Patent Filings Show Touch Screens Coming To The Mac: Told Ya!
Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 23, 2010
A little less than two years ago I took a great deal of heat from a pack of readers who were irate, nay, irrationally incensed, about a column I wrote. My sin? Arguing that Apple, the company that made the world familiar with the multi-touch interface found on the iPhone and the iPad, was at the time behind the curve with regard to touch technology on the PC. A new touch-friendly HP notebook, I argued at the time, had beaten Apple to that punch.
Today HP offers four desktops and at least one notebook with touch-enabled screens. You may argue the ergonomic merits of raising your arms to touch a screen that’s placed before you, and debate whether it’s an effective option for an interface. Yet Mathematically speaking, five is more than zero, making HP, by that simple measure, still ahead. Apple has yet to bring touch-enabled displays to the Mac. Yes the glass track pads on the MacBook Pro are , as is Apple’s terrific Magic Trackpad.
Now the evidence is mounting that the displays on Macs and MacBooks may soon be getting the touch-treatment. The Patently Apple blog has un-Earthed what it describes as the “Mother Lode” of patent applications: “The iMac Touch.”
It’s a fascinating application which the blog’s author, Jack Purcher, describes like so: “Imagine having an iMac on your desktop one minute and a gigantic iPad the next,” meaning you’ll be able to switch between running Mac OS X one minute, and iOS4 the next. The stand holding the display is shown with the ability to collapse and flatten allowing the screen to face up in order to more easily allow touching and thus solving that ergonomic issue.
And it’s not the only Apple patent filing suggesting touch displays on the Mac. Another surfaced recently pointing to touch displays on the MacBook line.
Previously Apple has been known to dismiss the idea of touching the screen, at least within the context of a personal computer. Touchscreens for notebooks, as CEO Steve Jobs said once in 2008, hadn’t “made a lot of sense to us.” As has often been his practice, Jobs disparages something only a few years before he embraces it. Examples include video on the iPod and digital books. We know how those turned out. Touching the screen on the Mac appears it could be next.
