Apple Touch-Screen Netbook?

je ne sais quoi writes "The Apple rumor mill is churning today. Reuters and the DOW Jones news wire are reporting that an anonymous source in Taiwan has leaked that Apple has ordered some 10-inch touch-screens from WinTek, the maker of the touch-screen for the iPhone. It looks like an Apple netbook could possibly be in the works for a delivery date in Q3 of this year, in time for back-to-school sales. CNET and Engadget have completely unsubstantiated mock-ups."

Comments

hold the keyboard please, need replacement Newton

[WillAdams]

Or at least do something interesting like having a second display function as a keyboard.

Above all, update InkWell and provide good support for use as an ebook reader which could do .pdf annotations (adding a .pdf preview of all documents to file bundles would be ideal if such annotations could then be synched back into the document when it was opened in the originating app).

William

The real question: Little laptop or big iPhone?

[wisebabo]

So will it be a computer running a "traditional" OS with the whole Windows, Icons, Mouse Pointer interface or will Apple make it a big iPhone like device that hides a lot of that stuff under a (relatively) minimalist user interface?

Part of me wants the WIMP paradigm because of the additional control I have over files and folders but part of me wants to see how far you can take an interface based from the ground up on a purely touch interface (like the iPhone). [I think the advantage of a iPhone interface is that it is even simpler than a WIMP interface, no need to explain about files or directories etc. Great for the rest of... err.. them, like my mom!]

Speaking of user interfaces, did anyone catch the new "Voice over" feature in the new iPod Shuffle? It seems this might be another (relatively) unexplored user interface design where a visual user interface is not available. Will this be incorporated into other Apple products (like multi-touch was transported from the iPhone to the MacBook touchpads?).

I say "relatively" because obviously voice/audio cue interfaces are not new (every voice mail system uses them) but this is the first time I've seen it in a portable device.

Re:Who wants this?

[ColdWetDog]

Hospital use -- how do you disinfect it? Will it survive being wiped down with astringent cleaning solutions several times a day?

We use the general purpose disinfectant wipes on laptops, cell phones, pages, stethoscopes, etc. all the time. A consumer quality computer product would do fine. You don't need to sterilize them. And you try to hire people that don't "drop" things all of the time. Seriously, the world isn't entirely made up of two year olds. I'd love one of these things if it ran OS X. If it were powerful enough to run Parallels or Crossover Office I'd buy a half dozen.

You listening out there Apple? There is a giant world out there that doesn't watch videos or listen to music. They do useful things. With computers.

We've got the money, honey, if you've got the time.