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Apple Patent Filing Points To a Keyboard With No Keys (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Apple's patent, titled "Configurable Force-Sensitive Input Structure for Electronic Devices," was filed in September 2015 and was recently made available to the public on April 7th. It states that this all-in-one input interface consists of a metal contact layer, and a sense layer combined with a drive layer mounted underneath. According to the patent, the sense and drive layers detect a force exerted on the metal contact layer. This is accomplished by using an array of pixels on the sense and drive layers that determine an input location when active pixels are aligned on both layers. The user then gets a response to his or her action thanks to a haptic feedback module and a light guide layer that lights up the "keys" through extremely tiny holes in the metal surface. The components of the force-input sensitive "structure" are enclosed within the device's chassis; thus the only exposed portion is the contact surface itself. In a provided drawing, the illustrated notebook shows four distinct input areas on the surface. However, the patent states that the device can have any number of input areas defined on the contact portion.
Even more amazingly, the mockup shows that the new Macbooks will come with Windows keys! http://s3.amazonaws.com/digita...
Finally, Apple has done away with the last advantage Microsoft had left.
... sort of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTK4eRzcRyI . Why would anyone think a buttonless keyboard would be a good idea?
A configurable braille keyboard and perhaps even a braille screen (by turning on/off the haptic feedback of a key) at the cost of a "standard" keyboard.
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There is prior art.
... this is really only good for hunt-and-peckers. I already have serious trouble using laptops with touchpad since my hovering thumb too often gets mistaken for a touch. Combine with focus-follows-pointer and soonish I'm ready to throw the entire thing out the nearest window. So I really do prefer keys and a trackpoint, thanks. Now if you turn the entire surface into a touch-sensitive deal, a touch-typist will have ten fingers hovering over it, which'll likely cause all sorts of noise, distracting from getting work done. So this really is only good for people who don't do that. Try and combine touch-typing with not-hovering and we might even see another wave of RSI. At any rate, if touch-typing is out then the average touch-typist's WPM rate will take a hit. But nevermind that. All hail apple's newfound coolness. Welp, very innovative, apple boys.
Just make the entire bottom of the laptop a touch screen....
Oh wait Apple doesn't have touch screen laptops yet.
Keyless keyboard has been around for a while. This article was posted 2/11/2007. http://www.gadgetgrid.com/2007...
don't jump on this shit like they did apple's chiclet keyboards.
Both of those changes were an infuriating and wasteful alteration that didn't help the ergonomics of either device, for me at least.
Do they think all computer users are casual users nowadays? Because if the Tablet situation didn't teach them anything I don't know what help there is for them.
Keyboards have keys for a reason. The standardization of formfactor, general placement, etc were done for reasons which overall are egonomic to proficient users. Forcing us to an entirely new paradigm every 10ish years is *NOT* helping things.
I'm up to about 5 different formfactors and layouts of keys today. And yet out of all of them I still return to my nice old AT styled keyboards. The ones with an arrow and editing key box placed between a numpad and the qwerty keys. It may be a bit big, but nothing else is quite like it for typing shit up fast and quickly being able to reassess by touch where you are positioned over the keys.
Well, they were very successful with the phone that can't make calls (Ipod touch) so anything is possible.
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Sounds like an innovative invention to me.
So, functionally speaking, it's basically a cross between these two products with haptic feedback?
http://www.amazon.com/CTX-VK20...
http://www.amazon.com/Optimus-...
Okay, good luck with that.
I've kinda gone in the other direction. Right now I'm typing on one of these...
http://www.pckeyboard.com/page...
I already hate the idea.
No tactile feed back. typos will abound.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Why would you want to use a keyboard that gives no actual feedback? I guess people don't care to type fast without making mistakes and not having to look at the keyboard like an idiot. It's a really frustrating experience on mobile or foldable keyboards.
They are obviously trying to trick Steve Jobs (who openly loathed physical buttons) into coming back to life. The joke's on Apple because Steve already had himself reincarnated as a cow in India.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They will invent a laptop that has no screen.
Laser projection virtual keyboards have been around for years. Apple is simply removing the cool projection part and then complicating the design. No thanks.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just like normal Repetitive Strain Injury, but somehow better!
I swear, Apple needs to be banned from making peripherals. Their keyboards, up until the most recent aluminum ones, required the user to take piano lessons to build up the finger strength necessary to push the damn keys. They couldn't make an even remotely ergonomic mouse to save their lives.
And now they're making keyboards with no keys? Do they not care how jarring it will be to people's fingers, when they are hammering away on a solid surface?
It's one thing to use a touchpad where you are alternating between gliding and tapping. It's another thing entirely when you are tapping constantly.
I can only assume that they've struck some kind of backroom kickback deal with Kinesis, for all the custom that is going to be flooding their way when people start suffering RSI en masse.
Basically a keyboard with no feedback whatsoever. You're essentially whacking your fingers on a solid surface with no relief.
It's like projected keyboards and touchscreens.
RSI, thy name is Crappy Keyboard!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
While this is interesting, you can find Apple patents for plenty of ideas that never came to be.
The most interesting one I recall seeing was back in '08 or '09 (pre-iPad) for a presumably OS X tablet device that would act as the brains/screen of a desktop or laptop setup. More or less, your "computer" would go with you anywhere as this tablet, but your experience using it would vary, depending on what chassis you plugged it into. I recall they had one that was an iMac chassis with a slot on the side to plug the tablet in, and another that was like a laptop with an empty frame for the screen, into which the tablet would slide. The different chassis could provide I/O hubs, battery, additional computing/graphics horsepower, or whatever else a user might want in a specialized scenario.
Obviously, that patent never came into being.
Apple's patents show one possible solution to a problem they're trying to solve, but it's rarely the actual solution Apple settles on for solving those problems. In the case of the tablet, maybe they were trying to solve the problem of being able to take your experience with you anywhere, and maybe they realized that a tablet simply lacked the horsepower at the time, so a better solution would be to work on better syncing between devices, which is exactly what they've done with iCloud Drive, Continuity, Handoff, and a number of other software approaches to making the experience between OS X and iOS more seamless. After the backlash Apple got over the feel of the new MacBook's low-profile "butterfly" keyswitches, I doubt they'd actually go with no-profile keys without having some sort of other development (e.g. using electric shock/air pockets/liquid bubbles to provide tactile feedback) to back it up.
they "invented' the ZX81?
Like hell you're taking away my tactile keyboard.
We had these in the 1970s. Haptic feedback was provided by a speaker underneath which clicked every time a key was successfully pressed. They did pretty horribly in the market.
They're still around in a few places where their waterproof nature is useful (e.g. the fill buttons on soda dispensers). But they failed pretty miserably as keyboards because of the lack of tactile feedback - you couldn't tell by feel that your fingers were actually resting on the correct keys. The lack of movement when pressing was also pretty damning.
Not saying this won't succeed. A generation of kids weaned off of touchscreen phone keyboards may be more accepting of these limitations that those of us who grew up with the awesome keyboards on IBM Selectric typewriters. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Forgot prior art. Disney's lawyers are cloning themselves to prepare for an all out assault.
And didn't they really really suck to type on? The only winners from something like this are the manufacturers, who save a bunch of money on actual decent keyboards. Thanks, but no thanks.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Prior Art
A keyboard without keys is just a board.
I believe there is prior art there.
What is funny to me is that a touchscreen and a raspberry pi can do this already, minus the haptic feedback; and I strongly suspect that if you're not actually trying to read braille, that's not going to be very much of an advantage, whereas pushing on a flat surface will very quickly become annoying, followed by actual sore fingertips.
As with the chiclet and membrane keyboards of yore, this thing shows no signs at all of actually being comfortable to type on.
For people who don't type much, I'm sure it'll be fine.
For me... no. I've used membrane and chiclet keyboards. I have nothing kind to say about them. At all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I can't even use my not-very-new macbook without an external keyboard. The provided surface is not designed for people to actually type on. Just to poke a key now and then, or input 140 characters of (cough) insight. Extended use is incredibly annoying. Hence... external keyboard.
But you know, it has to be thinner. Form takes priority over function every time with Apple.
Look at the nightmare the new mac pro represents. The inability to host any drive or ram expansion, the doesn't fit-anywhere trashcan, the desk full of warts and theftable drives and widgets if you want it to do anything more than just sit there stock... awful. Form over function.
That's why I exclusively buy used Macs now. Where they have gone, I have no interest in following.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Or maybe they reduce it converting their one-button mouse into a "joy" stick... that you sit on and manipulate by varying the depth... just like the control for the wheel-mobile thingy in SouthPark. Since it will be blu tooth, you don't even need to remove your clothes to use it--just wiggle around in your seat. Would make watching iphone users on a crowded bus entertaining to watch--and all fighting to get a seat so they don't have to dry hump a window to text... LOL.
I'm pretty sure my old Speak & Spell was a key-less keyboard.
The Atari 400 did this keyless keyboard in 1979.
Also fast food restaurants, like McDonald's, have used cash registers with similar keyboards since the early 80s.
This sounds suspiciously like touchpad in any modern laptop or touchscreen.
Why would anyone think a buttonless keyboard would be a good idea?
Less moving parts => less parts that could break down => less warranty repairs or replacement costs for Apple.
(Specially at a time where some territories like EU are going to put up more stringent and customer-oriented law regarding to warranty,
and thus every maintenance cost that Apple can lower is a win against such future laws).
Compare with touch screen:
how often did someone get a dead key on a virtual on-screen keyboard on a smartphone?
breaking the whole screen is the only failure mode.
Compare to a laptop:
after a couple of years, nearly every laptop has some problem in some mechanical part and a faulty key somewhere necessitating replacement.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Keyboard with no keys. Can I claim, prior art on this?
Why can't they just make it a dual keyless keyboard/trackpad that will detect whether I'm typing, moving the cursor, or using gestures so that I never have to take my hands off the keyboard when I want to point to something? This would be far better ergonomically than having to constantly reach for the mouse/trackpad and wouldn't require memorizing gazillions of keyboard shortcuts.
I'm a mechanical keyboard user. I hate rubber dome, chiclet, and touchscreen virtual keyboards (except for SwiftKey, which I'm using right now and is barely tolerable) so I could never see myself typing on a keyless iSlab.
But if they managed to add configurable, depressable surface bumps, in the shape of keys, that would be a huge advancement.
Imagine a keyboard where you can configure key placement, height, force needed, and tactile feedback response curve! Don't like the Cherry Brown preset? Just tune the response curve!
That's why I applaud this (incomplete) patent as a step in the right direction.
Would it technically be called a "keyboard" if it has no keys?
I will happily continue to use my Keytronic USB replica of the good old IBM 104 keyboard.
My oldest notebook computer is from 2000
Let me guess, IBM ThinkPad T-serie ?
More seriously, this laptop comes from a different era.
Its keyboard was designed for more durability.
(And older laptops even more so).
Nowadays, more laptops are designed more for shiny factor to attract customers.
They tend to be less durable.
The laptops that take a lot of abuse tend to get broken keys and malfunctioning keyboard overtime.
Sample: Not some 25-year old IBM Thinkpad, that I have still lying around.
Sample instead is all the various laptops that I've seen at fellow students dorms the past years.
They are often cheaper brands (or no-name brands), consumer oriented instead of professional oriented (the kind of laptop where the brand name and model name are useless to track a replacement part. There several revision of completely different internals that were released under the same "model name". Usually you need to track a few 4 digit long revision/submodels to find the exact thing you want).
Malfunctionning keys is the top complain I've heard
And right next are: faulty audio connector that got partially desoldered from months of regular "Dorm-party abuse", and b0rked connection in the hinge between laptop body and screen leading to intermittent display artifacts.
Failing cooling systems is also frequent, but far less problematic as nearly everybody seems to be okay buying a laptop cooling stand.
In theory, CD-R tray drive failing is a recuring problem, but as none of my sample actually use discs for anything (MP3 is still the main medium for swapping music around, when it's not straigh streaming from youtube) they've never noticed.
Failing audio ports, on the other hand, ARE serious business. Resoldering jacks has earning me quite a few favours from fellow students.
(at least batteries and power blocks are replaceable)
So that's 100% bull droppings. {...} TL;DR keyboards doesn't fail mechanically in reality.
Yup. Your single datapoint about your laptop in your basement instantly renders non existent all the dozens of laptops I've seen at fellow students', at parties, at girl friends'/ex-girlfriends'/other random flings'...
Okay, I have no problem with that. Keep your belief that no mechanical part in any laptop has ever failed.
And I'll keep helping fix old laptop for cheaper than buying a new, which has already earned me quite a lot of favour from (often female) fellow students.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I recall a "keyboard" from 5 or 10 years ago that projected the keys on a flat surface and tracked your fingers to register key presses. Wasn't one of the conclusions that typing on a hard, unyielding surface is a good way to end up with sore and strained fingers?
Does this patent address that issue in any way?