the touchscreens are coming

May 21st, 2012

Chuck Skoda:

In the Apple community, I keep hearing things like ‘OS X and iOS will never merge’ and ‘there will never be a touchscreen Mac.’ There are other like assertions, and it’s beyond my scope to talk about them all. These assertions are firmly grounded in the environment we live in today, and such statements yield very little to imagination.

Chuck argues that the assumptions we make about what computers should be and will be in the future will fall away for children now growing up where the “computer” they primarily use don’t have a keyboard or mouse.

What I find incredibly exciting about this is the interfaces people who grew up with touchscreen devices design could be very different than the ones we design. The user interfaces designed thus far for touch devices are still in large part based on concepts from the PC. That will not be true for the next generation.