The current MacBook Pro has a main screen and a touch bar, but it seems that Apple may want to add three other screens to make a laptop with five crazy screens.
According to MyFixGuide, the Chinese National Intellectual Property Office approved the patent today, June 30. It’s another patent that suggests what Apple could do with all the empty space on its laptops surrounding the keyboard and touchpad, this time suggesting the use of a “Dynamic Display Interface” that turns these blank areas into multiple displays. little.
Based on the patent illustrations, these screens take on roles similar to what Apple tries to use with the touch bar on its current MacBooks: removing toolbars from the main screen and next to the user’s hands for more access convenient.
The trackpad appears to be embedded underneath the top surface of the laptop, as there are no obvious signs of it, at least compared to the slightly sunken trackpad on current MacBooks. To compensate for this, the patent also details how touch comments could be added to the trackpad. This would allow the user to know if they had drifted out of the bounds of the trackpad, and would also give them a better idea of how they were interacting with objects on the screen.
The keys themselves can also be backlit in accordance with this patent, as the illuminated surface also surrounds them. While the backlit keys may make you think of eye-catching RGB lighting on player-oriented peripherals, this could be more practical to use. Think about how the lights could help guide your fingers to specific groups of hotkeys or to the row of home keys (as shown in the patent) to help you type more efficiently.
We’ve seen some ideas on how this might work from other laptop manufacturers. Asus’ ZenBook Pro Duo has a secondary screen above its keyboard, while Microsoft has the next Surface Neo that turns off and has a virtual keyboard on an identical second screen. Users wanting to completely abandon physical keyboards in the next year or two is highly unlikely, making Apple’s patent seem like a more sensible intermediate step.
While we wait for Apple to turn this patent into a real product (if it does), we have other advancements to consider. As recently announced at WWDC 2020, MacBooks will receive the latest version of MacOS, called Big Sur. The new operating system offers new menu designs, widgets for commonly used functions and updates to proprietary applications such as Messages and Safari.
Upcoming MacBooks will also feature Apple Silicon, the first Apple processors designed from the ground up using ARM, rather than the Intel chipsets it has been using for years. And the first ARM-based Mac will launch this year.
