Snow Leopard: Clear signs of the Mac touch?
The hunt for the “iPod touch on steroids”—aka Mac touch, Mac tablet—has fans, bloggers and the media seeking out any scrap of information, real or imagined, about the seemingly mythical device. Although serious analysts and pundits do believe Apple will release a touch-input portable computer, its size, shape and interface all remain cloaked in secrecy.
Thereupon, News.com has taken some time to go over the refinements in Snow Leopard and pronounced itself satisfied that new touch friendly features are already baked in. Further, with OS X 10.6 not due until September, also one of the possible timeframes for a touch product launch, Apple has plenty of time to add and refine the necessary features.
“After a closer look, however, the unifying theme of several of the new features of Snow Leopard is that they’re now extremely easy to navigate without a keyboard, or without a lot of mouse clicking,” Josh Lowensohn, News.com. “That also happens to be one of the keys to a successful mobile interface: keeping steps to opening applications and performing tasks to a minimum.”
Here are some of the specific changes in Snow Leopard that perhaps tip Apple’s hand:
• Expose in the Dock cuts out the need to use a keyboard, or use a trackpad gesture control open application, finder windows
• Safari 4 features accommodate easier navigation by touch, including Coverflow and Top Sites
• Quicktime X is also more touch-friendly, player controls are quite similar to the iPhone
• Stacks now has a scrolling option, resizable thumbnails
• Freehand drawing, Chinese character input (’nuff said)
See also:
— Does a 32GB iPhone mean a 64GB iPod touch?
— Cameras coming to the iPod touch, iPod nano?
— Analysts predict 7″ touch, 10″ mini notebook
With touch-friendly features already baked in, can we expect an über iPod touch any time soon? The earliest timeframe possible is September, when Apple plans to release Snow Leopard and when the company traditionally refreshes its iPod line, where many assume the so-called iPod touch on steroids will be positioned.
Nevertheless, the smart money — notably Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg — says not to expect a new touch or tablet device until 2010.
That said, almost no one expected the big changes Apple made to its MacBook Pro product lines at WWDC. Could the mothership be readying another surprise for September, are things well enough along, or will a new touch-based device have to wait until next year?
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June 17th, 2009
I doubt it will happen before 2010, but I think Apple are listening to their customers a little more these days because the economic climate demands that they meet their customers’ needs. Take the macbooks – Firewire was reintroduced. An SD card slot was introduced. There was a market for this and Apple is trying to exploit it.
Similarly, there is most definitely a market for a tablet Apple PC – just look at the amount of blogs about it – and therefore they will make one at some point. Its almost definitely in the works now, but Apple won’t want to release one that isn’t ‘upto scratch’ so to speak. That means it has to be aesthetically pleasing, intuitive and relatively powerful. In the absence of Steve Jobs, they might well be waiting for his return and approval of it as it is probably him pioneering such an idea anyway. He brings the ideas and suggestions, others work around those ideas.
Of course, wouldn’t it be a lovely surprise if they released it totally by surprise along with Snow Leopard, and just announced it a week before its release? Highly, highly unlikely to happen, but still, it would be nice.