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 dat

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...).