CrunchGear

I think the same. And I also think that Apple is thinking at least in this direction and I’m convinced that there will be NO multi-touch on notebooks. For the iPhone it may be accurate in some situations because of the interface which is different from OS X e.g. but touchpads are enough and scrolling gesture maybe the end of the line.
Sometimes patents are just there to save own ideas, Apple still could make money if its getting adopted.
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BTW : Any updates on the MacBook-updates in October?

Uh… where is 5?

Wow … I can’t even begin to understand your reasoning here.

I fail to see how this is the same as firewire. Firewire had competition that was widely adopted by Apple’s competitors. And USB caught up. Firewire is still better but USB is ‘good enough’. What is the competitor to “multi-touch”? Oh there isn’t one because multi-touch is not a product or a standard. Its a way of interacting with a tool.

And voice recognition is not the future. Sorry dude - as long as we are all sitting in cubes - voice recognition will not take a prominent role.

Multi-touch has a great future and the iPhone is only the first step in showing its capabilities. And its an awesome first step. I am looking forward to see how vendors will apply it. Most of your reasons are shortsighted and naive.

I would like to see the opinions of Michael Arrington on this very topic, I’m sure he would not agree with your key theory here, like I actually don’t.

Voice recognition is an old technology, has been around for years and if it never succeeded there must be a reason in my opinion. It wasn’t only the imperfection of the speech recognition engines, but the simple fact that, most of the times, is far quicker to point and click somewhere than to extensively explain to your computer what you intend to do with it.

I’m sure that speech recognition will gain more importance in the future, for various reasons, but it will never completely replace other forms of Human Computer Interaction, I’m not saying that the multi-touch will be widespread in 20 years, maybe we can’t still imagine what will come out by that time.

And please take my advice, don’t understimate multi-touch technology, it is in its early stages and has still a long way to go to reach beyond-eyecandy efficience and perfection.

greetings,

Michele

Will prolly end up being a niche premium product feature anyway. MOST users will never get used to the idea.

I always thought that “frogpad” thing which had about 9 or so buttons on it but got you to type things by holding combinations of buttons was actually kind fun to use…

I also think voice recognition sucks.
It’s so not an appropriate medium in so many situations. Do I really want to be dictating what I want to go to text to a train?… Nope.
Likewise in a lecture i’d love to make my own notes and not have to copy verbatim what the lecturer wants to talk about.
Thats not even taking into account the accuracy issues - my subjective experience has never been great. Though admittedly I do know a person who wrote a book entirely with a speech recognition program.

I do think multitouch is overhyped though.
Has some cool possibilities for music though (xy midi controllers, continuum’s and stuff like that) - some company is already messing around with this, but can take infinite numbers of touch inputs etc…
However, I’d love for apple to surprise me and make something of it thats not gimmicky and not niche.

And finally fingerprints suck. When people poke my laptop screen I sometimes feel like I should poke them in the eye.

It might work for some things. But I too hate fingerprints on screens.

I don’t like talking to my computer, most people are just to lazy for that.

Good points on the multi-touch. However, I think you missed the point with firewire. At the time that Apple first started using firewire, there was no universal interface like it that would allow input of real time video from the exploding digital video camera market. With the i-apps being so much a part of Apple’s sales advantage in the desktop market it was an integral part of the digital hub. It also allowed booting, and video editing from an external drive, another Apple exclusive. In fact, it pushed the rest of the industry to USB 2 (still not quite as good). In that respect it was a huge success. Without it, home desktop video editing and production would not be as easy and popular as it is today.

I don’t think MultiTouch or Voice is the future either. However I do think that what microsoft is doing with Windows G (prototyped 9+ years ago) is the future.

Think in terms of Minority report ;)