Mac OSX Leopard on a touch-screen, but not from Apple

Recently, I’ve been arguing with a trio of ambitious entrepreneurs whether a touch interface is coming to Apple products and how this could possibly affect iPhone app development. My point was that, since Apple has already filed a patent for a touch-screen mac and had shown strong interest on multi-touch user interfaces (see iPhone), it won’t be long until we see new touch-screen Macs.

Today, circulating the news is a video demonstrating Mac OS X Leopard running on a Gigabyte M912X (video follows), a small PC laptop with a touch-screen. The video is hosted on YouTube and has already been viewed more than 12k times since it was uploaded two days ago. Reading the comments, one can see that many people would like to do the same thing with their tablet PCs, which strengthens the idea that a touch-screen Mac (or a tablet Mac) would be quite popular.

If Apple officially produces touch-screen Macs, then I can safely bet that the UI (User Interface) would be enhanced to support multi-touch gestures etc, as well as other features that were missing in the OS since it was hard to implement without a touch interface. Combining this with the recent incidents of Apple rejecting iPhone apps for duplicating built-in functionality, my point was that building an iPhone app with features resembling those of a future Mac OS release supporting touch, could possibly be rejected - if Apple has already implemented such features in the OS. And since Apple is a company that knows well how to keep secrets (see the move to Intel processors) it wouldn’t be a surprise if we suddenly see Jobs demonstrating a tablet Mac on stage, anytime soon.