“My computing roots can be traced back to CP/M and an Osborne 1, so color me about as tried and true as a Mac user can be,” Ron McElfresh writes for McSolo. “First Mac, April 1984. Since then, I’ve owned nearly everything Mac, and most things Apple. And a few PCs and Windows PCs, along the way too, not to mention management of a few dozen Linux servers through the years.”
“That makes me not only experienced but curious about current trends. Ooe that is notable is the Chromebook line, and one that has my eye is the Asus Chromebook Flip C302, recently introduced at CES and soon to hit the market,” McElfresh writes. “For the most part, Chromebooks– easily viewed and tried at the nearest Best Buy store– look much like MacBooks for as much as $1,000 less.”
The Asus Chromebook Flip C302 “is a Chromebook I want to see but it’s size, weight, and Chromebook OS make it much less of a useful computer for me than a MacBook of nearly the same size and far more expensive,” McElfresh writes. “That brings me to a wishlist item. A MacPad. Think of it as a very small touchscreen MacBook; thin and light but running an Apple designed ARM-based A-series CPU like that found in the iPad. It wouldn’t run Windows or Linus, probably not do well with Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, but it would be competitive with Windows and Chromebook hardware at the premium end of the low end.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s way make sense: Touch onscreen only when there is no other primary input available.
What you really have to see is anyone under the age of 12, largely untainted by previous computing paradigms, using an iPad. That is the future, not trying to turn Macs into iPads.
That said, as we’ve asked many times over the past few years: Anyone in the market for a 12.9-inch device that’s an OS X-powered MacBook when docked with its keyboard base and an iOS-powered iPad Pro when undocked?
Illustration from Apple’s hybrid Mac-iPad patent application
