“New, slimmer MacBooks [are] coming in October… made from new materials [along with] iPhone’s multi-touch technology,” Josh Goldman reports for CrunchGear.
“The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook’s files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone,” Goldman repots.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: After using iPhone so much, we’ve already pinched our MacBook Pro touchpad looking to zoom in and out. It’d sure be nice if it worked!
Now, about those polished aluminium iMacs due this month…any1 heard anything?
The current MacBook trackpads can do multi-touch in a limited way, for right cilck and scrolling. Too bad Apple can’t just make it do the pinching stuff with an software upgrade… or can it?
Seems like the only interesting thing multi-touch can do right now is the pinch-zoom trick. Would it really be such a big deal to have a trackpad do it? Multi-touch on a Mac tablet would be much more interesting, if Mac OS X (and relevant apps) were enhanced to take advantage of it, so that you can use multiple fingers on both hands simultaneously.
I had a chance to play with the iphone , and while it is cool, It isn’t for me.( I just don’t use a cell phone that much). But what intrigued me was the keyboard and the non-mouse navigation and file manipulation. (zooming in, tapping etc. That what was most compelling. I did find the keyboard ‘multi-touch’ a bit frustrating, but I’ve got big hands.
So…. Imagine the ‘multi-touch’ technology wrapped the ultra small laptop that everyone is clamoring for. Say 10- 11 ” screen (ultra high resolution like the Iphone) on a bigger keyboard area, This with the flash based hard drive. All for say $999? Heck you could use Skype then instead of AT&T.
As Multi-touch is fleshed out, it might eventually replace the mouse.
It makes no sense whatsoever to have the trackpad be multitouch- it would have to be the screen of the laptop- then you would not need a trackpad at all.
The nature of the multi-touch on the iPhone is such that there is a one-to-one relationship between the screen and the touch overlay- it would not work to have a small trackpad control the large laptop screen- too imprecise.
As Steve explained in his keynote, the entire UI is bitmapped to the touchscreen- one-to-one.
@ Reality Check:
You hit the point about the scrolling. The way the iPhone works is a bit more logic from my point of view.