Rumor: Touchscreen iMac Merging iOS and OS X To Debut Within “Sixty Days”

John Brownlee ()

Rumor: Touchscreen iMac Merging iOS and OS X To Debut Within “Sixty Days”

According to LOOPRumors, Apple intend to host a special event in the next sixty days to reveal a refreshed, touchscreen iMac, and will come preinstalled with both OS X and iOS. A hybdrid iMac/iDevice, as it were.

Needless to say, it’s a lie, and you have to be pretty gullible to believe it. While it looks likely that Apple will try to merge OS X and iOS over time, it’s not going to happen in the next “sixty days.”

OS X 10.7 is at least a year away, and the next Apple event is in two months, and is Apple’s annual iPod event. There’s no time for them to announce anything, and hacking Snow Leopard to run iOS apps isn’t a simple task within the scope of an iterative point update.

So this rumor’s dumb, and should be disregarded. That said, it’s also probably an accurate look at the future of Mac desktops sometime in the next five years. An iOS emulator running on a touchscreen Mac with a Dashboard-like presentation is probably the minimum we can one day expect for Apple to deliver.

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iMac, News, Rumors |

  • Daniel

    So unlikely. iOS as a desktop platform is the worst OS ever.

  • http://blog.fimsch.net/ Konrad

    I am sure that Apple is also aware of the Godzila Arm phenomenon that killed every and all touchscreen products so far. People can only hold up their arm so long to interact with a monitor physically.

    So: Touchscreen on an iMac as a primary interface? Not bloody likely.

  • David

    Mac OS is NOW touch enabled. It was since they changed the virtual keyboard to fit finger’s size.
    I think it’s true (it’s something that I was expecting to happen someday)

  • Jesper

    I don’t believe in touchscreen based desktops. Atleast not with a vertical screen. That just won’t happen.

    A friend of mine bought the HP touchsmart not long ago. It was fun the first half an hour.

  • firesign3000

    I have two words for this rumor: horse puckey.

  • http://www.newdeep.net ehren

    The presser where the first aluminum iMacs were announced occurred in August, about a month and a half before the iPod event happened.

    Not saying that this will happen this year, or that the iOSMac is even remotely viable, but they have done such things before.

  • Bob Forsberg

    Touchscreen desktops….why? Dell and others have tried this already. Once the novelty wears off (3 days) they show up on craigslist.

  • Mark Kawakami

    Wait a second, this makes all sorts of sense. Apps for the iPad or iPhone should be relatively easy to run on desktop hardware, the only problems are that the display is a different size, shape and resolution, the interfaces have been designed for handheld rather than stationary use, the mouse has no place within iOS, OS X and iOS are related but vastly different operating systems and the Intel x86 architecture is entirely different from the A4 chip, which would require re-compiling only a quarter-million of the existing apps if they’re to run natively.

    Hmm… now that I list it out, it seems like maybe there are a few wildly insurmountable problems to expect this in the next 60 days. Maybe this isn’t gonna happen after all.

  • Kate

    Planet Express FTW! I put a decal of it on my iPad, it’s awesome.

  • jj

    Not gonna happen. I call BS on that.

  • John Appleseed

    Apple is going to unveil Mac OS X 10.7 late this summer. Totally renewed interface (like Quicktime X’s). Faster Finder. Touch-enabled Macs.

    John Appleseed

  • robb

    Sorry guys you are all wrong. I’ve been a stock holder for 10 years running. Apple is 5+ years out beyond your thoughts. itunes, pods, pads, Macs are all and always interconnected they are test bed for each other. Example, the track pad was the tool to test gesturing, and the screen… on the pod and pad are the test bed for the mac visa versa. Touch macs are comming and won’t necessarily follow a path that you are thinking. You have to think like apple and you will get it. Many are comparing Apple to other computer makers? Please! We are in a league of our own and innovate beyond the mortals you compare us too.