Well, I just took my first look at Apple’s preview page for OS X Lion. I had heard about some of the new features before. I suppose full-screen applications will be nice, and the support for document versioning at the OS level should be great, though it will take a little while for the application developers to catch up. Anyway, the apparent convergence between OS X and iOS is a logical direction for Apple to take.

Steve Jobs said at the Back to the Mac event in October 2010 that they weren’t planning to make a touch-screen Mac. He’s right that working with a vertical touch screen would be ergonomically awful, and although I can see some virtue in having both a multi-touch trackpad (for most things) and a touchscreen on the same computer, the benefits probably would not be worth the cost.

On the other hand, it occurred to me when I read about Jobs’ remarks that it might be a sort of smokescreen, because I don’t think a touch-screen Mac is out of the question. I think we might see something from Apple that would attempt to land in between the iPad and the MacBook Air. Imagine something like an iPad with a keyboard that slides out from under the screen when you need it – or perhaps an Air with one of those flip-around keyboard arrangements like the Windows tablet PCs have. As a “MacBook Touch” such a machine could run a touch-enabled OS X (and don’t anyone try to tell me Apple is not at least prototyping such a thing). Or as an “iPad Pro” it could provide a real keyboard to the iPad.

Keys: apple