The Newton platform was an early personal digital assistant hardware/software platform developed by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.). Development was started in 1989 and officially ended on February 27, 1998. Some electronic engineering and the manufacture of Apple's Newton devices was done in Japan by the Sharp Corporation. Most Newton devices were based on the ARM 610 RISC processor and all featured handwriting recognition software.

Most Newton devices were developed and marketed by Apple (this includes the whole MessagePad line and the eMate 300), but other companies, notably Sharp, Motorola, and Digital Ocean, also released devices that ran the Newton OS. None was as successful as Apple's devices. The Newton project was a PDA platform.

The PDA category did not exist for most of Newton's genesis, and the "personal digital assistant" term itself was coined relatively late in the development cycle by Apple's then-CEO John Sculley, the driving force behind the project. Newton was intended to be a complete reinvention of personal computing. For most of its design lifecycle Newton had a large-format screen, more internal memory, and an object-oriented graphics kernel.

One of the original motivating use cases for the design was known as the "Architect Scenario", in which Newton's designers imagined a residential architect working quickly with a client to sketch, clean up, and interactively modify a simple two-dimensional home plan[citation needed]. For a portion of the Newton's development cycle (roughly the middle third), the project's intended programming language was Dylan though in fact the language and environment never matured enough for any applications to be successfully written[citation needed]. Dylan was a small, efficient object-oriented Lisp variant that still retains some interest[citation needed].

Although it was efficient (for its day, and considering its substantial run-time dynamism)[citation needed], Dylan never lived up to its developers' performance expectations and was a tough sell for a development team unaccustomed to Lisp programming[citation needed]. When the move was made to a smaller form factor (designed by Jonathan Ive), Dylan was relegated to experimental status in the "Bauhaus Project" and eventually canceled outright. Its replacement, NewtonScript, which had garbage collection, tight integration with the "soup" storage and user-interface toolkit, and was specifically designed to run in small RAM/large ROM environments.

It was mostly developed by Walter Smith from 1992 to 1993.

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