way too slow"

Nathan

[bluekatt]

http://www.pencomputing.com/frames/newton_obituary.html

the bmate is mentioned there and its an interesting read especially the intel one

[Bunsen]

I wonder if you could transplant a mainboard from a 2100 into an eMate.

[bluekatt]

phsically it wil be possible but what about the rest ? connectors screen screen resolution connectors keyboard connector and why would you want to chop either up ?

even if the emate should have the strongarm 162 mhz

[sharonk868]

http://www.pencomputing.com/frames/newton_obituary.html

the bmate is mentioned there and its an interesting read especially the intel one

Such a very amazing link!
Thanks you for the post.
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[Anonymous Freak]

The Intel bit seems *VERY* unusual. Intel had committed fully to ARM, they only sold off their ARM line (the then-current chips called "XScale") to Marvell in 2006. Not to mention Jobs had fully embraced Intel over other architectures at NeXT years before; and obviously continued the connection with Intel, in secret, for years while back at Apple. (Even Rhapsody was available for Intel through 1998.)

I've always suspected it was a combination of "Jobs hates Scully" combined with cold hard business decision. After all, Newton was apparently a massive money-losing operation, and Apple needed to get back in the black. Jobs dislike for Scully probably made the Newton an even easier target.