18 MACWORLD FEBRUARY 2020
MAC USER WOULD APPLE MAKE ITS OWN SURFACE NEO?correct? You can’t
get crumbs caught in
a touchscreen.
I’m sure that in its
labs, Apple has
toyed with extending
the Touch Bar so
that it’s a virtual
keyboard and
trackpad, a control
surface that can be
retasked to be pretty
much anything you
want it to be. (Is this
not the ultimate
lesson of the original
iPhone?)
The problem with
this scenario is that it crashes against the fact
that Apple has not yet made any efforts to
adapt the Mac interface to support touch.
Unless it does so, what does this product
look like? Is there an entirely separate
interface on the bottom surface, separate
from the Mac, like the Touch Bar? It seems
like a waste of the space if macOS can’t use
that screen as a second display—but without
a touch-friendly interface, it seems like a
waste of time.
iPAD NEO
Let’s turn to the iPad, where Apple has
shown that it’s more open-minded about
extending the way the device works
with alternate input methods. Apple has
embraced keyboard input on the iPad
with the Smart Keyboard, and even
added a dollop of mouse support in
iPadOS 13.
Perhaps more importantly, iPadOS 13’s
addition of multi-window support might be
about more than just different ways of
multitasking. Once iPadOS and all of its
apps understand the idea of running in
multiple windows, the door is also open to
running those apps across multiple
displays—as in a two-screened device like
an iPad Neo.
Still, the Surface Neo is shaped like a
laptop—the hinge is a pretty powerfulSupport for multiple windows in iPadOS could lead to the ability to
run those apps over multiple displays.