I think I know what Apple is going to do!

[js]

bernie,

Have you ever spent time with an iPod Touch or an iPhone? You don't have to "open a window" to activate a keyboard. You just tap in a window where text lives or will live, and it appears. This is equivalent to putting your active cursor in a text window. The magnification bubble automatically activates and follows your finger without anything required on your part, and it works very well, I think, although I still need more experience with it. I've liked it the times I've used it, at any rate.

But, as I've said, you would NOT get one of these if you "required" an external keyboard and mouse to use it properly. It would be for people who felt that much of the time they would not need such things.

The thing is that most people find that a touchscreen does add something positive -- very positive. And I am one of those. Your mileage obviously varies here! And that's OK. Just 'cause a certain device is available doesn't mean it will be the only type available, nor that everyone must get and use one.

I mean, CD's and MP3's / AAC's are ubiquitous and most people listen to their music this way. But . . . that hasn't stopped you from being a vinyl aficionado, has it?

As for "JStradamus", how can you doubt me, bernie? Didn't I predict, over a year ago, our current economic meltdown? I rest my case. hehe. js-tradamus rules! All hail js-tradamus!

LOL!

 

[Crenshaw]

Touch screens will be fun......but theres one large faction of people who will never except it....gamers!

Touch screen in FPS will never fly.....maybe in RTS, but not FPS......



i in turn predict that if touch screens become as standard as the mouse....a whole new genre of games will come up, based on this. Look at the Wii and the games you get from it. utterly differnt from button mashing of previous consoles.

in fact, i think the future will be in virtual reality. We are already interacting "directly" in a sense with the contents of our screens. Wii players "interect" directly with objects on the the screen.

Crenshaw

 

[LEDninja]

Introducing the new MACBOOK WHEEL!!!!

Nice thread derailment. :thumbsup:

Not a thread derailment I think.
Let us take js's MacTouchBook and add tiktok's The Wheel to the side. Looks just like an iPod Nano Gen4 in movie mode but 10 times bigger. Allows operation of the computer without your hands being in the way of the line of sight.

Seriously though I think the touchscreen beats the wheel in ease of use. I'm a Hunt and Peck typist so a virtual keyboard won't bother me as much as the wheel. Scroll then click to select a letter is fine, scroll again and click again for upper/lower case is too much work. (Apple could have laid out the screen keyboard display on the wheel ABCDE instead of QWERTY, the highlighted keys jumping around is most annoying!)

I do not follow the arguments about the trackpad. Isn't a touchscreen just a large trackpad?

As to The Wheel didn't James Bond use one as the RC controller for his BMW?

 

[Tempest UK]

Seriously though I think the touchscreen beats the wheel in ease of use

One would hope so, seeing as the "Wheel" isn't an Apple product and was a joke about pursuing simplicity at the cost of (any) usability

Regards,
Tempest

 

[js]

While watching TV tonight, I saw an iPhone type device--don't know which one--where when you touched it with your finger, a CURSOR would appear just above and to the side, and that was the activation point. A different approach than the moving magnification bubble, but still, goes to show that there are ways around the hugeness of the fingertip.

 

[carrot]

That's the Blackberry Storm. I poked and prodded my friend's and never actually saw a cursor. I will have to play with it a bit more to confirm but I think it was just screencaps "photoshopped" onto the device.

 

[tiktok 22]

I've got to play with a Blackberry Storm and an iPhone and have to say, the iPhone is way more intuitive. The storm would just drag down if it got to busy and just didn't have the feel of the iPhone. This was just a first take on these items. I don't know about call quality or 3G speeds on each device. If I had a choice though, I think I would pick the iPhone.

 

[effulgentOne]

this isn't being produced yet, and its not apple, but here is a device in many ways similar to what you guys are talking about

 

[manoloco]

Hey Jim, fan of keyboards?, hard to find one of them nowadays, harder even than flashaholics, i love Cherry MX switches, i think it would be hard for touchscreens to replace the feeling and effectiveness of typing with them, on the other hand i ABOSULTELY LOVE tablets, recently i got a wacom tablet, and if you love drawing it is one of the best investments you can make for your pc, i have yet to try a wacom tablet lcd.

there are pressure sensitive lcd tablet laptops (like the HP TX2xxx series) but i dont know if they are as precise and effective as the wacom ones (although the HP ones use wacom technology its just that they use less sensitivity levels), will update this post to place a couple of drawings i did with the tablet, and some i just painted with corel or photoshop that i made with a leadholder and then scanned.

having that kind of versatility with precision in a portable package would REALLY rock for me.

i would like to spend more time with the tablet but my job is preventing it, however, theres always time for fun :

some are unfinished, maybe i will try drawing flashlights or scenes with them, could be interesting.

 

[js]

manoloco,

WOW! Amazing! I love your work!

But . . . you'd better remove the 2nd one from the top (chica2.jpg) as it isn't suitable for this forum.

 

[js]

this isn't being produced yet, and its not apple, but here is a device in many ways similar to what you guys are talking about

Wow. That is so cool! I was thinking the other day about the possibility of having BOTH halves of the laptop be a touch screen, but figured you'd be better served by having a keyboard on that second surface. But . . . yeah . . . that's along the lines of what I am thinking Apple might do.

 

[Kiessling]

Maybe even I could live with this one. It is

 

[brighterisbetter]

I don't have much to contribute which hasn't been said already, but good read so far. I'll probably retouch on it later when I have more time to do so.

 

[ev13wt]

manoloco,

WOW! Amazing! I love your work!

But . . . you'd better remove the 2nd one from the top (chica2.jpg) as it isn't suitable for this forum.

You could link it and label it nsfw? I missed it.

OP: You are dead on I think. Tablet style without moveable screen and touchscreen. Also 16+ hours battery time, or even up to 21. They bought a company about 3 months ago that was producing the first: "Computer on a chip" called "Lynx". Basically a chip with everything but memory on it. Very efficient design. The pins go straight to the I/O ports (Sata, vga, audio, key/mouse, usb, memory bus, etc). I bet they will plop it into the new machine.

 

[manoloco]

sorry about that, will be more careful in the future.

 

[js]

SO, we just got a new oscilloscope for the control room here at work. It's a LeCroy WAVEPRO 735Zi, and it has a touch screen. More significantly, it runs Windows Vista! When you touch somewhere, the cursor goes there, and if you touch and drag, it's just like a click and drag. Anyway, the point is that the integration of OS and touch interface was obviously not a problem.

 

[js]

Well, it looks like I was right!

Apple Plans To Launch Netbook With Touch Screen

Yee Haw!

I do want to re-iterate / clarify my position on this, though. I am a HUGE fan of good, full-size keyboards, as anyone who has read my The best computer keyboards ever made - still thread knows. In fact, I just recently got an IBM Model-M keyboard for my office computer, and wow is it nice (and VERY clicky!).

So, I'm not excited about a full-size laptop that is a touchscreen computer with no real keyboard (i.e. only a virtual touch keyboard on the screen). Axiotron makes such a thing, called a ModBook, and it's made from an Apple macbook or macbook pro. And if you read the reviews, it's clear that the lack of a keyboard is a real issue in many situations, and this disadvantage isn't compensated by a smaller, more convenient package.

A 9" or so screen size, however, is another matter in my opinion. The "netbook" size, in otherwords, is in my estimation, the perfect size to benefit from a touch screen interface, and the lack of a built in keyboard would be offset by the great convenience of a 9" iPod Touch type Netbook product. Basically the same size as a Kindle or the like, in other words, and something which would have that same functionality built into it (well maybe not the 3G cell wireless), but with color.

My iPod Touch is pretty amazing and surprisingly functional for a lot of things. I was just surfing the web on it for an hour researching the new mac pros when I found this link, actually. Plus, the mail reader can read MS Word attachments and Excel and PDF and etc. It's pretty awesome to be able to take the little iPod touch with me to a meeting and be able to pull up a document from email if needed. Much more convenient than taking my Macbook Pro--which I love dearly, however!

Anyway, just wanted to post a well deserved "I told you so . . ." :nana:

 

[Saaby]

I'm jumping into this WAY late, and uninformed. I skimmed through the first post or 2, so I might be repeating some stuff.

I have one of the Unibody MacbBook Pro machines. You're right that the increase in performance wasn't much. The shift to Aluminum for the MacBook was big (Though, regretfully, as you said, at the loss of firewire) and in fact my good friend has the previous design, but he has the high spec (512 Video, 2.6 processor) and I have the low spec (256 video, 2.4 processor). Who has the better machine? Probably him.

Where I think the MacBook Pros will start to shine, with their dual-GPU setup, is when Snow Leopard comes out with grand central.

"Grand Central," a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today's processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Source (See "Multicore")

The only thing i don't like about my new ProBook is the glossy screen. It really is quite glossy. If they bring the "anti-glare" option to the 15", as they have for the 17" I may pay the Apple-tax and get it. The only thing is they remove the black bezel, so the laptop kind of looks like a giant MacBook air. While the glossy screen is a tad annoying sometimes, I actually have grown to like the black bezel. It totally conceals the iSight, and it also conceals the black rubber gasket that goes around the perimeter of the screen -- we'll see.

As for the NetBook thing...it will be interesting to see what they do. When the Air came out last January -- I was using a ~3.5 year old PowerBook G4 15" at the time -- I was watching the Stevenote™ and I was super excited. I thought the Air+24" iMac would be the perfect setup for me. I was expecting the Air to come in at about $999, which would mean Air+24" iMac would be in the neighborhood of a spec'ed out MacBook Pro.

Unfortunately the Air is $1800, the cost of a MacBook Pro, so that kind of squashed that dream.

I drag my laptop to school every day. I've been schlepping a 15" laptop around for awhile now, and Apple does pack a lot of power into 15", so it's not all that bad, but I would LOVE something a little smaller, for those classes that I use the laptop in.

What I need is something that can work in tablet form with touch and/or stylus input. I'm not using this as a replacement for typing notes, because I don't believe in typing notes -- handwritten is much better. I am talking about classes, of which I have several, where the teacher has you buy a packet of notes at the beginning of the semester, and then they teach out of those notes for the semester. I hate carrying around extra weight, so rather than carry 500 pages of notes all semester I take the packet, which is usually spiral-bound, un-bind it, and shove it through a high-speed scanner.

Then, armed with a PDF of the packet I either:


A - Re-print the notes I need for any given day

or

B - Hilight and annotate the notes digitally.


What I am clamoring for is something that would let me do "B" more like I do "A". An eBook reader like the Kindle with stylus input would be great, and in-fact one exists, but it's like $500. $500 can buy A LOT of paper and toner (I have a personal, duplexing laser)...so I skipped that route.

Then I kind of got hit with the NetBook bug and thought maybe one of those would be suitable. Especially one of the ones with a touch screen. A little cheaper, and much more functional than a simple eBook reader.

Then I tried one out at Best Buy. Oh dear, I am just not a fan. They feel cheap to me.


So Apple...it will be interesting to see what they come out with. I'm betting that functionally they'll create exactly what I am looking for. Small, reasonably powerful, touch and maybe stylus input, OS X...perfect.

BUT, and here's what this is all coming around to...
Price though. That will be the interesting part. If it's $250 I'd buy it the day it came out. $350 and I'm going to have to think about it. $450 it had better be pretty good, and anything above that I just don't think I could justify.

So we'll see...

 

[js]

Ryan,

You won't be able to justify it, then, because there is no way this thing is going to cost under $450. I am guessing it will come in closer to $750.

As for the Snow Leopard thing, I knew about that, and am very excited, but both the new MBP's and the old Penryn MBP's have pretty much the same chip set except for the dual GPU thing. But as I recall, you can't operate both graphics cards at once. It's one or the other, and you pay a not insignificant penalty in battery life by running the more capable one with its own video memory.

The new MBP's are sweet, there's no question, and I prefer the new trackpad feel to the one I have--by a small margin--but overall I'm super glad I have a MacBook Pro "Classic" (i.e. pre 14 Oct 08) for reasons which I think I've mentioned already in this thread. The biggest one for me is probably the matte screen, and after that would come aesthetics and ergonomics: I like the look of mine better and I like the layout of the ports and optical drive better, and I like the keyboard on mine better. I also like having two FW ports, one 400 and one 800. And I also like the the edge of my computer is smoother and less sharp on the wrists than the new ones. It really is an issue for me when typing for any length of time! Both the old plastic MB's and the new aluminum unibody's suffer from the sharp edge feature--or rather non-feature. LOL! Still, that unibody is way cool, and it does slightly bother me that when I close the lid on my MBP that one side has a larger gap than the other, but all in all I'm glad I bought mine when I did.

Anyway, yes, we shall see.

Right now I'm watching the unfolding of the whole new nehalem Mac Pro's vs. the Jan 08 Mac Pro's. Seems the thing most people are upset about (other than performance to price ratio) is the RAM issue. The quads probably can't (although it's not certain yet) take more than 8 GB of RAM, and for many pro users that is a deal breaker. Also, it seems that you may lose 1/3 of your memory transfer speed by filling up more than 3 slots per CPU socket (i.e. 3 on quad, and 6 on octo), and that totally negates the faster memory architecture on the nehalems. Strange. So if that's the case, it's even more bad news. The price on the old ones is actually starting to go up now. Amazon raised their price back up $100, in fact. Eh. I dunno. For our uses I think the quad MP (which is faster in single thread performance than even the old 3.2 GHz MP 08) with 6GB or 8GB of memory will hold us for four or five years, and it's cheaper than fitting out an 08 MP with that amount of memory. Or at least it is in my case, since I get the educational discount. Anyway, off topic. Sorry.

 

[Saaby]

Ryan,

You won't be able to justify it, then, because there is no way this thing is going to cost under $450. I am guessing it will come in closer to $750.

Shhhh! They'll hear you. You're right, I'm sure it will be pricey pricey pricey, which will make it tough to justify for what I want it for (A *second* portable). Maybe after a year or so I can get a used one. We'll see. Until them I'm going to hope they'll pull a "$199 iPhone 3G" on us. $199 is still a premium to pay for a phone when there are so many other phones available for free, but it's not crazy out of reach. Of course if they do make it available at a reasonable price point, it will probably be available at that price only if you add 3G tethering to your iPhone plan for another $30 a month :ironic:

But as I recall, you can't operate both graphics cards at once. It's one or the other...

We'll see. There was a lot of back and forth on the subject when the Unibody 'books first came out, and I don't think anybody came to a definitive, final conclusion. Certainly it's not supported right now, but the same GPU setup is used in other (PC) laptops, and on those machines it is most certainly possible to run both at the same time.

You'll also recall that right now, to switch GPU, you have to log out and back in. Very clunky, and very un-Apple. If you ask me, I think Steve Jobs walked into Software over there at 1 Infinite loop about a week before the Unibody 'books came out and said "Here's what we've come up with. Now write drivers!" Ok not really, but I am quite confident that some time in the future we'll at least be able to switch between GPUs on the fly.

As for using both GPU at the same time? I'm confident that it will be a feature on future MacBook Pros. Will it come to my generation? Anybodies guess. Apple has a history of enhancing value of products later through software updates. Sometimes for free, sometimes for a small charge (802.11n enabler anybody?). Then again, Apple also has a history of introducing artificial differences between models, so I also wouldn't put it past them to make simultaneous GPU operation only available on a newer model. Fortunately, when the restriction is artificial, the developer community generally has a way of negating artificial restrictions

...and you pay a not insignificant penalty in battery life by running the more capable one with its own video memory.

That's true. Just imagine how much juice you'd use to run both at the same time. That's why I imagine a situation where the more powerful GPU switches on and off as needed, sort of how the CPU turns down it's voltage and frequency when not needed. Plug in the power-cord and have the big-GPU switch on permanently. Unplug the power-cord and have the big-GPU switch on only as needed, even for non-graphical tasks, but tasks of the sort that are better carried out by the GPU over the CPU. If that's the case, you could even see an increase in battery life -- by using the GPU for tasks it's better suited at, whilst leaving the CPU in partial-sleep mode.