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MacBooks to Feature iPhone's Multi-Touch?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-touch-me-there dept.

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"."

19 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, and... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The next MacBooks will also be powered by sunshine, float in mid-air, and cure cancer! Thank you Steve Jobs!

    1. Re:Yeah, and... by sokoban · · Score: 5, Funny

      I've got a finger gesture for you Mac fan bois. Ctrl-Alt-Delete?
      --
      09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
  2. Not just the touchpad by Chairboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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'.

    1. Re:Not just the touchpad by StarfishOne · · Score: 4, Funny

      "Hammer, problem, nail, etc."


      STOP! Hammer time!


      You can't touch this :P

  3. One step towards... by tehmorph · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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 .sig for reading- sanity error
  4. Every time ... by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... I multi-touch a MacBook in a Apple Store I get dirty looks from the employees.

  5. My Thoughts by MBCook · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  6. British humour by niceone · · Score: 5, Funny

    I for one look forward to giving two fingers to the new MacBooks!

    --
    ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
  7. Re:Stop it. Stop it. Just stop it. by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Funny

    Enough. Just let it go. Please. For your own good. I'll trade you some karma if you just let it go. I already have enough Karma, but I'd trade you for an iPhone. Oh, wait, that kind of defeats the purpose. [Emily Litella] Never mind. [/Emily Litella]
  8. What about the heat? by JimDaGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:What about the heat? by MsGeek · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you have the first version of the MacBook, you can't really do much other than software hacks and keeping your MacBook on a cooler pad to keep it cool. The Core 2 Duo was a major improvement heat-wise...it actually *is* a laptop rather than a lap cooker.

      The MacBook Pro also has LED backlighting rather than fluorescent backlighting. This is very significant in that the backlight becomes pretty much immortal...it will last as long as the computer does. With fluorescents, eventually you have to replace the fluorescent tube, which is a pain. I'm sure that eventually the MacBook will get it, but not just yet.

      --
      Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
  9. I think this is just a software change! by MoxFulder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:I think this is just a software change! by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Informative
      Unless I'm being dense, none of the things you mention require multi-touch. They're just single-touch gesture detection routines. Looking at the author's website reveals that the only multi-touch support is two-finger or three-finger taps, and that this is not supported on all models.

      It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y)

      The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
      • pressing one finger onto the touchpad
      • *simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
      That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...

      Simon.
      --
      Physicists get Hadrons!
    2. Re:I think this is just a software change! by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Informative

      other operating systems should be able to adopt similar features quickly! Doubtful. This is more than a case of "just software"; it's a sophisticated collaboration of hardware plus software. Apple bought a company called Fingerworks, founded by Wayne Westerman and his Ph.D. advisor based on his doctoral research[1]. They sold mouse-pad sized touchpad devices with gesture recognition as well as zero-force keyboards with integrated mousing/gesturing. These multi-touch devices effectively do low-resolution EMF imaging of the hand near the surface. No "mis-touches", the keyboard didn't generate false hits from "resting" on the surface, etc.

      Fingerworks vanished off the face of the internet a couple of years back. Apple quietly bought the company, its patents, and and the key researchers and engineers. Since then, they've been puting the Apple shine on their technology since then. Much to the likely delight of the "Fingerfans" the iPhone is the first product to ship with this technology since Fingerworks' was bought.

      It *might* be possible to hack something together with a synaptics pad, but the hardware itself is likely deficient to do full-on multitouch. See section 1.3 of Westerman's thesis, linked below, esp. the pre-Fingerworks prototype hardware "producing a 50 frames per second (fps) stream of proximity images." I note that the Fingerworks devices connected via USB, but had on-device processing and firmware notably richer than what's in a simple touchpad. That alone may spell death to attempts at pure host-side multitouch with a "dumb" touchpad.

      [1] PDF: Hand Tracking, Finger Identification, and Chordic Manipulation on a Multi-Touch Surface.
  10. According to the town hall notes by antifoidulus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  11. Re:ease of service, anyone? by wolrahnaes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have you worked on a Macbook yet? The hard drive and RAM are trivial to get to. Pop the battery, unscrew one panel (three screws), and either flip a lever or pull on a strap.

    --
    I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
  12. Multi-touch was hard to get right. by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    http://www.fingerworks.com/

    Look under news:
    http://fingerfans.dreamhosters.com/forum/viewtopic .php?t=678

  13. Re:Stop it. Stop it. Just stop it. by Goaway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

  14. Multi-touch Mac Mini by Snart+Barfunz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 ---