Like yet another sequel to Resident Evil, every few years another rumor surfaces that Apple is going to re-enter the hand-held market with a new version of it’s ground-breaking Newton. The latest of these rumors has just appeared on Apple Insider. Naturally, the latest rumor is updated with the latest wish-list items as well. The “Newton II” would be running embedded OSX and sporting a multi-touch interface like the iPhone and iPod touch. The screen would be half again as large as the iPhone (720×480). (Would that be soWVGA — sortofWide VGA?)The Apple Insider article puts the rumored Newton II firmly into the PDA camp, which brings up a host of questions. The PDA market is in a slow, steady decline as smart-phones have completely taken over what used to be the low end and UMPC are taking over what used to be the high end PDA markets. Would Apple really enter a market that shows all the signs of inevitable irrelevancy? It’s true that Apple could probably sell nose-hair trimmers on to people who would buy anything with the Apple logo on it, but they have to sell to more than die-hard Apple fans in order to make it worth their while. If Apple were to enter the hand-held computing market again, I think they’d aim for the market that’s showing signs of growth; the handtop market. Instead of a PDA running embedded OSX, they’d be better off with a true handtop running full-fledged OSX.

However, all this speculation runs into the proverbial immovable object in the person of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. It’s fairly-well circulated that Jobs disdains hand-held computing in general. He was, in part, the reason why the OQO creators left the company to create their handtop. As long as Jobs is at the helm of Apple, I have serious doubts that we’ll see anything like a hand-held MAC, except for the ones we create for ourselves.