Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel" 268
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."
The Onion (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The Onion (Score:5, Funny)
The onion, where it's April 1st year round.
And where only Apple could reinvent the Wheel.
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The onion, where it's April 1st year round.
and the net, home of eternal September
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You tap 'tip tap tap tip tap tap tip tap tip tip tip tip' which spells 'EMACS' in morse code.
Or, install VIM and then hit ANY key.
Re:The Onion (Score:5, Funny)
"Spin the wheel in ANY direction."
"Hey guys, which way is the any direction?"
The more things change...
Is it just me? (Score:3, Funny)
phone next? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe next they'll invent some way to dial a phone with just some sort of rotary wheel...
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Dialing a phone with a rotary wheel will actually be a whole lot easier in my mind than typing an email with a whole wheel. I don't see how this process is faster than me typing exactly what I want. Imagine trying to program with that thing. Predictive text will not be any help with odd variables names and punctuation marks all over the place. This to me is definitely overkill.
Re:phone next? (Score:5, Funny)
Dialing a phone with a rotary wheel will actually be a whole lot easier in my mind than typing an email with a whole wheel. I don't see how this process is faster than me typing exactly what I want. Imagine trying to program with that thing. Predictive text will not be any help with odd variables names and punctuation marks all over the place. This to me is definitely overkill.
It's quick than you think. Suppose you wanted to type Whoosh! to inform someone that they had missed a joke. Once you enter Wh you can just select Whoosh! from the dropdown list.
Re:phone next? (Score:4, Funny)
Hal is working on one of these already - that's why his first sentence has "quick" where the form "quicker" should have been.
Re:phone next? (Score:5, Interesting)
If this isn't on the iPhone AppStore already, it will be real soon. Enough folks would shell out a few bucks for the novetly of it.
"Hey, look at me! I can dial my iPhone, just like in those old movies!"
Mount your iPhone in a shoe, and you can play Maxwell Smart. Now that would really freak people out, when your shoe rings, and you take it off to answer it.
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Mount your iPhone in a shoe, and you can play Maxwell Smart. Now that would really freak people out, when your shoe rings, and you take it off to answer it.
I had no idea that iPhones had such a monopoly on the "being able to be mounted in a shoe" form factor...
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Mactini (Score:2, Funny)
This reminds me of the Mactini on the The Peter Serafinowicz Show Christmas Special: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noe3kR8KqJc
MacWheel Shuffle (Score:2, Interesting)
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You could get a cardboard cutout made of yourself to fool the rest of the office.
Re:MacWheel Shuffle (Score:4, Funny)
You could get a cardboard cutout made of yourself to fool the rest of the office.
It'd probably be less painfull if you got it made of cardboard.
Why is this on the -/ frontpage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ligfhten up dude. /. did. :-) (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I thought it was a bit of a waste of space but its "The Onion" what else could is be?
Re:Why is this on the -/ frontpage? (Score:5, Funny)
MacWorld San Francisco is today. This content is made available to you as part of their 'driving and leveraging for increased consumer experience' toward the '"Idle" supersite subbrand of the Slashdot publishing matrix'.
This post took 119 minutes to write on my new MacBook Wheel.
Re:Why is this on the -/ frontpage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Why is this on the -/ frontpage? (Score:4, Funny)
-/? This is slashdot, not dashslash.
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Do you seriously lack onine news sources to read and places to comment?
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2 things put me off on this (Score:5, Funny)
2. The dude that said "I'll buy anything thats shiny made by Apple!"
I know... (Score:4, Funny)
This is a bit "out there", but to be perfectly honest I'd rather use a laptop running VISTA over that silly Macbook Wheel. It will take me more time to type an e-mail on that thing, then it would to send an e-mail on Vista. This is what happens when Steve gets sick, Apple gets desperate for ideas.
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Did you know gullible isn't in the dictionary?
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Perhaps, indeed.
Re:I know... (Score:5, Funny)
I think you're missing the real genious here. What Apple/Steve did is simplify the computing experience so that it "just works". If you were to type an email in Vista, you'd have to use the confusing keyboad which has way too many buttons. A common keyboard has about a hundred too many.
Instead, you just flick the wheel around until you get to the character you need, like you would with a safe. That's it, there's just one device you interface with, and everything is a single fluid motion around the wheel. As is often the case, you're just stuck with your old obsolete ways, while Steve has seen the light and wants to share with us all.
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GPP still had a point about Vista, though.
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Ob ... (Score:5, Funny)
- Yes, iWheel !
10-to-1 (Score:3, Funny)
Next year's big Apple announcement will be the elimination of keyboards from the MacBook Air. Just touch sensitive pads so that we can make it even THINNER!!!!
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Uh oh, that is scary, because it is not that outlandish as the wheel so I could see Apple pulling that off and convincing everyone it is better (AKA "cooler").
I mean, imagine that reading the summary, for a moment, I actually thought Apple might be giving this a go!
For example I remember how people were telling me for years that you only need one mouse button, especially when the mouse looks nice.
Anyway, this should not be on Slashdot front page unless it is April fools, but it is a great video nonetheless!
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Leave it to Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
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Seriously, though, I think Apple missed a trick here. I'm really hoping they'll invent the iNothing. People are regularly asking what could be simpler than a wheel, and whilst I agree that they have got it down quite nicely, they could go further.
With the iNothing, you don't have the hassle of using the wheel or viewing a screen, you just have to do nothing! Now it really doesn't get simpler than that. I'd pay $5000 for that, minimum!
iNothing (Score:2)
mactini (Score:3, Funny)
Puts me in mind of this recent spoof, by Peter Serafinowicz: http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/348881/d4b348a0/de_mactini.html [dumpert.nl]
This is great news (Score:2)
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Ever heard of a mouse? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_(computing) [wikipedia.org]
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These darn rodents get into all the darndest of places!
Actually, I hardly ever touch the rodent. That's what Vimperator is for.
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People are too lazy to type or read anyway
You are absolutely right, which is why this half-assed move from Apple surprises me a little bit. Well, perhaps not, when Apple does stuff they always do it half way.
As you point out, people are too lazy to type and read, so what is it with the bright and shiny LCD that they ship this with? Typical Apple Tax. They want all my money, but they give me stuff I don't need nor want. Dropping the keyboard is great, but why force me to buy a screen? I am not going to type on the keyboard, why do they think I would
Swing and a miss. (Score:2)
This joke is about 5 years late, just like their Dick Cheney/undisclosed location joke I saw a few weeks back.
I remember when the Onion was something special.
the Onion have been right before now... (Score:5, Informative)
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First Post! (Score:5, Funny)
with Macbook Wheel
I can't find my car keys. (Score:3, Funny)
How did you Added your own Sentenced, The actor asked for an aardvark. 16uy89; ?
Sent from my MacBook Wheel.
Well the iPhone has no keyboard (Score:2)
(I know this is a joke.)
The predicted 7 inch iBook will not have a keyboard. Will probably have a virtual keyboard like the iPhone.
So not to crazy to imagine a full sized laptop with a virtual keyboard.
Of course the wheel is silly.
The Next Generation (Score:2)
And the next generation version will replace the two-dimension wheel with a little sphere that can be rotated through the use of a finger - it will be called te MacBall.
Almost had me... (Score:2)
...and now I want a wheel in place of my trackpad.
Damn you, Jobs!
Fantastic Innovation! (Score:2)
Nothing is more than a few hundred clicks away!
Love this... (Score:2)
Predictive Typing... (Score:2)
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"The abortion was successful" was another one.
Steve Jobs ... (Score:2, Funny)
FUCK THIS (Score:2, Informative)
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The Net reference? (Score:2)
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I guess the onion tv bug [placement] is equivalent to a pie symbol?
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Great easter egg Onion....
Apostrophe's (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:The really sad thing about this... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The really sad thing about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and then, after you finish all that, try to write a speech recognition program without using a keyboard.
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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 wa
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telecommuting might be preferable for a lot of jobs, but not all. and i'm not just talking about manufacturing, which i think will eventually be replaced by automation.
these days everyone from school teachers to librarians to police officers use computers at work. and all of these jobs also involve non-computer-related tasks that require an on site presence. so there will always be a need for non-verbal input methods in shared work environments.
besides, it would be a pretty bleak future if everyone just wor
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we could have had that by now if Microsoft hadn't effectively killed it off. They licensed L&H's technology, incorporated it into Office and then sat on it... never bothered to actually develop it any further...
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but people under estimate the mouse a lot. I've never seen any other input device that is as exact and that you can use for hours and hours without getting tired and sore.
I can think of one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackball [wikipedia.org]
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I look forward to playing UT2020 by waving my hands in the direction I want to turn and shouting 'fire'.
I'm already training for the steady decline toward inferior input interfaces by playing FPSes on the Wii.
Re:The really sad thing about this... (Score:5, Funny)
Computer! rm -rf /var/www/old!
# rm -rf /
#
SHIT!
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You're aware this is idle right?
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And this matters why?
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which is the point of idle.
That and their stupid 22
character wide comment
input
box.
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The difference here is that the same joke was already published in The Onion. If you haven't heard it before, great. But if you really don't see that The Onion digging up stories from 10 years ago and reprinting them with some minor changes is kind of lame, I think that's kind of sad.
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I'd feel sadder about my own existance if I had any recollection at all of a joke from the Onion from 10 years ago.
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I see. So you're just a troll then?
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Re:This doesn't belong here (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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So I have one of these and I'm going to flame your elitism right off the Internet if I can finish wheeling before my battery r
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Nah... He probably IS a fanboy, with a serious case of sour grapes.
Its never funny when it is about YOUR object of desire and affection, right?
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The Qwerty Keyboard is actually designed to separate often-used letter-pairs to opposite ends because it dates back to the old mechanical typewriters that used to jam up if you went too fast due to typebars being located beside one another.
There, fixed it for ya.
"Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes." QWERTY [wikipedia.org]
As to why QWERTY is selected for computer keyboards, I can't find the answer. I believe it may partly be due to the popularity of the Selectric typewriter.
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You can now get ergonomic keyboards that are designed to let you type as fast as you like
To PP:
I can ship you one if you like. Only $299.99 excluding S&H. It has 104 keys, allowing you
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Dense much? The device existed already, but it had a different key layout.
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