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MacBooks to Feature iPhone's Multi-Touch?
Gadgets Lover writes "According to CrunchGear's 'trusted source' that the upcoming MacBooks which are expected to be released around October will support the iPhone's multi-touch technology built into their touchpads.
The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook's files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that's nothing new. I'm talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen)
On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."
The next MacBooks will also be powered by sunshine, float in mid-air, and cure cancer! Thank you Steve Jobs!
Prediction: Within a year, all Apple products with displays will have multi-touch. Laptops, external monitors, iPods, the whole shebang. Sure, most people won't use it all in the beginning. The UIs we have today aren't set up for it, neither are our office spaces. But Apple will bet the farm and just make is a Standard Feature on the bet that while the demand doesn't exist NOW, it'll appear out of whole cloth once it's so ubiquitous.
They did it w/ USB. They did it with mice.
"Blah blah greasy fingerprints on monitors" Yeah, anyone with half a brain can think of 10 reasons why this is dumb. But it's the crazy guy in the back of the auditorium who's going to figure out how to get rich off of it, and in doing so will make the standard transition from 'crazy wacked out goofball' to 'eccentric visionary'.
... the Mactablet? I need a decent tablet, and Apple seems to be lining itself up for the ideal position to release one in. Decent touchpads, thin computers... logical, no?
Could not open
... I multi-touch a MacBook in a Apple Store I get dirty looks from the employees.
I have the last revision of the MacBook Pros that just came out. It's a great little laptop. It wouldn't surprise me too much if they did have multi-touch trackpads in the new Macs. It wouldn't surprise me if it was in mine and could be added with a software update. After all, they've supposed detecting when there are two fingers for a while, how much harder can it be to detect the stretching and squeezing motions? Apple has silently updated things before. For example, the cameras in the latest MacBook Pros are 1.3MP instead of 0.3MP. It's not exposed in software, but it's there.
The 1/2 the thickness thing? Never. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see that. That would be amazing. But I just don't think it's really possible with the MacBooks. Now if you got rid of the hard drive and optical driver, you'd have a better shot... but I'd still peg this as very unlikely.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I for one look forward to giving two fingers to the new MacBooks!
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Given that the current touchpads already have limited capabilities to sense the placement of multiple fingertips, Apple could probably implement some of the technology in Leopard and only release it in the final build. It would certainly be a great way to get a lot of free press.
She just plain doesn't want to switch, and there's no rational basis for her decision. As you've pointed out, at this point in time she is looking more for convenient rationalizations for not switching, "leaning curve" being one of the great excuses.
This is a common thing among people. They'd rather cling to outmoded ideas or irrational opinions to which they're already married because switching would be admitting they're "wrong," a terrifying prospect in modern day society, as the smallest admission of imperfection is blood in the water for the egotistical social sharks that populate our wars.
Basically, don't hold out much hope for her ever switching, as now that ego is involved she's incredibly unlikely to make any concessions.
I have a late 2006 Macbook with the Core Due (should have waited for the Core 2, oh well) and a Core 2 Duo iMac. Love them both. The Macbook has a scroll feature I just can't live without. Use one finger on the mouse pad and it moves the cursor as normal. Use TWO fingers and you can scroll any windows content vertically/horizontally. Every time I have to use a regular old laptop, I really miss this nice feature. These new features should be pretty nice additions to the Macbook
With that said, they only thing that bugs me about the Macbook I have is how hot the bottom gets. I had to buy a laptop pad which is a pain to have to remember to bring with me. In constrast, my Core 2 iMac is always cool and very silent. Are the newer models of Macbooks cooler so you can comfortably keep them on your lap?
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
so the hotter they get, the more power they generate. and the more power they generate, the longer they run. and the hotter they get, the more power they generate... but what determines when a section will automatically be jettisoned? if the LCD gets a crack in it, will it instantly be disconnected, so the rest isn't compromised?
What is...?
The Synaptics touchpads used on practically all notebook computers already support multi-touch features. These just have to be appropriately configured with software.
For example, using the Xorg drivers and GTK configuration applet gsynaptics, you can set up a touchpad to do different actions based on double-tapping, triple-tapping, scrolling via linear and circular dragging, etc.
So if Apple figures out how to make an intuitive user interface out of touchpad motions, that's pretty cool, and other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly!
My bicyles
Apple had a "Town hall" meeting with all employees on Thursday to kick off this iPhone thing. Finally, we got at least some confirmation that Apple is doing stuff with the macs again as Steve said, "The first leg is the Mac business, which Steve addressed by saying that they have the "best Macs" in the new product pipeline ever right now, and that the stuff coming out in the next year is "off the charts."
So if this is true(hard to believe the half size thing, but..) we should be seeing them soon I would wager. Though I doubt the macbooks would get a feature that their pro bretheren do not have first...
Monstar L
gestures that can be done on the iPhone's screen) On June 20th, CrunchGear reported, "The upcoming MacBooks will be about half the thickness of current models (which would be quite the feat) and they'll be made from new plastics/materials"."
Hopefully they'll be more serviceable, too. Personal best for disassembling a G4 iBook to get to the hard drive? 45 minutes, and that was after doing it three times. The screw count is staggering; one heat shield had TWELVE screws. Most of the screws lack threadlocker (or it isn't strong enough) and the screws are so loose they are almost ready to fall out after 3 years of daily use.
With IBM/Lenovo and Dell laptops (and probably many others), the drive can be accessed with one or two screws and they slide out of the chassis, even on their smallest+thinnest models. Why can't Apple do the same, especially given how Apple continues to supply mostly Toshiba drives, which have the highest failure rates of laptop drives? Even setting aside drive-manufacturer failure rates, drives are the most failure-prone components in any computer (well, save video cables and screen hinges, again in Powerbooks and iBooks.) I've never seen an Airport card or memory fail, yet they're the easiest to get to on almost any Apple laptop.
Please help metamoderate.
I wonder if Apple will move the CPU and associated bridge to the top half of the laptop, so heat vents up and out the top, a la the iMac. That might drop the size by dropping a relatively big fan wheel, but I don't think there can be much more of a drop in thickness while still including an optical drive and all the necessary ports to the outside world.
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
You're the only one I've ever heard of that actually likes those things. If you don't press them hard enough the mouse pointer hardly moves. If you press it too hard it goes flying around the screen. They're a nightmare to use.
Someone mentioned that people's desks aren't set up right at the moment, and they are right. 95% of situations with current computers aren't set up in a way that a touchscreen would be ergonomically sound. Reaching out in front of you, reaching across you, etc... I think that making the trackpad to be more useful is probably for the best, but screen would be only for occasional use i think.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I loved what multi-touch does for iPhone multi-media management. But the most difficult thing on the iPhone is typing text. This is less of an issue when the display reaches six inches or so.
The Mac version of the BSoD is the Transparent Multilingual Screen of Doom. Another word for it might be familiar to Linux/*BSD/Solaris/xNIX users: Kernel Panic.
I have only had ONE on any Mac running Mac OS X. That was because I had the buggy version of the WiFi driver (fixed now) and I hit a WiFi access point that was malfunctioning.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Several years back, Apple bought up a company that made multitouch keyboards and pads and employed the two professors who made it. It's not just software, the hardware is fundamentally different than single touch.
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The 17" could get 2.5mm thinner. They could use the 9.5mm optical drive from the 15" models. Since the 17" has enough room for the optical drive to fit completely under the right palm rest, it doesn't have to fit under the keyboard like it does on the 15".
But the 17" is already too flexible... to make a 21mm thick 17" model work you'd almost have to have new case materials.
I think you're right, though, that the big gains will come from flat solid state HDs. I don't know how they'll deal with the optical drive issue in the models (all but the rumored MBP subnotebook) that need an optical drive.
In any case, it's time for new MBP form factors. The Al enclosure has to be one of the all-time best notebook designs -- it's still more functional and useful than most others -- but, for crying out loud, the 17" version was introduced in early 2003, and hasn't appreciably changed since!
In response to this story, I had a look at the synaptics driver in Linux.
According to my dmesg output, the touchpad on my HP does indeed have the flag set for "SYN_CAP_MULTIFINGER", which I assume means it can report the positions of multiple touches.
Running "synclient -m 10" however reports a constant "0000000" under the "multi" field.
Anyone know how to properly access the multitouch data provided by the Linux synaptics driver?
Slashdot is not for technology enthusiasts. It's for people who dream of the days when computers were the size of closets, and who want a phone that "just makes calls".
What about shares in companies that make materials to teach reading comprehension? Sell, right?
How about a Mac Mini revision where it's whole top side is a multi-touch tablet? That would be very cool. Ergonomically, it would have to be no more than 1.5cm thick so there'd be no room for an optical drive, hard disk, CPU, etc - yet another opportunity for Apple to display their typical elegant minimalism!
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
So, because some people can't use a technology, nobody should be able to?
Lots of people can't eat corn, maybe we should ban everything with corn in it too? And nuts. With the war, how many people are missing an arm? Best not make cars with stick-shifts...
I'm not saying ignore people with disabilities (many of my friends have serious disabilities), but you can't make the world one-size fits all. And, as much as blind people might not enjoy the new iPhone, deaf people may enjoy being able to send email, pictures, and videos from a pocket-sized device.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
USB was going nowhere until the iMac came out with only a USB connection for mouse/keyboard/floppy. I don't even remember any x86 motherboards where the USB wasn't just some random jumpers and an optional cable that had the regular connectors on an expanstion slot cover (so you had to give-up a PCI/AGP/ISA expansion slot to use the 'on-board' USB. Apple made USB and the mouse prominent technologies for consumer personal computers, and now they appear to be trying to repeat that for multi-touch, which was invented by other people, just like USB and mice.