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Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel"
CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."
The onion, where it's April 1st year round.
Or does the anchorwoman have a head shaped like an onion?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
Maybe next they'll invent some way to dial a phone with just some sort of rotary wheel...
This reminds me of the Mactini on the The Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc
...is that if I hadn't noticed this was from the Onion when I read a blurb about it on another tech website this morning, I would have believed it. I don't know if that says something about my intelligence (or lack thereof) or if it says something rather disturbing about Apple.
However, on a more serious note, it's just a matter of time before the keyboard and mouse go away. Perhaps it isn't going to happen quite as soon as some people predict, but eventually with gestural control and the ever-improving implication of voice recognition technology, there just won't be a need for direct, physical input. I look forward to the days we our children can quote Back to the Future 2 with full knowledge that the kids in the arcade uttered a prophetic phrase: "You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy!"
The way that my jobs works out, I could do MOST of it with a Wheel! And if I got the MacWheel Shuffle, I could NOT show up, and half the office wouldn't notice ;-)
Probably Apples MS Bob
Seriously? A joke article on slashdot, on a regular news day..
1. 45 minutes to type a simple email.
2. The dude that said "I'll buy anything thats shiny made by Apple!"
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
This is a bit "out there", but to be perfectly honest I'd rather use a laptop running VISTA over that silly Macbook Wheel. It will take me more time to type an e-mail on that thing, then it would to send an e-mail on Vista. This is what happens when Steve gets sick, Apple gets desperate for ideas.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
- Yes, iWheel !
Next year's big Apple announcement will be the elimination of keyboards from the MacBook Air. Just touch sensitive pads so that we can make it even THINNER!!!!
Leave it to Apple to reinvent the wheel...
Personally, I thought it was a bit of a waste of space but its "The Onion" what else could is be?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"I'll buy anything from Apple if it's shiny and new."
Kinda says it all about the target demographic.
Your comment sucks. You suck. I love you.
You're aware this is idle right?
"...sonofabitch! It's a crummy commercial!"
I'm sure this being on the front page of /. has nothing to do with the Macworld Expo keynote that takes place in a matter of hours...
Puts me in mind of this recent spoof, by Peter Serafinowicz: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/348881/d4b348a0/de_mactini.html
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened before. People are too lazy to type or read anyway, so why bother with a keyboard? But using the terminal will be a bit tricky...
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
And this matters why?
AccountKiller
Why spoil the fun?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
This joke is about 5 years late, just like their Dick Cheney/undisclosed location joke I saw a few weeks back.
I remember when the Onion was something special.
Really really terrible submission. Should have been rejected.
For those plaintively responding "But this is idle" ... no it's not. It originated on Idle but it's on the front page, where it emphatically and utterly does not belong.
Oh, you must not have to live with fan boys.. this crap was freakin hilarious
the five blade razor...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
with Macbook Wheel
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The Qwerty Keyboard is actually designed to slow the typist down because it dates back to the old mechanical typewriters that used to jam up if you went too fast. You can now get ergonomic keyboards that are designed to let you type as fast as you like however I've only ever seen them used by people poking them with one finger at a time.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Nah... He probably IS a fanboy, with a serious case of sour grapes.
Its never funny when it is about YOUR object of desire and affection, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
(I know this is a joke.)
The predicted 7 inch iBook will not have a keyboard. Will probably have a virtual keyboard like the iPhone.
So not to crazy to imagine a full sized laptop with a virtual keyboard.
Of course the wheel is silly.
And the next generation version will replace the two-dimension wheel with a little sphere that can be rotated through the use of a finger - it will be called te MacBall.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
...and now I want a wheel in place of my trackpad.
Damn you, Jobs!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For a second, I thought it was April Fools Day. Screw you, Slashdot, for making me think spring was here!
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
The Qwerty Keyboard is actually designed to separate often-used letter-pairs to opposite ends because it dates back to the old mechanical typewriters that used to jam up if you went too fast due to typebars being located beside one another.
There, fixed it for ya.
"Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes." QWERTY
As to why QWERTY is selected for computer keyboards, I can't find the answer. I believe it may partly be due to the popularity of the Selectric typewriter.
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You can now get ergonomic keyboards that are designed to let you type as fast as you like
To PP:
I can ship you one if you like. Only $299.99 excluding S&H. It has 104 keys, allowing you to use your existing investments to the fullest!
Nothing is more than a few hundred clicks away!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
"One button. Endless possibilities." That's totally something Apple would put on a poster.
:q!
How did you Added your own Sentenced, The actor asked for an aardvark. 16uy89; ?
Sent from my MacBook Wheel.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
What makes it so funny is how close to reality every single piece of the spoof actually could be.
"I'll buy anything as long as it is shinny and made buy Apple." said the sheep
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
The reason why voice is such a bad input is not that the recognition programs are so bad but it is in the way the brain works. I use the same part of my brain to speak the sentence as I do to think about what I am going to say. Where as with finger (keyboard) input I can think about what should be recorded and let a different part of the brain control the fingers and let them do it. Like multi tasking the brain.
Check out the suggestions for the predicted typing: "The aardvark admitted it was wrong."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I am a long time Apple enthusiast. I really like their products, but I absolutely hate their software. Whenever I get an Apple product, the first thing I do is dual boot. I'm really looking forward to using the GRUB boot loader with the ease of the scroll wheel.
You have to admit though, that was a high quality spoof. They did a great job making the fake product and making it look like it works. As well as the surrounding expo looking backdrop.
Very funny.
-Andy
This is not a troll post. This is 100% insightful. Mod parent up! Idle and The Onion were funny back in like 2003 maybe.
The difference here is that the same joke was already published in The Onion. If you haven't heard it before, great. But if you really don't see that The Onion digging up stories from 10 years ago and reprinting them with some minor changes is kind of lame, I think that's kind of sad.
AccountKiller
Dense much? The device existed already, but it had a different key layout.
That's just Steve Jobs making sure Jeff Bezos's 1-click patent remains relevant...
I'd feel sadder about my own existance if I had any recollection at all of a joke from the Onion from 10 years ago.
I see. So you're just a troll then?
AccountKiller
I guess Mac users lose interest after 140 characters.
Best quote "everything is just a few hundred clicks away"... very funny.
... is rolling over in his grave.
Have gnu, will travel.
If I wanted to have to wade through The Onion's rubbish disguised as news all the time, I'd be over at Digg. The Onion, while funny, should NEVER be front page news at Slashdot - BECAUSE IT AIN'T NEWS! Seriously, what's next? Lolcats? Come on...
I support the FairTax www.fairtax.org
God damn it!
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
What if there were a wheel with the alphabet laid out around it, so that you would pick the letter from around the wheel, instead of scrolling through letters? I realize this is a joke, but I didn't realize it at first, and thought "what could you do with such a thing?" The keyboard in fact is difficult and slow for some people (especially those not brought up in the computer age,) so could there be a faster way for them to type? I'm not saying a wheel is the answer, but considering other possibilities as well as a keyboard might not be a bad idea.
.
I guess the onion tv bug [placement] is equivalent to a pie symbol?
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Great easter egg Onion....
Due to it's lack of Screen, Hard Drive or Wheel... LMAO!!!
It doesn't matter at all...
which is the point of idle.
That and their stupid 22
character wide comment
input
box.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This is totally retarded! How in the hell are you supposed to type anything with this nightmare? 45 minutes to type an email and only 20 minutes of battery life?! And the most ridiculous thing is when all your files are in alphabetical order like that, so you have to sift through the whole computer to find it. The guy even admitted that you have to make a few hundred clicks to reach the file you want! This must be some sort of ploy to get people to run out and buy all the remaining MacBooks BEFORE this ridiculous change is implemented. I for one am NOT going to get one of those stupid "wheel" MacBooks. If they came up with an Apple n*tbook that used a wheel, maybe that would be kind of weird and cool, but there is no way you can possibly do any serious work with this.
The Onion really shells out to get a laugh, that must have cost at least thousands to put together.
The mockups were remarkable though, a wheel instead of a keyboard really is just ridiculous, but maybe if they put one beside the keyboard it could do something interesting and useful. Apple has always impressed me with the way they used capacitive sensing, they could do quite a bit more.
That just gave me an idea for a keyboard with 'normal' keys to give you the tactile feedback, but as you touch each key it lights up or something, or applications make some use of it... to... uhh... something cool, God damnit!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The previous comment was funny. This one is the troll, you stupid fucks.
Err, no, that's a flame. A Troll is when you try to get people to reply to your post as if it were serious and...
Damn it!
I'm waiting for someone to come up with an input-device modelled on a Rubik's Cube. Man, *that* would prevent computing-whle-drunk. Or, in my case, I would probably never get the letters I wanted, in the right order :-O
You sound like my wife.
Lighten up, Francis.
This will stop some fat finger typing.
Also this will allow people with mittens on to type.
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Where are slashdots editors, and why doesn't the article mention it's a joke and not real news.
The site is News for Nerds: Stuff that matters NOT Rumors/Jokes/Spoof news for Nerds: Stuff that's funny
Please fix this, so Slashdot can maybe spare a little of the credibility remaining from its glorious history...
colossal
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Apples' latest must have gadget
Thi's seem's to have been written by a per'son who ha's no idea where to put hi's apo'strophe's
Hey, it's not too far off from plausible. Check out the Microsoft Big Ass Table(tm)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY
What the fake? It's totally amazing to see that nobody's telling it's a joke ! Slashdot's turning fake or what?
Because most of the early typing contest were won by people writing on qwerty and that the avrenge speed of user on qwerty keyboard is faster the lets say dvorak whem mesuared against real life people with existing skills. Actually wery few tests not performad by Dvorak hiself show the Qwerty keyboard as slower then any other design with the posible exeption of engelbrechts 5 key one.
The myth ithat the keys were araged to just slow speed is not actually the full truth. the real point of qwerty is to avoid that syncronisation of keys and roller should macth in a way so that letters placed next to eachother got entered after another(a problem that apeared with the abcd keyboard). and since back then the order on the roler decided the keyboard layout qwerty was what came out. qwerty did go down well because the qwerty machines did in fact allow faster typing then most it's contemporary competitors.
Reminds me of a fun project I did a couple years ago where I did away with the keyboard and set up double mice to be used together. You could mouse with both mice and by holding down the left middle mouse button you could use simple gestures from the two mice to type and do other things pretty effectively. It worked pretty well but would probably never catch on as it requires learning gestures. The general idea was to make the computer more usable for people who could use mice but not keyboards (due to trouble moving their fingers).
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Don't know if it's real or not, looks real and it's a good idea but one button. Seriously? And also, 45 min for a small email? And a 19 min battery? Seriously, Apple looks like it's going to become just like Microsoft at the fact that no one who is involved in developing the product has ever actually used it. So what if it's ultra-thin. It doesn't matter if you can't use it for more than 30 min. 30 min is the bare minimum in my opinion, and 45 seems like the max. Also, for a laugh (and a hint at whether or not this is fake) go to 2:17 in the video and watch the scrolling newsfeed at the bottom.
One Button. At least ten times as much time wasted to find your letter, word, sentence, file, program, action... Simplifying into less buttons doesn't necessarily make a device more user-friendly or quick to use, rather, it can slow down usage because you could possibly miss the option you were looking for and have to go back for it, or it could plain be faster because it only requires one action: pressing the right key to get the right letter to appear.
This isn't the future of computers, this is a gadget that won't work.
I am not devoid of humor.
The Mac uTurn
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* Sigh *