Isamu Sanada, the Japanese photographer who makes Mac mockups, has created a new design for a tablet Mac that blends the iPhone with the MacBook Air subnotebook. He calls it the Mac Air.
According to a rough translation of his site, the Mac Air also doubles as a desktop.
It hooks to a wireless keyboard and uses a wireless Time Capsule-like docking station as a hard drive. The dock includes a SuperDrive for playing and burning Cds/DVDs.
It boots into the iPhone operating system when a tablet, and OS X when used as a desktop.
It’s a great idea, but will Apple ever make such a device? Maybe. Sanada has once or twice correctly predicted Apple’s products in the past. As previously reported:
Isamu Sanada is a photographer by trade, but an Apple designer by calling.
Sanada is an amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes. His Applele website is a popular showcase for dozens of speculative designs for future Apple machines.
In fact, Sanada is so adept at mimicking Apple’s look, he created a design for a new laptop that predicted Apple’s distinctive Titanium PowerBook G4 months before it came out.
Apple has released new firmware updates for several machines, but offered no meaningful explanation of what the update does. Apple’s note is maddeningly cryptic:
This update fixes several issues to improve the stability of [MacBook Air. Macbook, MacBook Pro, iMac] computers
Apple also released an update for the Aluminum Keyboard, but this one at least includes a meaningful description of the changes:
This firmware update addresses an issue with the aluminum Apple Keyboard and the aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard where a key may repeat unexpectedly while typing.
Back in January, I was fairly effusive in my disappointment in the MacBook Air. I still think it’s a product that has a long way to go before it fulfills its promise as a thin, light, road warrior’s machine (the fact that it isn’t standard with an SSD is a pretty poor statement about its long-term reliability), but I’m now willing to admit that it hits the mark with at least some people, including people I really respect, like BusinessWeek’s Reena Jana, their innovation editor.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with Reena in the past, and she’s a constantly on-the-go kind of person, meeting with design and innovation leaders around the country. She probably travels for business more than I do. And she loves her MacBook Air:
OK, so I personally don’t have the need for many USB ports, nor for a huge, huge hard drive. And I don’t even feel that bad that there’s no Ethernet port, although I could get an attachment for it, which to me isn’t such a big deal (I rarely use the Ethernet jack). I’m reminded of when MacBook’s stopped having a floppy drive, or a dial-up jack. People were upset. But other laptops followed, because these features became obsolete. I see a parallel here, and my laptop lifestyle was starting to reflect the phasing out of DVDs and Ethernet jacks before the Air was released.
Fair points all, though I think I’d be more comfortable with the Air’s lack of a DVD drive if Apple distributed its own software, such as iWork, on USB key instead of DVD… Still, this is another reminder that a lot of people don’t need anywhere near the file storage capacity that I do. Just this weekend, I learned that my sister-in-law is desperate for an Air, as well. I’ll be very interested to hear how the Air performs in the market. I still think it will meet a fate similar to the G4 Cube, but there are some people who are incredibly excited by it.
For me, I think I’m stuck in Steven Levy’s camp: If I even had one, I think I’d probably throw it out with the newspapers by accident.
Apple patents are the key to understanding the next generation of products. The latest submitted, by Wayne Westerman (of Fingerworks), is no different. This patent application shows diagrams directly relating to multi-touch on Mac OS X, illustrating a drop down control panel with advanced multi-touch settings. There are a series of 'chords', or combinations of different fingers, which to different operations. There are already basic multi-touch gestures instated in the Macbook/Pro's, but we can assume that those laptops are not equipped for the advanced gestures. The Macbook Air, however, may be able to adopt these through a software update.
This patent application effectively claims that the new multi-touch trackpads are sensitive enough to detect the various combinations of fingers which are being used. This opens up another world of functionality for Apple, and if the patents keep rolling in, it might be Apple-specific, which will really help to increase their market share. Mac-1 PC-0
Apple patents are the key to understanding the next generation of products. The latest submitted, by Wayne Westerman (of Fingerworks), is no different. This patent application shows diagrams directly relating to multi-touch on Mac OS X, illustrating a drop down control panel with advanced multi-touch settings. There are a series of 'chords', or combinations of different fingers, which to different operations. There are already basic multi-touch gestures instated in the Macbook/Pro's, but we can assume that those laptops are not equipped for the advanced gestures. The Macbook Air, however, may be able to adopt these through a software update.
This patent application effectively claims that the new multi-touch trackpads are sensitive enough to detect the various combinations of fingers which are being used. This opens up another world of functionality for Apple, and if the patents keep rolling in, it might be Apple-specific, which will really help to increase their market share. Mac-1 PC-0
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