Multi-Touch On MacBooks In October
- June 29th, 2007
- Read 14513 times
- 69 Comments
Back on June 20, I reported that there’d be new, slimmer MacBooks coming in October that along with being made from new materials would also feature some “speeds and feeds” updates to the internal components. Today, another “trusted source” told us this was correct and added that the iPhone’s multi-touch technology is theoretically supposed to roll out with all the new laptops, including those coming out in October. 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.)
There’s no reason to believe that Apple isn’t capable of adding this functionality and it would definitely be a sweet addition. Just having it for flipping though your iTunes Library and for zooming in on photos or docs or sites would be great. Here’s hoping this comes true.
I wonder if apple will also turn the touch pad into a small LED screen with icons that change based on the app (already product s out there with these features).
Or better totally changing the keyboard with a touch sensitive screen…
maybe it would be too much… maybe not ;)
Why on God’s green earth would they just not make it a tablet with the touch sensitive area being the screen as it is on the iphone. There is only one word for inventing a touch sensitive screen and then using a touchpad as a proxy for the screen and my mother taught me better than to use it. But you know what it is.
Merchant, I totally agree. I was more than a little disappointed that it was the touchpad. But hey, maybe there is hope then for a full-on tablet if people take to using the iPhone and touchpad multi-touch interface.
Ooohhh…Multi-touch on our laptops, now we can get grimey grease all over our displays on our laptops - not just our phones. :-P
Umm you can already navigate files etc using the trackpad. Its called two finger scrolling and its been around for ages. If you mean the pinch to make pictures bigger well thats pretty stupid on something as small as a trackpad.
I am much more interested in the slimming part; if that were true I might just wait to buy any laptop this summer before school at all. Damn.
The new mac books will be slimmer? I think that’s a pretty safe bet to make.
However I’d bet the farm that Apple does not integrate multitouch into their touch pad. Using multitouch in such a small area would be awkward and Apple’s designers are smart enough to come up with a better solution.
How cool would it be if the laptop could detect gesturing above the keyboard (so your palms never need to move)?
Probably guna have a bigger area for the touch pads, as the current macbooks have a fair bit of room bellow the keyboard.
Ha - huh - what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
“Why on God’s green earth would they just not make it a tablet with the touch sensitive area being the screen as it is on the iphone.”
Because the former is much harder and more expensive than the latter? I have no doubt whatsoever that a future MacBook will have a multi-touch screen, but three months after Apple debuted its very first device with a multi-touch screen is perhaps a bit soon to expect such a thing to hit the market, don’t you think?
It was already being done by Fingerworks, way before iPhone. Apple bought Fingerworks, made them stop producing their products and patented the technology. I’m pissed off at Apple because I was just about to buy a Touchstream keyboard before they killed Fingerworks. Somebody made Apple notebooks better than they were, and Apple had to destroy that for their own benefit. Read comment 6 here:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.3dnews.ru/documents/9105/mac_kbd.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/multi-touch-coming-to-a-mac-near-you/&start=3&h=270&w=400&sz=25&tbnid=l6XyGg172lGxlM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=124&hl=en&um=1&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfingerworks%2Bmacbook%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff
i think the idea of having multi touch built across the keyboard is an amazing one, one i have never even dreamt of. just using your mind’s eye to imagine an interface that powerful–versatile–that has apple written all over it.
From anonymous: “How cool would it be if the laptop could detect gesturing above the keyboard (so your palms never need to move)?
That would be awesome. Imagine resizing photos that way.
I wonder if thats why Microsoft announced that bulky new UI last month - ahead of Apples multi-touch system. Maybe so they could claim ‘prior art’ on some features and get their patent hounds involved…
Well, MacBooks, or MacBook pros? Are both getting the same?
FBmore
I agree wit wat u said…dat would be veryyyy nice if it waz a touch screen keyboard….i really like that idea..but i think people will get annoyed if they were to just simply touch the touch screen keyboard by accident….i dont no….i like the idea but i think some people wont like it..touch scren cant replae buttons permeantly enless its smart were it would know if u want to type or not to type….but….w/e now i really want a mac boook if this happens lol
Touch systems will not replace some things. They certainly are ok for generalized movements. But their is no feedback like their is when you type. Pretty much why they have to add some sort of click sound. People already saying iPhone pad very hard to dial nimbers, many cannot do it with thumb or single handed.
Texting the same problem. Just because it looks cool does not mean it is easier.
Tablets have not caught on as well as some thought. Some of the software is buggy and poor handwriting is not picked up right by the software.
New slimmer macbooks? They’ll be faster as well!?
Seriously, it’s obvious that this will happen at some point. As far as rumours go, this one has got no juice.
“theoretically supposed to roll out with all the new laptops”
They could also theoretically come with rocket packs.
I’ll treat this one like the original iPhone rumours. I’ll believe it when Apple make a public announcement.
How would the computer differentiate between multi-touch commands and basic trackpad functions? Using the iPhone briefly, it seems like double tapping to zoom seems faster. The pinch is certainly cooler, but tapping is faster.
I think this may be more of a software upgrade to the existing touchpad firmware. They did the same last year that enabled my MacBook Pro to do Two Finger “Right clicking” and of course Two Finger Scrolling. So the current touchpad can detect different gestures, but the software does not know what to do with it.
The update will just be the software and integrating it with applications.
PS. When I put two fingers on my touchpad and move them apart or pinch them together, I get no response. There is definitely feedback going to the sensors, but the firmware just does not know how to interpret them.
PPS. I know that my touchpad detects Three Finger gestures, because it does NOT do anything when I put three fingers and move them around.
This sounds cool, it can either be a mayor success or a total failure, but to innovate you need to take big risk.
OK another trusted source… common, this is all to get attention.
How about the next iMac will have touch screens and multitouch technology?
http://www.mostofmymac.com
maybe the keyboard wont even be there anymore? Two screens, more battery, no keyboard.
From a developer’s standpoint, this is very unlikely. There has been no mention in Leopard of any “multi-touch” API for developers to use. Apple has called Leopard “feature complete” as of WWDC, and the conference is the best place to introduce brand new API that would be necessary to handle this.
thats not fair, i just bought mine…
This doesn’t really sound that exciting. You can already scroll horizontally and vertically with the Macbook. The ability to use “multi touch” on a track pad doesn’t really appeal to me. So now I can move around in cover flow another way? That sounds cool, but no reason to upgrade.
Maybe I’m wrong and it will be awesome. If that’s the case, I hope my Macbook can do it too with a software upgrade.
Who’s to say this isn’t one of the remaining ’secret’ features of Leopard? Surely the sort of thing that is described would be done with a software update to the mouse drivers (possibly a firmware update?). Apple has released firmware updates for the trackpads before, and if I’m not mistaken recently (as in: the past year or two?) moved from a third party trackpad supplier to an internally-developed chipset for the laptop trackpads.
The only reason they’d do that is if they had a reason to do it better (otherwise cheaper to outsource, no?). And when it comes to trackpads, in this case better might simply be “different”. Multi-touch or gestures via the trackpad would be a logical assumption.
Although of course for the trackpad to be sending multi-point information, there’s gotta be an interface to support it. My money is on the fact that we haven’t seen all that Leopard still has to offer.
Hey , yeah and imagine if they had multi sense computers so it could do what you were thinking, or heres an idea, stop fassying around with unnecessary gimmick addons and try fixing some of the annoying problems that are still plagueing their current system and not just sell their souls to the god of fashion.
Why would this be a hardware release? They already accept multi-input on the trackpad (scrolling) so wouldn’t this just be a software issue that could be released with the upcoming OS upgrade? I don’t see great use for it, but it would make photo and music searching a bit more intuitive and quick since you wouldn’t need to move the mouse pointer around so much on screen.
TabletPCs are now several generations old, and Microsoft has even released Surface - a multitouch multiperson interface (though in the form of a rather expensive coffee table - but interesting nonetheless).
The MS application OneNote has transformed the way I work - no more tons of papers / binders full of notes - can grab images (which it does an OCR and becomes searchable), write handwritten notes (which are searchable), record audio/video that are linked in time with what I’m writing, share/sync the document with others, etc, etc…
However, I was actually hoping that Apple would finally come out with a tablet PC of their own. Multitouch would be good if also available with a Wacom pen interface (i.e. finger painting doesn’t replace a nice brush).
I gave up waiting, despite all the rumours and patents and stuff — and that was last summer! And my TabletPC cost $1300 and works really well despite having a nasty OS.
I’m rather surprised and disappointed - as I would have finally gotten a Mac after all these years (last Apple machine I purchased was a IIe). And many universities are now requiring tabletPCs for all their students - because teachers can write notes on the tablet instead of a blackboard and it’s shared with everyone, so students can concentrate on annotating their questions / comments on top instead of just copying what the teacher is writing…
Hopefully Apple will finally throw on a digitizer to their laptops, and create an application equal to or better than OneNote.
Since going to the TabletPC, I would never go back to a normal machine, as it has changed the way I work.
So no Mac for me now — and it will be frustrating if the progress of multitouch technology is stunted due to Apple restricting it’s use to the iPhone.
but we’ll see what the future has in store.
Replacing the trackpad with touch-screen technology is a spectacularly bad idea from an ergonomic perspective. Neck-and-shoulder strain city, here we come!
The problem with finger-based multi-touch enviroment is that it needs to be redesigned - as we can see in iPhone. OsX and Windows are designed to use mostly with mouse and using them directy with fingers would be very clumsy. So the whole user interface needs to be redesigned to finger use - and that is what we’re not going to see very soon from companies like Apple or Microsoft. Maybe there will be some gestures made with trackpad according to coverflow or something, but multi-touch screens? I doubt that - in other hand I really hope they’re coming =)
I am sitting here looking a a box that just arrived in from China with my brand new 15 inch MBP in it. To open or not to open? That is the question.
Interesting information, I am considering to buy a macbook after my holiday but now I am having doubts whether to wait or not. I could wait and then buy a new version with the pinch thingy, but I don’t know if that is word the wait since I need the laptop for my study. On the other hand I could wait and then buy a macbook as it is now but probably for a lower price…
Got me thinking!
People looking for mac tablets, check out http://axiotron.com.
They have a Modbook that is a macbook tablet.
Just wanted to share in this interesting topic….
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