John Beales

If you haven’t heard, the Advertising Standards Authority, (the UK’s advertising watchdog), has banned this ad in response to 2 viewer complaints:

The judgement states the ad was banned because the statement that “all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone” was deemed misleading because the iPhone does “not support Flash or Java, both integral to many web pages.”

This judgement hightlights the fact that regulators don’t often truly understand the internet, even if they are sometimes required to regulate it.  If we take the ASA’s ruling at face value then nobody can advertise any computer as being able to access “all the parts of the internet” since most computers ship without Flash or Java plugins installed.   To take that arguement even further, since most computers that are sold run Windows, and windows comes with Internet Explorer, and IE, in it’s current form, is not 100% standards-compliant, so all of the Internet is not available computers either, at least not out of the box.

Granted, the iPhone is much more difficult to add a Flash or Java plugin to, (I believe it is impossible right now), but governments and regulators seem to pass strange, mis-informed judgements sometimes.  On the other hand, we’re really wanting some regulation when it comes to net neutrality.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about a MacBook Touch – a Mac laptop with a touch screen, perhaps in tablet form, but each time I read a speculation like this I wonder – would a MacBook Touch really be useful?

Image found at http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2008/07/rumour_macbook.html

I sit at a desk, (or on a couch sometimes), and work on my MacBook Pro.  I spend most of my time coding in PHP, Javascript, HTML, or CSS, and I use the trackpad to control the mouse.  This way I rarely have to move my hands, (I know it sounds lazy).  I find that I can get things done fastest working like this.  If my computer were to have a touch, (or multi-touch), screen I would have to lift my arms, touch the screen, then find my position again on the keyboard.  I know it would be fast, but multiplied by a thousand, (or however many times I interact with the mouse), per day it would take a lot of time.  Really, if I can drag something across the screen by moving one finger five cenimetres on the trackpad, why would I involve my whole arm in dragging something twenty-five centimetres across the screen?  Call me lazy, but it seems like a lot of unneeded work to me.

Another more minor issue would be the dirty, dirty screen.  My screens, (on all of my computers, not just the MacBook Pro), get pretty dirty, I they would probably get pretty disgusting if I was touching them all of the time, instead of just sometimes as I do now.  True, I could, (and would), clean the screen, but it’s not just a one and a half second wipe like on an iPhone or iPod Touch – I imagine that it would get annoying after a while.

A tablet form factor would reduce these problems.  I have never owned a Tablet PC myself, but the demos I’ve seen were pretty cool and I can see how they would be useful in some situations, but for everyday computing I don’t really see how the added cost of a touch screen would give a MacBook Touch any added value.

Of course, they usually seem to figure out how to do it down there at Apple, so if they are actually working on a MacBook Touch, it may be excellent, we’ll have to wait and see.