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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.
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.
Keyless keyboard has been around for a while. This article was posted 2/11/2007. http://www.gadgetgrid.com/2007...
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.
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.
If it was good enough for the ZX81, it can certainly be upgraded and cost ten times as much.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
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.