“I have seen the future of desktop computing, and it is very small,” Benj Edwards writes reports for Macworld. “Ironically, it is also very portable.”
“Imagine a Macintosh in a smartphone form factor,” Edwards writes. “Pull it out of your pocket, and it works like an iPhone with a touchscreen interface. Make calls, run apps. But link it up with a wireless mouse, keyboard, and AirPlay monitor, and it provides a full-blown OS X desktop experience.”
Edwards writes, “It’s the MacBook Pocket, and I just made it up.”
Much more in the full article here.
Sounds like an iPad with a few tweaks.
Uh yeah. Shades of Surface!
Not at all, to me. Dock it into a location with a “permanently” set up keyboard, mouse/pad, and large monitor. Keep it at pocket sized, not iPad sized. I would buy a dock for home and work for that kind of portable functionality! And if they become common enough, you could find a dock at Kinko’s, Starbucks, etc. I like it a lot!
Yes great idea but there are very good reasons why it doesn’t exist and won’t any time soon. To gain this functionality you lose too much else in the present state of technology.
Sounds like an iPhone (or iPad) with a screen sharing app.
But Edwards can call it “MacBook Pocket” if he likes. He should sell stickers.
Not… A visionary.
Oh, you mean iSurface
iSlate?
Limited vision of the future…
The increasing power of CPU, the increased network bandwidth for iCloud, cheaper and faster memory, new input methods, neuron simulating voice handling and context management and all he wants is a smaller Mac.
How about Holo display that can be manipulated with your hand, full interactive voice interaction, eye movement cursor management, AI capabilities with full understanding of one’s communication so it can do 80% of the work.
Most of these are available today they are just not commercial enough and Apple fan know the only company that will make it a reality in a manner where they can sell in Billions not Millions.
Didn’t someone have a phone that did this already?
I am sure I have seen it.
There has been plenty of attempts at something of this nature. All in museums now. Some seem to forget that even in a tablet format the reason that the iPad succeeded where previous ones did not was precisely because it did NOT try to do as he proposes.
The MacOS X GUI (mouse, keyboard, pull down menus, modal dialogue boxes) is definitely the end-all-be-all to computing interfaces.
I’d assume that the holy grail of computing would be a digital assistant with full AI and voice control. Something akin to what we saw in the movie “her.” (for those who saw that flick)
The reason I think that the ultimate goal is to get to the point where you can talk to an AI, is because people I know often avoid web site support in leu of an 800 number, and then desperately mash the 0 key looking for a live operator. We are humans, and the closer a computer comes to acting like another human, the more comfortable I think we’ll be.
Then of course skynet will eradicate us. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator) )
I REALLY wish there was an edit button. The MacOS interface is NOT the end-all-be-all.
It certainly works a lot better than iOS. I realize that touch and the screen size matters in how an operating system works, you can only accomplish just so much, but I would never be able to do my job without Mac OS.
There are many of us who utterly detest WordPress and its pitiful lack of functionality.
Motorola already tried this on Android a couple of years back.
I just made it up- not.
“Ironically”? I do not think it means what you think it means.
And this is amazing:
“I have seen the future of desktop computing”
“and I just made it up.”
Think much of yourself, do you, Benj? Yehhhh, nobody has EVER thought of something like that before.
No. That’s a Macintosh in my pocket. 🙂
NO……MacMini in my pocket
Apple needs to release an updated Mac mini and an all-new mid-range internally-expandable tower and a new generation of 4k displays, not a shrunken MacBook Air.
PLEASE keep iOS as far away from OS X as possible. Don’t bloat out the Mac OS any more than it already is. To merge the two is to copy the MS Surface, and we all know what a piece of crap that is. Worst of both worlds.
We already have a pocket Mac. It is called the iPhone. Did he just crawled out from under a rock?
Ding ding ding – we have a winner! Give the man a prize.
My truly personal computer hasn’t sat on a desk in years.
Yeah, and I thought I made up French toast waffles…until I searched the internet.
They are tasty though.
That’s the type of “kludge” device that Apple will NOT do. Apple prefers you have a Mac and an iPhone, not a compromised iPhone that tries to be a compromised Mac.
mouse , keyboard, monitor + phone seems like a unwieldy solution vs macbook air + phone.
The macbook air option might cost more but it’s sure heck a lot easier to carry around.
Sorry, you didn’t just “made it up”
I posted it here, like 3 years ago, after they launched the iPod Touch:
An interface where you could dock an iPod Touch, you can plug screen, and USB devices, and you get the full Mac Desktop.
Too bad I can’t dig throught MDN database….
Great idea, but you did not just make this up. Sorry, but some of us envisioned this exact scenario ten years ago, as we watched the iPod evolve and realized the Mac would one day be that device in your pocket, and it would wirelessly interface with your desktop peripherals. Additionally, I’m sure others thought about it long before I did.
What’s the point? There are things that I can easily do on my Mac, things I can easily do on my iPhone, things that I can easily do with either, BUT things I only do easily on one or the other, not both.
I do video editing and format conversions that require a lot of processor horsepower, screen real-estate, storage and the precision of a mouse. Same for photo work. OS X isn’t designed for the tiny screen and the last thing I want to see supported by OS X is a touch screen! I’ll slide my greasy fingers all over my iPhone and wipe the screen on my sleeve, but I never, ever touch my computer screen!
I like that Apple is making it easier and easier for iOS and OS X apps to work on the same files, but the two operating systems need to stay separate. Microsoft tried this with Windows for phone, Windows for tablets, failed, learned nothing from the experience and is trying it again with win 8, for phone, tablet, laptop and desktop and is still not doing as well as they had hoped.
Apple needs to keep in mind that while it is good to learn from your mistakes, it’s far better to learn from the mistakes of others.
Nope, this idea was conceptualised and product made some time ago.
The product was called OQO and it was a full PC in a form factor smaller than netbooks, with a touch screen and stylus. Model 1 onwards had a USB port to plug in a keyboard From Model 2 onwards, it also had a docking station accessory that allowed you hook up a full size monitor too along with multiple USB devices. It ran the full Windows 2000 or XP operating systems and had a battery life upto 6hrs. All in a pocketable device. Oh, it also had a slide-down mini keyboard so effectively you could work while on the go. Tragically it got blindsided by the iPhone, which consumers loved, and industrials went for ruggidized notebooks for those truly determined to work on the go on full WinXP.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO
iOS 8 and Yosemite leapfrog over this tired concept. Really, “I just made it up”… where has this guy been the past decade???
Ok, let’s take the iPhone pre-iOS 8 and OS X pre-Yosemite. To get to the “pocket Mac”, you’d need a lot more horsepower. Heck, you’d need a lot more everything… storage, RAM, etc…
However, all of this extra would be wasted when you’re using the pocket Mac as an phone. Plus you’d have issues scaling it down to fit in your pocket.
So… since you’re going to have to have a keyboard, an AirPlay receiving device, and mouse/trackpad, along with some sort of storage… why design the docking component so that it’s the box about the size of a Mac mini that connects to any monitor, or build the docking components into a monitor like that of an iMac.
Then boom, you add storage and such to those devices on the desk side and what do you know, you’ve got a Mac mini or an iMac.
With iCloud plus Continuity, you’ve got a seamless transition between the desk and your mobile device regardless of whether you’re computing or telephoning.
Even better, your pocket Mac or “iPhone” gets to use an interface and apps best designed for a device that size, while the desktop experience is optimized for a desktop (or laptop) experience.
I call this the Keynote Demo at WWDC 2014, and I just made it up!
Sounds like “Ubuntu for Android”
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android
Great, another Ubuntu platform for developers to ignore.
Sounds almost like the old DuoDock. 😉
I’m surprised to see so many comments miss the point if his idea. He’s not suggesting that iOS be ported to a big screen when docked or that OSX be visible on a phone screen, a la Surface. He’s suggesting that the data carried be accessible in both formats, seen as iOS in small screen and OSX full functionality when air-docked. It’s an awesome idea, if you ask me, and exactly what’s HASNT been tried yet.