Wow, that ended awkwardly: > When we were exploring multitouch many, many years ago, we were trying to understand the appropriate application and opportunities

Wow, that ended awkwardly: > When we were exploring multitouch many, many years ago, we were trying to understand the appropriate application and opportunities for [it]. We just didn’t feel that [the Mac] was the right place for that…. It wasn’t particularly useful or an appropriate application of multitouch. > Because? > For a bunch of practical reasons. It’s difficult to talk [laughs] without going into a lot of details that puts me starting to talk about things that we are working on. I don’t really want to talk much more about it. The politics behind this must be mind-bending. In the earliest days of touch computing, Apple and Microsoft each bet the farm on two different strategies. Apple spun off a new product line based on iOS while Microsoft worked to integrate touch into the existing laptop / desktop OS. Microsoft's difficulty shoehorning Windows onto a phone-sized device meant that Apple's phone products were always superior (though MS did turn out a few good devices along the way). However they have finally integrated touch into Windows in a way that is starting to transform the product. The critical issue here is that now both companies feel the bind of their strategies. Apple now has to double-down on its decision not to put touchscreens on Macs. There's absolutely no technical reasons the Mac team can't integrate a touchscreen into a Mac - hell, it's probably easier than getting one to work in Windows. The only thing stopping them now is politics, and the original design decision, which has some merit (a touch-enabled 12" Macbook might make sense, but a touch-enabled 27" or larger iMac? C'mon.) It's political because there now exist two different power centers within Apple that are not really integrable and their existence is dependent on Macs not having touchscreens. Now it's just a question of which strategy works best. As a matter of fact I don't have a strong opinion on this, but a few years ago I bet that, if Microsoft could actually bring touch to Windows in a way that really worked, they'd win for the very reason that Apple would be structurally unable to copy it. [1] [1] http://riprowan.com/windows-8-vs-ipad-advantage-microsoft/ http://riprowan.com/windows-8-vs-ipad-advantage-microsoft/