Would Apple Make a Dual Touch Screen Netbook?

Lonnie Lazar ()

3346545891_57171a3edb_o.jpg
Image © Hugo Lala. Used with permission.

Hugo Lala has a vision for Apple’s much rumored netbook. “Imagine…,” he says:

Dual touchscreen with multiple configurations for the bottom display:

- keyboard + “touchpad”
- multitrack audio mixer
- dj “turntable”
- accelerometer

2 X 10’ touchscreen
wifi: 802.11n
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1,86 GHz
2 Go SDRAM DDR3
128 Go SSD
SuperDrive DVD (hope it fit in this)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
Webcam
Mini DisplayPort
Microphone
Speaker
audio output
2 X USB
1 X FireWire 800

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Lala says his netbook would have at least 5 hours of useful battery life and the accelerometer in both screens to allow for reading ebooks in vertical mode with facing pages, just like a real book.

20 comments »

About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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  • Finsen

    If it is an all-touchscreen netbook, it wouldn’t have a mouse pad because it doesn’t need one. Things can be selected, dragged and controlled with touch, there’s no need for a mouse pointer anymore.

  • real industrial designer

    Do we have to look at every dilettante work from every 16 year old fan boy?
    This Photoshop Mock-Up is so bad, every Designer would cry!
    He even don’t know the basics of perspective drawing…

  • JD

    The spec’s read directly from the $2500 MBA, which would make the MBA obsolete. 2x USB and 1x Firewire… again MBA Poof, gone…. c ya. This would be the most expensive netbook ever. IF this releases in 2009 I say no way. Push it to mid 2010, maybe. (still think it’s over spec’d for a netbook to comptete under $1k even in 2010)

    I could see the dual screen maybe, but a tablet form factor with basically an oversized iPhone is what I am betting on. They could produce a 10″ tablet, drop in a slower processor, 2gig DDR2 ram, 32 or 64 gig SSD all the other goodies except the firewire and have a $600 to $900 machine that would be attractive to lines and lines of Apple faithful and the rest of the world wanting to get a peek at the “next big thing” Apple released.

  • Duality

    Power use would be over 9000!

  • brian

    Lela continues that it also shoot rainbows out of a hole in the back and emits unicorn calls. I agree with real industrial designer, this is getting ridiculous.

    And Lonnie, admit it, you’re posting this just to get a rise out of us.

  • Fearless Fred

    As a touch expert (13 years in the industry and counting) I’d say it’s a no to full keyboards being replaced by touch any time soon. Given how the Apple touchscreens work (Projected Capacitance), the silicon isn’t there yet to drive a screen of the size they want at a high-enough node count to get the accuracy, linearity, and performance that Apple (and the public) would want. Also, I would serously doubt if people will take to a touch keyboard without tactile feedback. Yes, it works well on an iPhone/iPod Touch without taclie response. However, when you think about it, you’re not typing long emails/documents, etc on one of them. Imagine typing a page of A4 on the iPhone keyboard. It gets very frustrating very quickly. I can see the idea of a touchscreen embedded onto the main display, but as I said earlier, they’re not there yet. When you look at an iPhone, your finger is a sizeable percentage of screen are (about 10% in both axes). So, the actual accuracy of the system is about 5%. You can’t just scale up the screen by stretching it. You need to multiply the number of “nodes” in the screen by a couple of factors, and the silicon simply isn’t there to do it yet….

  • Fuego

    the mouse pointer can be usefull: you don’t always want to put your finger in front of your photoshoped image or text.. I’d like to have a resizable trackpad like this!

  • Johann

    I don’t think I would like to type on a touchscreen keyboard. It’s ok for the iPhone & iPod touch, because they ought to be small. But even there I don’t like it because you have no tangible keys.
    Also, is a netbook really the right device for audio mixing and DJing? For me a netbook is only a little more than for going online on the go.

  • Charles Lowndes

    Lush, but at those specs…..It’s no netbook……

  • Steve

    One issue i could see is when u are typing you lean your hands on the notebook itself so you would be touching the screen making it go mental?

  • TheJ
  • http://cultofmac.com Lonnie Lazar

    Really appreciate Fearless Fred’s input here — nothing like a reality check amidst the vortex of Apple hype and speculation.

    @Real Industrial Designer: love to see what you’d come up with; show us why dilettantes and 16 year-old fan boys should find something else to do.

    @brian: getting a rise, yes, that’s part of my job, but I also think it’s legitimate to feature these types of items because of the unique inspiration Apple seems to create in the world. I can’t remember the last time I saw a mock up of a Windows machine that might or might not ever come to pass.

  • glorious912

    I think the keyboard would be okay, if it had the same sort of clicking action as the blackberry storm, and you could rest your fingers on the keyboard when not typing, and if it had some kind of touch technology that could make 3D objects (such as keys) something you could feel. Also, about the second background on the bottom touchscreen: Apple would give you an option for solid colors, but a second background looks really cheesy. I know this is just a mock-up, but a realistic touch keyboard and some interesting little features would make this part of my list of stuff to think about buying. A trackpad with multitouch would be cool, too, but they could make it really big on that touchscreen and make it like a tablet, and you could maybe use your finger or a stylus and move anywhere on the screen. I can see potential in Photoshop and some other options for touching on the screen. And maybe you could download skins that would make the virtual keyboard look like the old macbook keyboard or resize it and stuff.

  • Fearless Fred

    Lonnie, glad to add my tuppence-worth!

    Just to make it a bit clearer, I’m not ruling out touch on a main display of a laptop in the near future (18 months). But, honestly, it’s not going to replace a keyboard. Also, as Fuego says, a mouse/trackpad will still be needed. The size of the human finger will be too big when it comes to things like touching up photos in iPhoto, or precise selection within iMovie, or Garageband, for example. Look at *any* touch-base item such as an iPhone, or where touch is used within ticketing machines on train stations/ check-in desks at airports, etc. The items that the user selects are larger than your finger. This is to ensure that the user can easily pick the item they want. If your finger can cover three or four items at once (imagine the red, yellow, and green buttons at the top of your current open window). Which button is the right one for the OS to activate? Touch certainly has a large part to play in a lot of computing interfaces in the future (or at least I hope so, or I’m out of a job!) but it won’t replace fine selection devices of keyboards very soon….

  • Max

    …brilliant!

  • http://nicholaslohr.wordpress.com nickux

    A “netbook” to me is a sub-$500 cheap notebook used primarily for web-surfing and processes that don’t require a lot of CPU horsepower. A dual-screen touch notebook thing from Apple would not fit any of that criteria. I just think it’s a big mistake calling these mock-ups a netbook.

  • Patrick

    what’s a “128 GO SSD” ??? ;)

  • Fuego

    @TheJ:
    I don’t think Lala was thinking about the “Knowledge Navigator”……

    looks more like the asus dual screen concept:

    http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/03/hands-on-with-asus-dual-panel-touchscreen-pc-at-cebit/

  • denny

    The smudges on my iphone drive my nuts! Can you imagine keep this thing looking clean!

  • NewJohnny

    @Lonnie and @Fred

    People hated the Treo keypads when they were introduced too. The keys are too small everyone said. Well, years later, those keypads are still on palms and blackberrys and considered the standard.

    10 years from now, a touch-screen keyboard will be standard and everyone will like them just fine. I believe this is the future of laptops.