Harry McCracken: “And for close to seven years, I’ve used an iPad in a keyboard case as my primary computing device. In all the years that I’ve been raising my arm to the screen to tap icons, scroll through text, and perform other actions, it’s never felt like an ergonomic burden, or even something I give much thought to one way or another. There are certainly instances when using a mouse or trackpad might have felt easier—for selecting large chunks of text, for instance—but that has less to do with inherent problems with touchscreen computing than it does the design of iOS and iOS apps.”
I like to visit a local Starbucks when I’d like to get out of the house while working. When I do I have a habit of counting the devices I see around me and what type they are. Are they MacBook’s are they PC’s? I’ve run across a fair number of folks using touchscreen Windows boxes, most notably Surface Pro’s. They’re great computers. The display is basically a tablet with a detachable keyboard. Think about iPad Pro with an Apple Keyboard. Yeah, just like that, but in this case the computer is running full blown Windows. I know it’s blasphemy to you like Windows in the Apple ecosystem, but I really do like the Windows Operating system and Microsoft’s developer tools. They’re both top notch. If I were writing Windows applications everyday I’d pick up a Surface Pro as my daily driver. It would be powerful enough for building code and I could detach the keyboard and use it as a tablet. Oh, did I mention the Surface Pro has a pointing device? That’s a big bonus for fine grained selection.
In conclusion you can lump me with the “I’d love to see a MacBook Pro with touchscreen or a new product based on iOS that is deeper, richer, than ever before” crowd. A version of iOS with a trackpad and mouse pointer that can run Xcode — optimized for iOS — and other tools.
I’d call it iBook.
