Tag Archives | Apple

Over at CNet’s The Digital Home blog, Don Reisinger has posted a plea for Apple to release a touch-screen Mac computer. The meme isn’t new–in part because Apple patent filings have suggested for years that the company has at least thought about making such a beast.

I disagree with Don, though, that Apple should release a…well, let’s call it a Mac Touch…”as soon as possible.” And while it’s completely true that predicting what Apple will or won’t do is dangerous, I kind of doubt that a Mac Touch is imminent. Here’s why.

–The Tablet PC has been a miserable failure. It’s been almost six years since Microsoft rolled out Windows-based tablets. I remember asking a Microsoft exec at the time how he thought the platform would do; he told me that he thought that most laptops would be tablets within a few years. Instead, it seems more likely that Tablet PC might just disappear, except for vertical business applications.

(Side note: The Tablet PC rollout featured Rob Lowe–yet another oddball Microsoft celebrity endorsement.)

I was skeptical about Tablet PC at the time, and was therefore not the least bit surprised that it failed to catch fire. You can’t build a good general-purpose Windows laptop that doesn’t have a physical keyboard, and if you do provide a physical keyboard, touch becomes a lot less compelling. And to this day, Microsoft’s answers to basic questions about touch-based interfaces remain unsatisfying.

It’s likely that a Mac Touch would be substantially different from a Tablet PC–for one thing, it would likely involve multi-touch and fingertip control rather than a stylus–and Apple would likely offer a much more refined approach than Microsoft. But I think that the failure of Tablet PCs shows that consumer interest in touch interfaces on standard computers is lukewarm, to put it mildly. And while Apple often enters nascent markets before anyone’s had a big hit, it’s rare to see it do anything where other companies have experienced nothing but failure.

–Keyboards and touch don’t mesh that well. Don says that a Mac Touch should have a physical keyboard. But if it’s essentially a normal MacBook with a multi-touch screen, there are all kinds of usability issues. Do you really want to reach over the keyboard to touch the screen? Can you design a MacBook with a hinge that stands up to lots of finger-pointing? Would people be able to deal with finger-smudging? And if the design is more like a Tablet PC convertible, with a screen that rotates around to conceal the keyboard, would Apple be able to provide enough functionality with a touch-only interface to make the experience worthwhile? (Folks are willing to deal with the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard because it has clear upsides in terms of device and screen size; I’m not sure that the same would be true of a Mac Touch.) If the Mac Touch was a desktop–Don doesn’t explicitly say he thinks it should be a portable–would it have more potential than HP’s interesting but nichey TouchSmart PC?

–What could you do with a touch-screen Mac, anyhow? Don doesn’t really address this. Presumably, it might offer some features similar to the iPhone’s touch-driven photo viewer, media player, and so forth. It might even use a touch-screen as a replacement for a standard touchpad (or an alternative–a Mac Touch might sport both). But it’s not clear that a touch-driven interface on an otherwise typical Mac would provide any compelling benefits.

–Apple is so dang busy with other stuff. Even Steve Jobs said that the glitchy rollout of Mobile Me was evidence that the company had bitten off more than it could chew in one big gulp. Doing touch well would be a major undertaking, and I wonder whether Apple would see it as having enough potential payoff to be worth the work involved.

I’m completely willing to be proven wrong here. Maybe Apple has figured out how to make touch make sense. (If it has, I woudn’t be surprised if its device looks less like a touch-screen Mac and more like a hybrid device that’s sort of like a Mac and sort of like an iPhone, and sized in between.) Maybe it hasn’t figured out touch, but is going to try anyhow, just because the idea sounds theoretically cool.

Actually, I’m not just willing to be proven wrong–I’d love to see a Mac Touch that makes sense. One thing’s for sure: Steve Jobs has more vision when it comes to this stuff than I do…