Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel"

CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

Why is this on the -/ frontpage?

[Juggz]

Seriously? A joke article on slashdot, on a regular news day..

Ligfhten up dude. /. did. :-)

[crovira]

Personally, I thought it was a bit of a waste of space but its "The Onion" what else could is be?

Re:The really sad thing about this...

[Tx]

However, on a more serious note, it's just a matter of time before the keyboard and mouse go away. Perhaps it isn't going to happen quite as soon as some people predict, but eventually with gestural control and the ever-improving implication of voice recognition technology, there just won't be a need for direct, physical input.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure I'm not alone in not looking forward to being surrounded by an office full people jabbering at their computers, so speech recognition, even if it ever gets to a level of accuracy that makes is speed-competitive with a keyboard, will still not be suitable for a lot of working environments. And I'm not all that convinced that is is improving very quickly - current products seem to need a lot less training than those of 10 years ago, but the best you can get out of them doesn't seem much better than what could be achieved back then. Gesture recognition won't stand on it's own as an input medium, although I can see it being more useful in the forseeable future than speech recognition. Personally I see direct physical interfaces persisting right up until we can have a wireless brain interface to take over.

From TFV

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'll buy anything from Apple if it's shiny and new."

Kinda says it all about the target demographic.

Re:Why is this on the -/ frontpage?

[jayhawk88]

Oh noes, it took up almost 2 cm of your screen when you opened Slashdot, and perhaps as much as 3 minutes of your opening morning avoid-work browsing to view the video, however will you recover from such trauma?

Timing is everything

[malice]

I'm sure this being on the front page of /. has nothing to do with the Macworld Expo keynote that takes place in a matter of hours...

Re:The really sad thing about this...

[ari_j]

Try writing and formatting a 20-page brief, 150-page thesis, or a thousand 2-page letters on your cell phone if you need any proof that the full keyboard is here to stay.

Oh, and then, after you finish all that, try to write a speech recognition program without using a keyboard.

This doesn't belong here

[torstenvl]

Really really terrible submission. Should have been rejected.

For those plaintively responding "But this is idle" ... no it's not. It originated on Idle but it's on the front page, where it emphatically and utterly does not belong.

Re:This doesn't belong here

[PK_ERTW]

So, any topic that shows up on 'idle' is banned from appearing on the front page?

This is a story that clearly belongs in idle. It is also, in one dudes opinion, from the top of that pile. So if the category exists, does the cream of it not belong on the front page?

PK

Re:Why is this on the -/ frontpage?

[gsgriffin]

WHY? Because it's damn funny!! If you can laugh at the jokes made at MS (which I assume you do), then take a little...everyone on /. knows that Mac users give a lot of lip. Take a joke and enjoy it. This was better done than anything I've ever seen come from the Apple basher club.

Re:This doesn't belong here

[k7gixxer]

Where do you think that many Slashdot stories originate from? That's right - from other sections, of which Idle is just one. And they can appear on the front page! Wow! -1 to you, for being a humourless plonk.

Re:The really sad thing about this...

[ari_j]

Having actually read the parent and its parent, I, unlike you, am aware that the claim was that "it's just a matter of time before the keyboard and mouse go away." That means no keyboards at all, and it's preposterous, a few cell-phone novels from the people who grow square watermelons notwithstanding.

Your suggestion that people balked at computers because they did not view them as practical is not backed up in history, nor do you provide any citation to any serious claims of that sort. The computer was originally presented as a business machine that could replace the typewriter. Typewriters had already been popular for nearly 100 years, and were an invention born out of necessity: Business communications during the Industrial Revolution demanded a faster way to create correspondence.

Unless and until another interface is capable of performing all computing tasks at least as efficiently as the keyboard, the keyboard will be commonplace. It may be removed from certain applications, but until a better technology for writing (and formatting, as I pointed out earlier in my call to write those documents on a cell phone) letters and the like comes along, every office PC will have a keyboard.

Why voice is bad for Input?

[flamewatcher]

The reason why voice is such a bad input is not that the recognition programs are so bad but it is in the way the brain works. I use the same part of my brain to speak the sentence as I do to think about what I am going to say. Where as with finger (keyboard) input I can think about what should be recorded and let a different part of the brain control the fingers and let them do it. Like multi tasking the brain.

Re:Yeah

[bikehorn]

This is not a troll post. This is 100% insightful. Mod parent up! Idle and The Onion were funny back in like 2003 maybe.

Re:Apostrophe's

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples' latest must have gadget

Thi's seem's to have been written by a per'son who ha's no idea where to put hi's apo'strophe's

Although it is, indeed, correct.
when a word finishes with a 'S' and you want to apply it as a possessive pronoun, it is necessary to use an apostrophe next to it...