[Gizzer]

I love my MacBook's giant trackpad to bits and have become a MultiTouch guru - to the point where I wish my iMac's keyboard had a trackpad on it for multitouch scrolling/zooming/page forward & back etc.

But whenever I look at it I can't help wishing it had one more feature:

Mebius Laptop



Casual on-the-go editing in Photoshop and pretty much any other image editing application would be fantastic if the MacBook trackpad also doubled as a mini tablet. I'd envisage it working in such a way that as soon as the pad detects a stylus rather than a finger, the sensitivity is increased to allow for stylus level resolution.

You wouldn't necessarily need to have the pad double as as screen (as in example above) but just having tablet-level sensitivity with a stylus would be such a creative boost.

Go on Apple, you know you want to.....

[scratt]

I like that very much.

[curiousuburb]

Hmmm...

It's like the bastard offspring of a laptop and a DS.

Tablets with integral screens underneath have been done before, and for art/design arguably require at least 6x8" real estate (presuming decent resolution). Otherwise the UI inefficiencies of zoom/scroll/pan get prohibitive. Case in point: the cramped 'piano'.

Probably faster/more intuitive than learning keyboard mapping when it comes to handwriting recognition for some stroke-based languages, but that's been known since the earliest days of Newton/Palm.

And three screens of Hello Kitty smileys and emoticons smacks of UI immaturity (or legacy devices/phones/etc)... or a very different target market.

Once OLED screens are cheap, why have a plain trackpad when you can provide additional feedback. At that point I'd expect it to be an option (the way glossy or matte were once options). But it seems like a lot of compromises for the sake of 'neato' factor at the moment.

Agree trackpad-as-tablet accuracy (with similar angle/pressure/etc stylus support) built into MBP would be cool.
Perhaps as another price differentiator from MB at the beginning, then made available across the line.

Wacom would be pissed, though.

[scratt]

Basically that's what appeals to me too..

I barely use my trackpad. Haven't for years. I always either use my machine at home with a mouse, and now I think about it generally travel with a mouse.. So it's basically on planes I use my trackpad.

But if I had a way to get scribbles and hand notes into a machine and didn't have to carry another peripheral around with me to do it, that would be worth a small premium on the cost of a machine. Either as an option or on high end machines only, like you say.

I would value that far more than voice recognition or any other of the slightly underwhelming alternative input systems for computers...

With the large expanse of real estate on the front of most laptops, particularly Apple's 15" and 17" machines, it almost seems like a no-brainer. How cool would it be to have the entire front area of a MBP in-front of the keyboard be mapped to the screen as a tablet...

[Gizzer]

Originally Posted by scratt Basically that's what appeals to me too.. I would value that far more than voice recognition or any other of the slightly underwhelming alternative input systems for computers... With the large expanse of real estate on the front of most laptops, particularly Apple's 15" and 17" machines, it almost seems like a no-brainer. How cool would it be to have the entire front area of a MBP in-front of the keyboard be mapped to the screen as a tablet...

Yes definitely. I own an ancient small Wacom tablet it's great for any task I've needed it for, so having the current MB trackpad (which is only marginally smaller) or having a massive pad spanning the whole front of the notebook would be superb.

[Bryson]

What we want is an iPhone screen embedded in the front of the laptop. Nice!

[Eugene]

Apple will eventually do this...

...except much larger...