Apple Patent Hints At Future Touchscreen Macs… And Future iOS-Integration With OS X?

Even as Apple has blazed trails in forwarding multitouch as a bonafide interface for mobile devices, they have completely abstained from installing touchscreens on their MacBooks and iMac-lines, despite the fact that numerous competitors have jumped with both feet forward into the multitouch PC arena.

According to a recently discovered patent, though, Apple’s at least thinking about bringing multitouch to their desktop and laptop lines, detailing a touchscreen MacBook boasting iPhone-(and iMac)-like IPS display technology.

Here’s the thing: it’s not really hard to slap a touchscreen on a MacBook or iMac. The ModBook guys, for example, have been doing it for years. It isn’t a hardware challenge, it’s a software challenge: just look at the multitouch capable laptops and desktops running Windows 7 and you’ll see that, right now, multitouch displays are just an extraneous gimmick. There’s no reason to actually touch your display, outside of the novelty of doing so, because the operating systems and applications just aren’t built for it.

Apple’s not about to get gimmicky with their computers. As the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad prove, Apple’s serious about multitouch, but OS X is inherently mouse-driven, and so are their current experimentations with OS X multitouch. Apple’s smart enough to know that you can’t just slap a multitouch display on an operating system and have it be satisfying; it takes a major revision of the software driving a computer to make it a tangible user experience.

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Here’s my prediction: the next version of OS X is going to be written largely around multitouch support to accommodate future touchscreen-equipped MacBooks and iMacs. I also expect this version of OS X to try to marry iOS with the operating system, perhaps Dashboard-widget style. There’s just too much money in iOS apps not to roll them out across all of their devices, and apps will give OS X a real reason to embrace multitouch non-frivolously.

Until the next version of OS X hits, though, we’re just not likely to see a touchscreen Mac. Snow Leopard isn’t ready for it yet.

4 comments »

About the author

John 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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Fearless Fred
I think there’s also a question of ergonomics on a laptop/desktop that isn’t a problem when using an iPad or iPhone/iPod. Try spending more than a minute or two moving your hands around raised at shoulder height, as if you’re touching the screen on your iMac. Pretty quickly you’ll notice muscle strain in your shoulders. I’ve worked in the Touch industry now for 14 years, and ergonomics and useage patterns for the large format (>10″) touchscreens are very different from the handheld market…
SolarSaves
This patent technology will be used in the unannounced ultra-light Hybrid iPadMacBookAir. To create content with a physical keyboard it is setup like a regular MacBookAir. Then you can slide the screen down over the keyboard to use it with the touchscreen like an iPad to consume content and play iOS games.
You heard it here first…
http://blog.tice.de/?sprache=englisch Tice
… and an AppStore for regular Mac applications? That would be my nightmare.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_X3NAXBSRIUBSF7O7DKIPH53GCQ J.D.
Good article! In my opinion, it’s a question of when this computer interface transition will come, not if. And also, one would assume that hardware such as special solid state drives would have to be integrated with OSX as standard if we want to be shaking our computer to undo the last thing we typed instead of erasing the hard drive itself!