I can kinda see the notion of it unfolded and set on a stand in ‘desktop’ mode with separate keyboard, and a mouse, and then it becomes your laptop computer on the go, and could also serve as a giant iPad for artists and other creatives.
The virtual keyboard allows Apple to sell it globally without needing separate keyboards for different locales/alphabets.
Yeah, there could be an audience, but they really have to bail the folding screen and the keyboard haptics. Apple can likely do this.
This isn't what we want. We want MacOS on iPad, just do that.
Or, better yet, an iPadOS that is still better, to the point that we are advocating for it to replace the aging MacOS. Understanding this is still 5-10 years away but we really should be in the realm of it being good enough now that we aren't seeing macOS on iPad noise.
I don't get it. What is this for? Why would Apple make this? Why would people buy it?
The workflow I have with my MBP16 is propped up on a desk with the display open at work and at home, with an external monitor connected to it. 99% of the time, it is like that. So, a 16" monitor and a 27" monitor side by side. I have an external keyboard and mouse at both desks. I just disconnect one Thunderbolt cable, put it into a backpack, and bring it back and forth.
With this, it means instead of a 16" monitor, it would be a 20" monitor. Would prefer it to be bigger at 22" to 24" though.
I'm pretty adept at using my iPad's virtual keyboard and trackpad functionality, so using this foldable's virtual keyboard and trackpad in clamshell mode would be fine me for the remaining 1% that it is used that way.
Sure. I used this concept with my very first mac, the Powerbook Duo. I had the "minidock" to clip in the powerbook, and had the onboard display of that right next to a (huge!) 19" RGB monitor. It worked great - in 1993. I wore out 3 internal powerbook keyboards in graduate school with that, then switched to using a ADB keyboard to clack away at home all day. All this said, I have no idea what advantage this rumored product has over what you described, and what I had over 30 years ago.
I don't get it. What is this for? Why would Apple make this? Why would people buy it?
The workflow I have with my MBP16 is propped up on a desk with the display open at work and at home, with an external monitor connected to it. 99% of the time, it is like that. So, a 16" monitor and a 27" monitor side by side. I have an external keyboard and mouse at both desks. I just disconnect one Thunderbolt cable, put it into a backpack, and bring it back and forth.
With this, it means instead of a 16" monitor, it would be a 20" monitor. Would prefer it to be bigger at 22" to 24" though.
I'm pretty adept at using my iPad's virtual keyboard and trackpad functionality, so using this foldable's virtual keyboard and trackpad in clamshell mode would be fine me for the remaining 1% that it is used that way.
Sure. I used this concept with my very first mac, the Powerbook Duo. I had the "minidock" to clip in the powerbook, and had the onboard display of that right next to a (huge!) 19" RGB monitor. It worked great - in 1993. I wore out 3 internal powerbook keyboards in graduate school with that, then switched to using a ADB keyboard to clack away at home all day. All this said, I have no idea what advantage this rumored product has over what you described, and what I had over 30 years ago.
I get more another 16" worth of display space, presumably at 265 PPI, that I can tote back and forth.
Is that better than just using two external monitors? Probably dependent on budget, desk space and workflows.
Kuo is going to have problems recovering from this one. We’ve been over this. MacOS, which also runs Mac Pro workstations with multiple screens, is not going to become bloated up to run a touch-based user interface. That’s why iPad will never run on MacOS. So a big, folding-screen touch-based MacBook makes no sense. A big, folding screen MacBook that isn’t touch-based makes even less sense. So ultimately here, Kuo’s prediction is not going to happen.
So I guess this will become a test of just how far sites like Apple Insider will go to let Kuo get away with changing his predictions until they finally become credited as “correct.” That’s because, for Kuo to ever turn this one around, he’s eventually going to have to morph this prediction into the one folding-screen prediction for Apple that might actually happen: a folding-screen iPad. A folding screen Mac isn’t going to happen. A folding screen iPhone isn’t going to happen. Both are fundamentally gimmicky ideas that would require too many sub-optimal compromises in quality to produce the gimmick.
A folding iPad, however, has some utility. That utility would be simple and straightforward: making a large-screen tablet more portable. At the same time, it would avoid the pitfalls inherent in folding screes for either of the other devices. It wouldn’t need an additional external screen (and the OS bloat to run it) like an iPhone would. The folding mechanism also would be far less prone to damage from wear than would an iPhone, which would be compulsively retrieved, opened and closed dozens or hundreds of times all day, every day. Unlike a folding-screen Mac or iPhone, a folding iPad would require virtually no changes or additions to the operating system. Maybe it would require an additional line in the code to equate the folding and unfolding action to the current opening and closing of a folio cover, but that’s about it.
So the question is, when Apple never releases a folding-screen MacBook, but maybe does make a folding iPad, and Kuo changes this ridiculous prediction, will the rumor sites swallow the nonsense, forget the folding-screen MacBook prediction and sing Kuo’s praises once again when he announces that he meant to say “iPad” all along?
Kuo is going to have problems recovering from this one. We’ve been over this. MacOS, which also runs Mac Pro workstations with multiple screens, is not going to become bloated up to run a touch-based user interface. That’s why iPad will never run on MacOS. So a big, folding-screen touch-based MacBook makes no sense. A big, folding screen MacBook that isn’t touch-based makes even less sense. So ultimately here, Kuo’s prediction is not going to happen.
So I guess this will become a test of just how far sites like Apple Insider will go to let Kuo get away with changing his predictions until they finally become credited as “correct.” That’s because, for Kuo to ever turn this one around, he’s eventually going to have to morph this prediction into the one folding-screen prediction for Apple that might actually happen: a folding-screen iPad. A folding screen Mac isn’t going to happen. A folding screen iPhone isn’t going to happen. Both are fundamentally gimmicky ideas that would require too many sub-optimal compromises in quality to produce the gimmick.
A folding iPad, however, has some utility. That utility would be simple and straightforward: making a large-screen tablet more portable. At the same time, it would avoid the pitfalls inherent in folding screes for either of the other devices. It wouldn’t need an additional external screen (and the OS bloat to run it) like an iPhone would. The folding mechanism also would be far less prone to damage from wear than would an iPhone, which would be compulsively retrieved, opened and closed dozens or hundreds of times all day, every day. Unlike a folding-screen Mac or iPhone, a folding iPad would require virtually no changes or additions to the operating system. Maybe it would require an additional line in the code to equate the folding and unfolding action to the current opening and closing of a folio cover, but that’s about it.
So the question is, when Apple never releases a folding-screen MacBook, but maybe does make a folding iPad, and Kuo changes this ridiculous prediction, will the rumor sites swallow the nonsense, forget the folding-screen MacBook prediction and sing Kuo’s praises once again when he announces that he meant to say “iPad” all along?
A folding screen Mac does not necessarily imply touch screen. The portion used as a keyboard would respond to touch, but the portion used as the Mac screen need not. And when you unfold it and place it on a stand as your desktop display to be used with separate keyboard and mouse, it also need not accept touch input in that mode. So some of your argument against may not be valid.
Kuo is going to have problems recovering from this one.
Sadly, no. Especially since he went out on his own a few years ago, Kuo's predictions have become far more reliably and often outrageously wrong than right, but he is never held to account. Sites like AI will continue to run stories headlined by the latest Kuo utterance, backed by the stupidity of always anonymous "supply chain sources" predicting what Apple will be doing two years from now. Because Apple so famously leaks what it's doing two years in advance. According to Kuo, under display Touch ID debuted with the iPhone 15, and we'll be getting an iPhone Fold when the 16 debuts in Sept. More recently, about a month or so back, Kuo led the charge on the "Vision Pro sales are doomed" story that was picked up everywhere, because there isn't a tech site on Earth that doesn't love an "Apple is doomed" story, An oft quoted line in the article was that sales were badly missing "market consensus." But if any site had done even casual research on Kuo's claims, it would have revealed them to be complete nonsense.
First, due to the complexity and yield of Vision Pro production, it was estimated just before launch that Apple would be constrained to about 400K units in the first year. And Apple's own comments indicated that they expected "niche" sales from Vision Pro in 2024, hardly surprising for a $3500+ v1.0 product that introduces a whole new computing platform.
Second, it was widely estimated--including by Kuo--that Apple sold as much as half this amount during the pre-order and first weekend sales of Vision Pro launch--which, at that point, was in the U.S. only. Let me reiterate: about half the units that Apple could produce annually were sold by the end of the first weekend that VP was on sale, and it had yet to launch anywhere in the world other than the U.S.
Third, Kuo issued very positive comments on Vision Pro sales just six weeks before his "Vision Pro is doomed" announcement. What changed over six weeks? Absolutely nothing.
Fourth, Apple had yet to launch Vision Pro sales anywhere outside the U.S. when it was announced that sales had "dramatically slowed." Just consider the stupidity of this: what everyone knew was going to be a niche product in its first year did gangbuster sales initially--perhaps as much as half of what could be manufactured for the year--and then, 12 weeks later, came the shocking news that sales had "slowed dramatically" in the only country where it had launched to date. Wow, who would have expected that three months after all the well-heeled, early adopters had bought their Vision Pros, sales would dramatically slow down? And yes, by all means, let's declare sales are doomed before Apple has even launched Vision Pro in its largest market, which is China, not to mention the rest of the planet. Pure idiocy.
Fifth, every article stated that Vision Pro sales were badly missing "market consensus." That was the scale of measurement against which sales were failing: "market consensus." Sure sounds authoritative, right? I mean, who would question "market consensus?" Well, guess what? There's no such thing as "market consensus" for Vision Pro sales. It literally does not exist. If you look at the brokerage house analysts who cover Apple, their first year estimates for Vision Pro sales were all over the map: from 50,000 units to 5 million units. There is no consensus--and you don't get to one by adding up these wildly varied estimates and dividing by the number of analysts. So Vision Pro sales were failing against a measurement that doesn't exist.
Kuo is going to have problems recovering from this one. We’ve been over this. MacOS, which also runs Mac Pro workstations with multiple screens, is not going to become bloated up to run a touch-based user interface. That’s why iPad will never run on MacOS. So a big, folding-screen touch-based MacBook makes no sense. A big, folding screen MacBook that isn’t touch-based makes even less sense. So ultimately here, Kuo’s prediction is not going to happen.
So I guess this will become a test of just how far sites like Apple Insider will go to let Kuo get away with changing his predictions until they finally become credited as “correct.” That’s because, for Kuo to ever turn this one around, he’s eventually going to have to morph this prediction into the one folding-screen prediction for Apple that might actually happen: a folding-screen iPad. A folding screen Mac isn’t going to happen. A folding screen iPhone isn’t going to happen. Both are fundamentally gimmicky ideas that would require too many sub-optimal compromises in quality to produce the gimmick.
A folding iPad, however, has some utility. That utility would be simple and straightforward: making a large-screen tablet more portable. At the same time, it would avoid the pitfalls inherent in folding screes for either of the other devices. It wouldn’t need an additional external screen (and the OS bloat to run it) like an iPhone would. The folding mechanism also would be far less prone to damage from wear than would an iPhone, which would be compulsively retrieved, opened and closed dozens or hundreds of times all day, every day. Unlike a folding-screen Mac or iPhone, a folding iPad would require virtually no changes or additions to the operating system. Maybe it would require an additional line in the code to equate the folding and unfolding action to the current opening and closing of a folio cover, but that’s about it.
So the question is, when Apple never releases a folding-screen MacBook, but maybe does make a folding iPad, and Kuo changes this ridiculous prediction, will the rumor sites swallow the nonsense, forget the folding-screen MacBook prediction and sing Kuo’s praises once again when he announces that he meant to say “iPad” all along?
A folding screen Mac does not necessarily imply touch screen. The portion used as a keyboard would respond to touch, but the portion used as the Mac screen need not. And when you unfold it and place it on a stand as your desktop display to be used with separate keyboard and mouse, it also need not accept touch input in that mode. So some of your argument against may not be valid.
So much of that makes no practical sense. Making half the screen touch sensitive and the other half not would be both an engineering oddity and a point of incessant user outrage. Making half the screen touch sensitive to accommodate a virtual keyboard but nothing else, and you're adding on to the user outrage. A touch screen that accepts touch input when the device is bent, but doesn't when the device is flat? Are you kidding? Apple sells craploads of iPad magic keyboards because for anything more than brief typing to fill out a text box or something, for anything bigger than an iPhone, people greatly prefer a physical keyboard over a virtual one. No one is out there thinking, 'I really hope my next MacBook upgrade doesn't have a keyboard!' All of the things you've described are crazy rationalizations to get to the gimmicky thing that no one asked for: a folding screen, keyboardless MacBook. Kuo's prediction here is the stuff of uninspired fan fiction: a painfully unoriginal, poorly thought-out narrative that a few fanboys think would be really cool, but that would make no one happy if anyone actually made it.
So no, I don't think so. I'm going say none of that invalidates my argument.
Long since the heady days of rumor threads before the iPhone, many of us tried to describe the utility of a foldable device the size of a thin paperback form factor. Something that could go in a pocket, closable to protect the screens and when opened, providing a screen that could mimic a real book - thus a latter day iBook. Since then, the iPad mini and iPhone Max's have tried to be that, but neither quite do it. To some, this may be a niche, but I think, like the original iPod, it is not a solution waiting for a problem; it is a form-factor that most didn't know they wanted.
Comments
Is that better than just using two external monitors? Probably dependent on budget, desk space and workflows.
So I guess this will become a test of just how far sites like Apple Insider will go to let Kuo get away with changing his predictions until they finally become credited as “correct.” That’s because, for Kuo to ever turn this one around, he’s eventually going to have to morph this prediction into the one folding-screen prediction for Apple that might actually happen: a folding-screen iPad. A folding screen Mac isn’t going to happen. A folding screen iPhone isn’t going to happen. Both are fundamentally gimmicky ideas that would require too many sub-optimal compromises in quality to produce the gimmick.
A folding iPad, however, has some utility. That utility would be simple and straightforward: making a large-screen tablet more portable. At the same time, it would avoid the pitfalls inherent in folding screes for either of the other devices. It wouldn’t need an additional external screen (and the OS bloat to run it) like an iPhone would. The folding mechanism also would be far less prone to damage from wear than would an iPhone, which would be compulsively retrieved, opened and closed dozens or hundreds of times all day, every day. Unlike a folding-screen Mac or iPhone, a folding iPad would require virtually no changes or additions to the operating system. Maybe it would require an additional line in the code to equate the folding and unfolding action to the current opening and closing of a folio cover, but that’s about it.
So the question is, when Apple never releases a folding-screen MacBook, but maybe does make a folding iPad, and Kuo changes this ridiculous prediction, will the rumor sites swallow the nonsense, forget the folding-screen MacBook prediction and sing Kuo’s praises once again when he announces that he meant to say “iPad” all along?
First, due to the complexity and yield of Vision Pro production, it was estimated just before launch that Apple would be constrained to about 400K units in the first year. And Apple's own comments indicated that they expected "niche" sales from Vision Pro in 2024, hardly surprising for a $3500+ v1.0 product that introduces a whole new computing platform.
Second, it was widely estimated--including by Kuo--that Apple sold as much as half this amount during the pre-order and first weekend sales of Vision Pro launch--which, at that point, was in the U.S. only. Let me reiterate: about half the units that Apple could produce annually were sold by the end of the first weekend that VP was on sale, and it had yet to launch anywhere in the world other than the U.S.
Third, Kuo issued very positive comments on Vision Pro sales just six weeks before his "Vision Pro is doomed" announcement. What changed over six weeks? Absolutely nothing.
Fourth, Apple had yet to launch Vision Pro sales anywhere outside the U.S. when it was announced that sales had "dramatically slowed." Just consider the stupidity of this: what everyone knew was going to be a niche product in its first year did gangbuster sales initially--perhaps as much as half of what could be manufactured for the year--and then, 12 weeks later, came the shocking news that sales had "slowed dramatically" in the only country where it had launched to date. Wow, who would have expected that three months after all the well-heeled, early adopters had bought their Vision Pros, sales would dramatically slow down? And yes, by all means, let's declare sales are doomed before Apple has even launched Vision Pro in its largest market, which is China, not to mention the rest of the planet. Pure idiocy.
Fifth, every article stated that Vision Pro sales were badly missing "market consensus." That was the scale of measurement against which sales were failing: "market consensus." Sure sounds authoritative, right? I mean, who would question "market consensus?" Well, guess what? There's no such thing as "market consensus" for Vision Pro sales. It literally does not exist. If you look at the brokerage house analysts who cover Apple, their first year estimates for Vision Pro sales were all over the map: from 50,000 units to 5 million units. There is no consensus--and you don't get to one by adding up these wildly varied estimates and dividing by the number of analysts. So Vision Pro sales were failing against a measurement that doesn't exist.
A class action lawsuit in the womb hoping to be born.....
So no, I don't think so. I'm going say none of that invalidates my argument.