Was it Wallis Simpson who said you can never be too rich or too thin? Being neither, I have no idea what the attraction could be.

Yet the revelation expressed in breathless hype and Huck Finn razzle dazzle by Steve Jobs last week at Macworld left me underwhelmed. Perhaps my expectations were led astray by the uncommon common sense of the Iphone. It was as if Apple said: what don’t you like about cellphones? Then made a list and solved for elegance.

The new laptop is a bit thinner at the front. This ain’t the future. I want the bubble car, thanks! The whole clamshell notebook is functional, but nothing new. How about a flexible screen and keyboard that roll out of a cpu container? Or unfold like a paper hat? Or roll up into a tube?



Let’s think out of the box here. You spill your coffee on any laptop in the world and it’s gone; sealed against moisture would be handy. And the whole mouse and click thing was a great idea when Doug Englebart figured it out in 1967, but it is time for gestural computing with a little more spatial specificity than in Minority Report. How about a tabloid sized touch screen with a keyboard that I can make appear with a double tap?

Well maybe next year. Although it would take Apple to successfully bring it to market, I am not holding my breath for Acer or Dell on that one.