Apple's first tablet computer was not the iPad but the Newton PDA, developed under former CEO John Sculley and launched in 1993. This handheld personal data assistant allowed users to manage contacts and calendars, take notes, and send faxes. The device weighed about a pound and cost $700.

Newton was intended to be a complete reinvention of personal computing. It had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and an object-oriented graphics kernel. Apple produced two Newton models, the MessagePad and the eMate 300, both were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor. The device ran an OS called Dylan, a small, efficient object-oriented Lisp variant. However, Dylan never created a big following among the developer community as many of them were unaccustomed to Lisp programming. Development of the Newton platform officially ended on February 27, 1998.