The patches are applied in the factory, toward the end of the production line, and they fix critical bugs. If the units don’t have these fixes, the Newt won’t work very well.
The patches live in the battery protected low-power RAM of the Newton, and they’re theoretically immortal as long as power holds out. This is why the battery compartment has a wacky mechanical locking system meant to discourage people from simultaneously removing both the main and the backup batteries.
Am I the only one who thinks this is an overly fragile way of doing it? It's almost like planned obolescence. (Apple isn't the only one doing this; a lot of very expensive test equipment back then also had things like calibration constants stored in battery-backed RAM.)
For the first Newton we didn't have much choice. The unit only had 512K of RAM and no flash; we added a single lane of 128K of RAM (one chip) for extra user data storage when it was clear we were not going to meet our RAM budget for heaps and such (that single lane wasn't usable as vanilla RAM, since only every 4th byte was working RAM).
Later units had flash chips, and the wacky battery lockout stuff went away (to everyone's relief).
We might have been able to add flash to the first Newton, removed all the wacky battery stuff and had cost parity, but the schedule was so tight that there was no time to make any changes. (I have a write-up of fake deadlines and bad scheduling practices in the various companies I've worked for, I should really finish that...).
Not if users can reinstall the updates themselves, then it's simply inconvenient. Just like the Palm Pilot, which lost all data when the battery went flat, or when you had to reset it after a crash.
The lithium batteries were typically rated for 10 years, and modern flash devices are also typically rated for 10 years. Or were you thinking of something else?
It's a heck of a lot easier to replace a lithium battery (even under power) than it is to replace most flash devices.
The patches live in the battery protected low-power RAM of the Newton, and they’re theoretically immortal as long as power holds out. This is why the battery compartment has a wacky mechanical locking system meant to discourage people from simultaneously removing both the main and the backup batteries.
Am I the only one who thinks this is an overly fragile way of doing it? It's almost like planned obolescence. (Apple isn't the only one doing this; a lot of very expensive test equipment back then also had things like calibration constants stored in battery-backed RAM.)