“And while some of the graphic figures of today’s patent did slip out in Europe, we were never able to verify whether they were legitimate or not,” Purcher reports. “Well, today we finally get to post the Mother Lode of all information concerning the iMac Touch and it’s absolutely brilliant!”
Purcher reports, “The naysayers will have to eat crow on this one, because Apple’s method of transitioning from OS X to iOS is clearly outlined for both the iMac and MacBook – and it’s a grand slam home run. Imagine having an iMac on your desktop one minute and a gigantic iPad the next. Imagine playing iGames on this dream machine – Wow! Apple takes the mystery out of how OS X could finally co-exist with iOS on a Mac.
“Apple’s patent describes the transition process this way. When the iMac’s display is oriented upright and relatively far from you – the keyboard/mouse input mode could be selected and basically you’re operating in OS X mode,” Purcher reports. “Then to switch to a touch-based input, you’ll change the orientation of the iMac’s display so as to make touching the screen easier and more natural. For example, to enter touch input, you’ll want to pull the iMac’s screen closer to you while pushing the display screen down flat as if you were going to read a book, states the patent. In this orientation you’ll be able to select a corresponding UI which should translate to using iOS. In fact, the transition is really an automatic process.”
Purcher reports “Apple’s patent figure 11 is obviously a representation of a MacBook that could transition into a tablet and in doing so takes on the transition process as described pertaining to the iMac Touch. Meaning, as the display of the MacBook is turned into tablet mode – OS X will instantly transition into iOS mode.”
There’s much more, including multiple patent application illustrations, in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Uh, we’d kind of filed this one away in the “Discounted Rumors” folder, but now we wonder if it wasn’t just a bit early: “Get ready for Newton 2.0 MacBook touch?! So says our source — the same one who tipped us to wireless iTunes Store sales direct to iPod, iPhone a week before Apple debuted it — in staccato fashion: Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. Pretty expensive to produce initially, but sold at ‘low’ price that will reduce margins. Apple wants to move these babies. And move they will. This is some sick shit. App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too. By October at the latest.” – MacDailyNews, July 22, 2008 (In later rumormongering, our same source indicated that there would no SuperDrive; it was only present on prototypes and not meant for any shipping product.)
Of course the above rumor may have been about iPad, but the name “Macbook touch” and the ability to run “full Mac OS X” along with being “App Store compatible” sure matches up better to this newly published patent application.
Been waiting for this shoe to drop.
There it is!!!!!
This is beginning to look like the System 9 to OS X transition. At first, primary OS was System 9, with dual boot, and the ‘Classic’ sandbox mode. Then it was OS X boot only, but still with the ‘Classic’ mode. Then the ‘Classic’ mode simply went away. The process took about five years (until Intel Macs eliminated Classic altogether), but it gave Adobe, Microsoft and all other major application developers enough time to transition to the new development tools and the new UI.
If the previous timeline is any indication, in two years, iMacs and MacBooks(Pro)s will have iOS as the primary boot OS, and few more years down the road, and OS X will be in legacy support mode. The precise timeline will only depend on how quickly the major Mac software houses port their OS X apps over to the new multi-touch UI.
In five years, hopefully, we’ll all look back with befuddlement on mice and wonder how on earth we got anything done using those clunky devices.
iOS Apps will run in their own environment. Think Dashboard, press F11 and your iOS Apps float onto the screen…
Ahhhhh!!! Ahhhhhhh!!!! The best of both worlds on the iMac. Ahhhh!! I LOVE IT!
If you read the patent and use your imagination, the transition animation is clearly a hybrid of Exposé “Show Desktop” and Dashboard’s closing animation.
Awesome.
MW: “Times”, as in “The times, they are a’ changin” (or whatever)
@ Jamie
Beat me to it
Apple. Let’s have it ready and selling for Christmas ’10. Macbook Touch, Ipad with front facing camera for facetime and white IPhone 4, thank you very much. I’m waiting. ( foot is a tapping.)
The only problem that I see with the MacBook is how to get the screen to rotate in a manner that doesn’t resemble some POS PC laptop.
Okay, I hate to be a party pooper, but I want to see it before I get happy about it. There are just too many pro-level apps that I’m used to in the current interface (DAWs, software synths) for me to see them working in iOS. If the emphasis is going to be on the touch screen, then what about user interfaces like keyboards, MIDI keyboards, fader units, etc?
Maybe I’ll like being eased into it, I don’t know, but I don’t like the idea that I’m going to be “forced” into it.
@cubert
Automobiles share many of the same characteristics and we call them all cars. So just because the MacBook’s screen wiil pivot, doesn’t put it in the same class as a POS PC laptop.
Just sayin’…
@ elarue
First off you jumped the gun without reading the patent. In upright mode the iMac touch is primarily OS X. Only when you tilt it to a given angle that you set, say 65 degrees, the OS changes automatically to iOS. So your apps wouldn’t be affected, at all. Read before you leap, my man.
Finally, maybe some good news for the iMac. Something refreshing. If only the Taiwan rumor of it being ths Christmas were true. Pleeeease.
This is great, but I do need some precision input.
As they transition away, they need to start actively considering Styli or something.
Cubert:
Remember Radius swivel portrait monitors…?
@elarue
What makes you think these so called “pro level” apps will be ported to iOS?
These are two distinctly different environments here and each will serve its own unique purposes. As developers embrace multi-touch, they will begin to see the possibilities as they apply to both their prospects and their software.
No one is forcing you to do anything. If you buy one of these Macs, you won’t be required to use iOS, as long as your favorite software is still available on OS X.
<i>By October [2008] at the latest.<\i>
That’s fishy. It’s two years later and it still seems a year away at least. The idea that they almost did this two years ago seems… Unlikely.
@nathan
Again, if and when Autodesk decides to port AutoCad to iOS, they had better come up with a way to provide the same level of control to the multi-touch version that current OS X users are now enjoying.
Now, having said that, it’s not gonna happen. Nor are we going to Adobe’s Illustrator or Photoshop for iOS. Those two bloated programs, like Microsoft Office will never make the cut.
Is that the mysterious Unnamed Hardware mentioned in the latest iOS build?
Sorry, I guess I was jumping the gun a little bit – it just seemed like a lot of the comments were claiming this would be like OS X replacing OS 9, which led me to react, “No, I don’t want OS X to go away – I like OS X!”
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Many people were pissed when the iPad came out because they wanted an OS X slate computer. But technology (chips & battery life) didn’t allow Apple to make an OS X slate-like computer when the iPad was released.
However, technology marches on and everyone had to know an iPad-like device running OS X was coming down the road when the time was right.
The iMac with a touch screen seems a little far-fetched however. First you don’t want to reach toward an upright screen to do touch gestures. Second, an iMac with a screen that is movable from vertical to horizontal sounds like a pretty inelegant piece of hardware and we all know Apple doesn’t do inelegant.
I think what everyone is missing is that new little gizmo that Apple released recently called the Magic TrackPad. Imagine an iMac with a Magic TrackPad running something that might look like iOS but is really OS X. As you touch the trackpad, shadows of your fingers appear on the iMac screen, just as if you were touching it. You then move charts and pics around in your Pages documents or rearrange pics in iPhoto. The possibilities are endless.
These kind of ideas will probably be incorporated in OS X 10.7. That is why we haven’t heard much about 10.7. Apple is keeping it under very tight wraps because it will be so revolutionary (again). It will completely change how we interact with our computers.
So boys and girls. OS X isn’t going away anytime soon. Remember iOS is just a slimmed down OS X that is necessary to run on slower processors with far less power. iOS also introduced the world to some new interface concepts that users would not accept if they suddenly just appeared on a PC or Mac. If anything, OS X and iOS will be drawn closer in the future with similar interfaces. One operating system for computers with big boy processors that are plugged into the wall and one for cordless computers with small, very efficient processors.
Remember you heard it here first.
What a joy it will be to read a magazine in all its glory on such a beast. I wouldn’t use touch much, but it sure would be nice to have it when I wanted it. Another great idea from Apple.
What a strategy. iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac Touch MacBook Tablet. All playing off each other, all adding some new dimension to our digital life. Just when the mac was getting a little boring and bam! News to shake things up. Nice news coming into the fall. I hope it’s this year, but it might take a little while longer. Apple could easily make this happen. All of the parts are there.
OS X IS DOOMED!!!
Mac user choice and control is doomed
Switch to Windows 7
Switch to Ubuntu
That’s what “Bootcamp” is for.
If Apple wanted App Store apps on OS X they would have used DASHBOARD!!!
I think most posters hare, including 84 Mac Guy, are short-sighted.
Mac OS X is going away. Steve Jobs said as much (more-or-less) almost fifteen years ago, when he was asked what would he do if he ran Apple: “I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth — and get busy on the next great thing.”
We have seen iOS on a small screen. We are now seeing iOS on a tablet (i.e. laptop-size) screen. And this patent indicates that we’ll be seeing iOS soon on full-size screen.
There is absolutely no point in having Two distinct operating systems available on any platform. Mac OS X will continue to exist just as long as necessary for the transition to iOS to be complete and smooth.
Current iOS is essentially identical to OS X, except for the top surface layer of UI. Everything underneath is identical. 84 Mac Guy got it backwards; it is not OS X that’s coming to an iPad-like device (hardware-wise, the 1GHz A4 processor would have absolutely no problem running full OSX; my friend’s 450MHz G4 Cube is running Leopard without performance issues). It’s the other way round.
Apple is successfully training vast masses of people on usage of a multi-touch interface. During the past three years, we have witnessed rapid development of iOS and its feature set. From the original version, we have seen introduction of SDK and app development environment, then SDK support for external hardware (via dock connector), then SDK support for built-in hardware (camera, microphone), then SDK support for multi-tasking… If the pace of development continues, very soon, we will get some level of file storage and access, needed for various apps to freely share information. All the pieces are falling into place for a full desktop-grade OS without mouse and keyboard.
Whew!
Took a look at those funky drawings, Apple won’t do that, it’s just to dam much work switching between modes. Not only that, switching from a comfort of a mouse and keyboard to heavy arm and wrist movement? Not.
On the other hand, prepare for a onslaught of DUAL CORE NETBOOKS!!!
Slow no more!! Take that cheap single core iPad JUNK!!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20014400-64.html