Apple Special Event planned? iMacs with iOS?
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 09:41 AM | Posted by drawbob
LOOPRumors received a tidbit of information today suggesting Apple is planning to develop a hybrid OS into their next iMac. The iMac should be equipped with both Mac OS X and a touch interface for iOS.
A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs announced that Apple is renaming iPhone OS to iOS. The company has been putting a major focus on Multi-Touch™ since the iPhone’s debut, and adding it to their desktop line is inevitable. Such a move will assist developers in building and testing iOS apps, while opening up new possibilities for touch-screen computing.
Our source indicates that Apple will release the new iMacs at a Special Event within the next 60 days.
Reader Comments
NOT GONNA HAPPEN!
The only place touch interfaces are useful on a desktop computer is if you set one up as a kiosk without mouse/keyboard and that market is smaller than the Tablet PC market Microsoft has been chasing for a decade. Other than that it is a useless gimmick.
Don’t be fooled by the Microsoft commercials showing people walk up to a computer and touching the screen to make something happen and declaring, “magnifique!” Apple certainly isn’t!
No one will use a desktop computer like that on a day-to-day basis and for any extended period of time. You can be much more productive on a desktop with a mouse and keyboard. Extending your arms to do anything on the screen is a non-starter. It takes too much effort as people’s arms will get tired quickly.
While I think it would be interesting to be able to run iOS apps on a Mac, the iMac is probably not a very appropriate model. At least with a notebook you can incline the display at a somewhat comfortable angle for touch input. Interacting with a large, vertical space is an ergonomic nightmare for anything but a few quick touches.
Perhaps when the Back-to-School promo ends.
Sooner or later it will happen. But, what if the touch was accessed via a bluetooth “Magic Touchpad” instead of actually touching the screen?
Touch just becomes another input method.
While I would have said the same as “GC” about a touch-screen desktop computer, I’ve noticed something interesting. Some of the little kids (3-4 year olds) who started out playing with an iPod touch or their parent’s iPhone find touch interaction with a desktop screen to be a “natural” thing. They can’t grasp using the mouse yet, but they instinctively try to point at and touch things on the screen to select things in kids’ games and the like.
Perhaps some of our aversion to using a desktop display in this manner comes from growing up doing it differently? Like many things, you can probably get used to reaching out your hands and touching a screen in front of you - though it doesn’t feel comfortable at all initially. (We’re really not used to using our muscles in that manner in daily life. When we reach out to point at things, it’s a brief action in almost every case, like pressing an elevator button to select a floor, or pressing a few digits on an ATM machine you’re using from out the car window.) But little kids growing up with it might have no problem at all with it.
Makes sense.
I can see iOS flying into screen view like Dashboard and using iPhone/iPad apps on that screen then toggling back out to MacOSX desktop.
BG
A “touch interface” does not have to mean a touch-SCREEN interface. It could much more easily mean a large touch PAD built into the keyboard. This is something I’ve felt they should have for a long time as an alternative to a mouse.
However I realize this would also not represent a full implementation of iOS on an iMac or MacBook. Maybe there’s a way to make that work, but I personally see a touch pad as more important on a Mac than iOS.
I agree that a touch screen Mac is inappropriate for usability reasons.
I also wonder about the prospects of a Touch iMac, however, it is also very humorous to watch people immediately dismiss it cuz “people’s arms will get tire quickly” or that it is an “ergonomic nightmare.”
I think Steve Jobs noted when the iPhone was first introduced that everyone has the perfect pointing and clicking device - their hand!
I am sure babies get very tired of pointing at everything that they want and that must be why they really get cranky.
How many person’s loved using a mouse the first time or the second, or third ... I know people who still have hand-eye coordination problems with a mouse. I love using a trackpad on a Mac laptop and always have. How many people can’t use them and immediately opt for a mouse plugged into their laptop. I see it everyday.
Many people would prefer to reach out 18 inches and just touch the screen to do something or to interact with their computer. I am content with the trackpad but I would love to get an iPad -hmmm, seems like there are 3,000,000 people using touch now and by the end of the year at least 10 million. so perhaps the next step is uniformity with their desktop and laptop if not for everything perhaps just for a few things.
you can do things several ways on a computer, can’t you?
In five years, Apple won’t be bundling keyboards or mice with their Macs anymore. All of their computing devices will be multi-touch, running iOS. This makes so much sense that it’s really strange that nobody sees it.
Throughout history, humans had always directly interacted with objects of their work: writing, drawing, cutting, scraping, squeezing, pinching, sawing, pounding, braking… Up until about 40 years ago, the contact was direct. Then, suddenly, somebody invented the concept of display and keyboard: you press something here, and something changes over there, on a seemingly unrelated display. Somehow, humanity learned to use this system, despite its unintuitive construction.
iOS suddenly brings back the ultimate user interface—working directly with the object of work by TOUCHING it. There is absolutely NO WAY they’re going to let this UI remain confined to their mobile devices.
Five years from now, we’ll all be asking ourselves, how did we ever get anything done using such arcane devices as keyboard and, worse yet, mouse???!!!
Might work like this: Remember the old table lamp iMacs with the LCD screen at the end of an articulating arm. Now picture the shape of the mount for the current generation iMac.
Would it be hard to design a high quality mount that would allow the screen (computer) to be pulled toward you and down to a semi-prone, inclined angle. Somewhat like a drafting table.
Virtual keyboard at the bottom, only elevated by the thickness of the device itself. The top being several inches off the desktop for convenient viewing.
To see from a distance-or to interact with bluetooth keyboard and mouse-just push it up and away, back to it’s standard orientation.
Sounds doable to me.
The best of both worlds. And iOS is instant on and has access to the App store (and all of the apps you’ve already bought for your iPod touch, iPhone and iPad...)
This will happen.... You think iMacs are cool now… Just wait!
It’s not that far-fetched, if done right. I agree that a touchscreen iMac is unlikely ( and to the point, painful and tiring for long sessions), but there was a recent patent filed by Apple for a touchscreen-type trackpad, which we could easily see on the next iMac, along with an optional iOS interface (for which that trackpad would be particularly well-suited).
At least, I’d buy it, and I can see some uses for it (trackpad + iOS iMac, not a touchscreen iMac).
Who said “vertical space” ?
For a hundred years layout artists have worked on layout boards, at an angle to the body yes, but not vertical.
Nobody complained about tired arms.
Use your imagination guys, The best way to implement touch on an iMac is with an external pad, which Apple has a patent for.
It will likely be on a swivel allowing the display to tip back when used with multi-touch. I would be all over it.
All iOS development happens on Macs so running an iOS virtual machine isn’t a problem. How best to providing multi-touch input is.
I don’t think people want to use their computers with their arms stretched out in front of their face. Nor do I think people really want to constantly clean finger prints off the screen.
It would work fine if Apple is replacing the keyboard+mouse with a redesigned keyboard with multi-touch surface below or a separate multi-touch surface.
It’s sad but sometimes true. People needs featured computers even the features are not appropriate. But the most funniest thing is, they still have ‘reasons’ to ‘justify’ their lousy decisions.
Apple stuff are the only computer products for me, but I definitely don’t care for the idea of a touch-screen that’s vertical. My old shoulders won’t like floating my arm about and it really seems impractical for some 27” iMac. Most people would have their arms constantly going up and down. That’s a lot of area to cover on a vertical surface. Don’t even dream about typing with a virtual keyboard on a vertical display. Apple is too smart to try to compromise touch on a device that’s not conducive to touch. HP has done it, but I’d like to know how much touch is used on a daily basis by those desktop users when they can easily use the keyboard and mouse.
I personally don’t think Apple would do something as non-ergonomical as that. Unless Apple comes out with some mini-matching touch-display that sits next to the keyboard, it’s just not going to be practical to run touch iOS on an iMac. I’m sure a 27” touch-display would be rather expensive, too.
@ GC and Bregalad
Your comments make a lot of sense.
However, when I heard the rumor of milling the laptop from a single piece of AL, I thought I had great reasons why it was not possible. The unibody.
You know - feet don’t really taste that bad!!
Point - Be careful, Apple has a way of making the unimaginable practical.
I have 6 monitors on my Mac Pro. I also now have an iPad running the touch-button interface for Adobe Photoshop. My 30” in the middle will almost certainly not thrill me to be touch based. But to have others closer to me as an interface panel for what I want to do - much like a control panel or flight control interface - would be stellar. Even moreso if I mounted them on adjustable arms so that their mission and purpose changed as my needs did.
I also think, having watched 6th Sense technology presentations, that a “touch interface” may be just the beginning of a true gestural interface for the Mac. Now we’re talking. And at that, the iOS interface might be a great way to convert the understandably complex interface of OSX into the appliance-style MO that is so popular on the iPad.
Y’all are looking at it wrong. I doubt the screen will be touch enabled, but they are likely to have a pointing device that is. IOW, imagine being able to gesture on the back of a smart mouse. The win is that all of the iPad apps will now run on a desktop computer. My further guess is that this won’t require new computers.