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New Apple Patent Imagines an OLED Screen As a Keyboard For MacBooks (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted Apple a patent titled "dual display equipment with enhanced visibility and suppressed reflections." The documentation for what is patent number 9,904,502 outlines a device that would use a second display as a dynamic keyboard. Two implementations of this design are described in the patent application, according to Patently Apple. The first utilizes a permanent hinge, while the second allows the screen to be removed and used separately, along the lines of Microsoft's Surface Pro range and other two-in-one computers. The patent documentation makes it clear that the implementation is not intended as an accessory that would allow two iPads to be paired together, with one serving as the keyboard. Additionally, illustrations associated with the application explicitly state that one screen is an OLED display, while the other is an LCD. A double-display set-up could provide easy access to a different keyboard layout language, context-sensitive controls, or even a large sketching surface to use in conjunction with something like an Apple Pencil. However, that flexibility would come at the cost of the traditional typing experience offered by a mechanical keyboard.
An external OLED screen you use as a configurable keyboard basically describes the TouchBar.
Maybe Apple means to make a larger version of it for desktops - one of my biggest gripes is that I actually LIKE the TouchBar and the features it offers across different apps, but I can't get used to them because I often use an external keyboard with my laptop in clamshell mode, and so I never really get used to use the TouchBar as there is no external keyboard that has one.
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Old news. Apple won't do a laptop like thet, too risky with Timmy Cook steering the ship.
DO NOT WANT!
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Is a Nintendo DS that you can tear in half, but with more OLED! and Laptop size!
Iâ(TM)ll take the type cover over this any day. Short of some clever haptic feedback work or muscle memory I do see a lot of touch typing getting done.
I already have trouble with the low-profile keyboards on the new MacBooks.
A touchscreen would make it even worse.
I hate typing on flastscreens.
I'm calling fail now, so you all can say "hey that guy should probably be Apple CEO now" when it happens. -AC386 captcha: STONED (yes!)
Soon to be followed with iOS Pro as the only OS available for the Macbook. The iPhonification of the Mac line is nearly complete!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Now work with me here for a moment, what if we made the iPhone.. able to fold in half! We'd have a touchscreen for buttons on the lower half, and a screen on the upper. Genius!
and mac laptops will be banned from the bar test if they do this.
The current mac book pro keyboard is horrible compared to previous ones, and I find the touch bar useless.. I ended up just plugging in an old mac keyboard into my new macbook so I have physical keys.. Why would I want my finger prints all over a screen with no physical tactile feedback (not haptic)
How can a patent be granted when this:
along the lines of Microsoft's Surface Pro range and other two-in-one computers
So obviously yells prior art?
on these might have expired. I mean, if the goal is to make a crappy keyboard, why stop at half measures?
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At least that was a proper keyboard with pressable keys and all. Each key had it's own display.
http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/tactus/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/9836/
https://store.artlebedev.com/for-programmers/objects/optimus-popularis/
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fucking bitches
Holy crap, that will be typing hell. My hands drift on the keyboard all the time on the flat key keyboard as it is. I hope they don't do that on laptops that developers are supposed to be using. That would be just as awful as removing the headphone jack. But courage right.... or maybe another $500 on wireless headphones and a keyboard.
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You really have gone off the fucking deep end!
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That's what this sounds like. No thanks, I prefer an actual keyboard.
for fucks sake, do away with the touchbar and shitty keyboard on current MB Pros go back to a tactile feel keyboard you out of touch fucks.
Only Apple could imagine a keyboard with no tactile feedback as a superior user experience.
Only Apple could make me appreciate chiclet keyboards.
Apple won't be happy until they've turned Macbooks into a useless slab of semi-translucent plastic whose only real difference with the future iPad is that you'll be allowed to run apps you've signed with your own key, instead of being restricted to running only apps already-approved and downloaded from Apple's store.
The first 21 claims are based on a claim of the device having two display separated by a hinge.
What in the claims distinguishes this invention from Nintendo DS?
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2
The OLPC XO-2 did have two identical displays, maybe having one be OLED makes it novel enough to call their own...
Probably has more rounded corners too!
Sorry, but would it allow
1) Typing faster than on standard keyboard?
2) Typing with less errors than on standard keyboard?
3) Typing easier and with less health problems than on standard keyboard?
4) Typing at least not so expensively that on specialized ergo keyboards?
No. This keyboard is made for the single segment of market: Consumer, not professional.
And now I should remember the words of (then) education minister of Russia: Communists were not right when they tried to grow a creator-man. Now we should grow a qualified consumer of all the things the mankind has been created.
I find the touchbar is shit. If's different for every app so it's impossible to get used to
That's the whole reason I like it; as for getting used to it, it's VERY possible for apps you use a lot. Which is the point, for those apps you get extra custom functions that can work in ways keys do not (like sliding control over values).
However like I said, that getting used to part is more of a problem than it should be because there is no external keyboard with a TouchBar.
The volume down was always in the same place.
They still are. At most you have to tap away custom features to reveal them again, but mostly (just like Esc) they are always up there.
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Seems like apple is still stuck in the past...
They even gave microsoft the idea for clippy...but with Bill the Science Guy (predates him too:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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And only the true apple faithful will be singing the praises of this terrible idea. Telling all other keyboard users this is the best keyboard ever.
http://techland.time.com/2011/03/29/first-look-at-acers-dual-screen-no-keyboard-iconia-laptop/
So basically it's an updated Acer Iconia Dual screen or Toshiba Libretto W105? How is that not prior-art?
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They've been working on this for more than 10 years.
I heard about it from a little birdie back in 2008.
Believe it or not, this evolved separately from the touch bar, which is a spinoff from the watch stuff.
The proposed XO-2 was a clamshell where both halves were touchscreens, and one mode of using it was to use the lower half as a keyboard.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-2
I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you can make something like this despite Apple's patents.
Now, Apple is making claims that their devices have good visibility outdoors, even if the user is wearing sunglasses, so maybe there is something of value in their new patents. But the patents cannot simply be "computing device using touchscreen as a keyboard" because it would have flunked the prior art test.
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Will they make a touch version of the MacBook Wheel as well?
Hey guys, we did a pretty good job in making the keyboard shittier with the butterfly thing. Is there anything else we could do to make it even worse? How about, we just make it a glass surface? WOW!
How did they actually manage to make this patentable ?
There have been countless variations of this "software is controlling the faces of the keys" since forever.
- Entire second touchscreens working as a keyboard.
- individual LCD, eInk or OLED screens behind every key (Art Lebedev Studio's Optimus Keyboard was attracting lots of attention back in the days).
- whole LCDs/OLED screens behind the whole keyboard (what Art Lebedev eventually settled with to make it less expensive to produce than the earlier models)
- laser projecting a keyboard on any surface
etc.
How the fuck did Apple manage to file a patent about a horse that has been beaten to death during the past 15 years ?
(Reads TFA,...)
Ah, okay. They have "improved" the technology by adding polarized filter, because glare can be a problem with the kind of glossy surface they use.
Yay for innovation !
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Touch typing is for wimps. And I am a card carrying member of the Touch Typing Wimps Club. You can (try to) pry it out of my cold dead hands.
I also have trouble touch typing on Mac chiclet keyboards. Something's not right about the spacing of the keys, but I didn't try to scientifically figure out what. It feels like the keys are ever so slightly further apart than what I'm used to and I end up pressing in the gaps between the keys.
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Unless they put some sort of buttony surface above the screen, this will totally kill efficiency. I could see it being handy as an add-on peripheral, but for a primary keyboard?
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Acer Iconia.
https://www.cnet.com/products/acer-6120-dual-screen-touchbook/review/
Dual screens, with touch keyboard.
So does this apple patent make the Acer infringer?
This can only sound good to those who have to look at their keyboard to type anyway. Otherwise it's an incredibly annoying distraction. I look at my hands maybe once ever 10 minutes.
It might be different if I was a hunt-n-pecker like Tim Cook.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Because they demoed a touch screen keyboard concept for desktop usage years ago.
their take was a touch screen overlaid with a set of transparent keys so that whatever was on the screen shined up through the keyboard.
Never mind existing products like Lenovo's Yoga Book.
All in all this highlights the sorry state of the US patent office!
What about a sensitive keyboard.. as found on the Atari 400! And Odydssey 2, ZX80, chessboards etc.
I had a Yeno toy computer with such a flat keyboard.
Before you jump at me I propose this to be on a PC laptop.
Why? If you're going to have a crappy keyboard anyway, you might drop the pretense of having keys. It would resist spills! No more dead or missing keys on a laptop. Clean it with a sponge. And it's flatter and lighter obviously.
I'm curious how better it would work than in the 80s.
A lot cheaper than an entire screen, too.
I'm serious, because I'm tired of keyboard issues. (and I can't use my PS/2 keyboards on laptops, so if the laptop keyboard is unbreakable that's easier thanks)
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