There is a touch Mac in your future

For the past couple of years all MacBooks have had multi-touch enabled trackpads which has led Mac software developers to start adding support this type of input.  More recently Apple introduced a multi-touch enabled mouse, which lets users of iMacs use gestures in the applications that support them.

Does anyone think that this is in no way related to Apple’s very successful multi-touch based products: iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad? I certainly don’t.

iPhone OS is derived from OS X, sharing most of the code with the desktop and notebook OS.  The reasons for this close relationship are now more evident after Steve Jobs revealed that the iPad was in development before they started working on the iPhone.  It seems clear that iPhone OS started out to be a touch enabled version of OS X which according to the initial presentation of the iPhone SDK, two years ago, that is in essence what it is.  iPhone OS is comprised of the core layers of OS X combined with a different interface layer.

While the ideal form factor for multi-touch enabled computers escapes me, I’m pretty sure that Apple has a team of engineers working on it and that they will figure out an answer.  In fact, discovering this form factor and being able to do a good implementation of the hardware for it might be one of the major potholes in Apple’s path to delivering a multi-touch desktop.

Most people look at the iPad and naturally consider it a large iPhone, or iPod Touch.  It seems that not as many look at it and see it as a small iMac, but apart from the Home button the iPad looks very much like a miniature version of that desktop computer.

While I’m not expecting any announcements in this direction for this year’s WWDC, I believe it is not far away.  It would probably be premature for Apple to even comment on a move such as this now, but once Apple has sold over 10 million iPads and has been shipping desktop computers with multi-touch mice for a couple of years…  Perhaps at WWDC 2011.

On the other hand, would not be surprised to see Mac mini’s getting a bundled Magic mouse, as part of the product or a recurring bundle offer, as it is now the only computer that Apple is selling that doesn’t come with any sort of multi-touch interface device.