In the early 1990s the company squandered enormous resources and billions of dollars on a series of failed consumer products like the Newton PDA. Its efforts to do everything itself, building capabilities as varied as cutting-edge hardware development and volume manufacturing, led to huge losses and massive layoffs.

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Apple has a hit going with iPod's current design and format--to try to morph it into an upscale PDA could be a Newton-sized mistake.

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