Apple's Next Hit Could Be a Microsoft Surface Pro Clone

theodp writes "Good artists copy, great artists steal," Steve Jobs used to say. Having launched a perfectly-timed attack against Samsung and phablets with its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Leonid Bershidsky suggests that the next big thing from Apple will be a tablet-laptop a la Microsoft's Surface Pro 3. "Before yesterday's Apple [iPad] event," writes Bershidsky, "rumors were strong of an upcoming giant iPad, to be called iPad Pro or iPad Plus. There were even leaked pictures of a device with a 12.9-inch screen, bigger than the Surface Pro's 12-inch one. It didn't come this time, but it will. I've been expecting a touch-screen Apple laptop for a few years now, and keep being wrong.

Comments

Re: It's the OS, Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly recommend you stop making comments on a subject you know nothing about.

Apple has been getting UNIX 03 certification since 10.5 (Leopard). The recent 10.10 (Yosemite) release received certification on September 24, 2014.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm

Re:It's the OS, Stupid

[dgatwood]

It isn't the idea that is bad; it is the implementation. One device with two distinct interfaces is a recipe for epic failure. But a single, unified interface that can take input in more than one way is useful, assuming you can get developers to adopt it. Mind you, it isn't a game-changer, and it isn't something that would be useful for every app, which makes it a hard sell, but that doesn't mean the concept lacks merit.

For example, if I had a full-scale laptop with a touchscreen:

• In audio editing apps, I could just reach up and nudge three or four sliders at once, rather than click each of them one at a time. When I need to mute every channel but one, I could reach up and drag across the buttons. And so on. Because mixing isn't something that most people do frequently, you wouldn't have the "gorilla arm" problem. With that said, if you do find yourself doing a lot of mixing, you could always spin the screen around and use it as a tablet, all without interrupting what you're doing, changing apps, moving the content from one device to another, etc.
• In photo editing apps, you could swing the screen around flat, then treat it as a pressure-sensitive art tablet (using either finger press spread or a stylus to detect pressure). Then you could switch back to the normal mode to work with type layers, adjust layer effects, etc.

An iPad can theoretically do both of those things, but lacks the CPU power, storage capacity, and pointing precision to do aspects of either task well. And although you can buy physical control surfaces and digitizer tablets or use an iPad as a controller in conjunction with your laptop, that's nowhere near as convenient as having it all in a single package, and being able to just reach up and interact by touch occasionally.