Will there be a 22-inch touchscreen iMac?
While we’re all waiting for the Apple tablet announcement (the invitations are out, by the way, Jan. 27 at 10 a.m.) we can begin to chew on a new rumor about a 22-inch iMac featuring a touchscreen.
This new scuttlebutt apparently is more of the same from Asia, where all of these devices are actually produced. It may have come from inside Apple manufacturing partner Quanta, based in Taiwan, who would be manufacturing the item, were rumor correct. The report also says that the screens will be produced by Sintek Photronic. This is all according to DigiTimes , whose report was based on an article from the Chinese language newspaper China Times. Please note that very few Apple rumors have a direct path to our ears.
Because touchscreens are becoming more popular, it is expected that the manufacturing economies of scale will inevitably bring prices down, which is also anticipated by Moore’s Law. As devices like the iPhone and iTablet proliferate, it will become less expensive to produce things with these handy screens. With what may have been prescience, Steve Jobs said several years ago in a conversation about touchscreens with Bill Gates, “This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be.”
There has been much written about the dubious ergonomics of such a device. One has only to imagine himself constantly reaching out a couple of feet in front of his face to see how heavy his arms would become if the device were used a great deal. Still, the touchscreen offers users a much more direct experience than a mouse, and some actions, like dragging, are much more natural with a finger than a mouse. The mouse cursor is, after all, a virtual representation of our finger on the display. It is possible that touchscreen gestures, in combination with a keyboard or voice recognition, could be the input devices of the immediate future, with the mouse dropping by the wayside.
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