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C|Net Looks at Apple's Magic Touch

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:45 PM - by

Apple believes that the multitouch interface so popular on its iPhone will transfer to the MacBooks. The problem is that as Apple enforces its patents on various gestures, competitors will seek creative ways around those patents, and the technical community, accustomed to 25 years of standard mice and icons, will end up with many different user interfaces, according to C|Net on Tuesday.

Apple first brought the touch pad gestures over the MacBook Air, but now that they're included in the new MacBooks Pros, many more customers will be exposed to the technology. One can expect Apple to protect that technology IP as it percolates into the mainstream, especially with notebooks being a significant fraction of Apple's sales.

Even so, competitors won't be far behind. At CES, Synaptics introduced their own multitouch UI called "Momentum." Microsoft is well known for its Surface Project.

On one hand, Apple has an opportunity to create the next generation user interface for small, portable computers. However, there is also a risk that we could soon see the same gesture doing different things on different devices from different companies. That could be a giant step backward for the industry, according to Tom Krazit.

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Wed Feb 27, 2008 4:40 am

The name of the company is "CNET Networks" or "CNET" for short.

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LaurieF said:

member since 15 Jun 2001 with 3547 posts, TMO Forum Mod, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Feb 27, 2008 6:03 am

Yeah fine - thanks - go to the web site and look at the logo to the left of cnet.com…

In other words, it doesn't matter.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:49 pm

The logo looks like c|net, not C|Net, but that's just the graphic logo. The company name is "CNET" for short or "CNET Networks". It matters because "C|Net" shows total disregard for accuracy in reporting.

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