The business was awarded a patent for a reconfigurable computer keyboard.
Over time, Apple has tried to reinvent many items (with varying levels of success). And today, the fantastic ol’ keyboard is apparently up to get a comprehensive rethinking.
Apple’s recently granted patent envisions a future computer keyboard that could utilize configurable keys using tiny OLED displays to change individual essential functions proactively.
Reinventing the Computer Keyboard, All Over Again
The patent examples imply that the new technologies can be utilized for both the built-in keyboards located in MacBooks and standalone computer keyboards like the Magic Keyboard household of keyboards for iPad and Mac.
A computer keyboard with lively labels generated by miniature organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens containing pixel arrays can produce custom images, different personalities, etc.
Patently Apple clarifies that Apple’s United States patent for “Electronic apparatus having keys together with coherent fiber bundles” envisions dynamically changing key tags, possibly enabling just one keyboard version for use across the globe.
N reaction to consumer input switches keyboard language or design. The keyboard would only reveal English letters into Greek letters for every one of the keys. In ways, it’d be similar to that OLED strip over the keyboard of a few Mac laptops, which Apple describes as the Touch Bar–merely applied to the whole keyboard.
OMG, Did You Say Touch Bar?
This type of computer keyboard would rapidly accommodate designs optimized for productivity, gaming, programming, etc. As stated previously, it might prove particularly useful for fast computer language changes. You may even have the ability to produce your keyboard designs complete with custom key positioning and images.
As yet another example, this newest computer keyboard patent from Apple suggests that the keys would have the ability to leave anything, so why don’t you exhibit different font styles with this keyboard? The amount of chances sounds almost too good to be true. However, if this patent becomes executed in a future computer keyboard is a wholly different issue.
The Wonderful World of Crazy Apple Patents
Such as other businesses, Apple often patents notions. But several of its creations never have to be utilized in transport solutions. And of the ones that do, a few, such as the Touch Bar, haven’t proved very useful as a result of the absence of visual feeling.
Instead, Apple might be working on this as we talk; a patent filing to get a better version of this Touch Bar using Force Touch haptic feedback technology was seen in December 2020.
Though the idea of a reconfigurable computer keyboard is tantalizing in the newspaper, we would not get overly excited about this patent since, if anything, the MacBook Pro keyboard saga combined with the relative unpopularity of this Touch Bar shortcuts is the ideal illustration of the way Apple’s obsession with form overwork can occasionally hurt its customers.
