When you think about the basic logic behind Apple's Magic TrackPad, you could reasonably envision touch controls going well beyond glass. This only makes sense as Apple gains experience with touch technologies on different substrates. In a second patent application published today, Apple discusses a new way of bringing touch to aluminum and other metals. There, new discoveries may very well lead to the development of truly next-generational forms of a MacBook or perhaps just added magic to their MacBook Air. Considering that Apple also discusses introducing air-wave controls on Apple hardware, it might be the place to kick-start this little wonder of an idea. The Concept also extends to the iPod where we might even see a spiral-styled control UI surface amongst a series of new specialized hardware interfaces. While I think that Apple's new reconfigurable hardware concept sounds a little like their one time chameleon project, the fact remains that Apple now has the technological experience behind them to advance some of these great and wilder ideas. I think that Apple's TrackPad was only an experiment for what lies ahead. And it all sounds like a lot of fun to me.
On February 17, 2011, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals the next chapters for both their iPad and MacBook portable devices. Apple first discussed future plans regarding a smart bezel for their iPad and iPod touch a year ago while hinting at new hovering capabilities just last week. The idea is to give Apple's iPad bezel easy yet invisible controls. In today's patent application, Apple really spells out how the smart bezel may not require a Home Button and added controls like volume will simply require a swipe of your finger. If that wasn't enough, Apple kicks everything up a notch by talking about a Live and Reconfigurable touch interface for future MacBooks. This has a lot of potential if Apple's haptic technology advances accordingly. It's the device every OEM on the planet is trying to master and it sure looks like Apple is getting a whole lot closer than most. Go Apple!
The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 18 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. The notables within this second group of patents includes one that likely relates to a Final Cut Pro feature dealing with an Audio View using 3-Dimensional Plot and another for video conferencing on an iPhone years before there was ever talk of such a device.Lastly, Apple has won a vital patent on the road to delivering a Telephonic MacBook to market.
A pair of new Apple patent applications have surfaced this month at the USPTO that clearly illustrate Apple's research efforts are mounting in the area of motion sensing and motion tracking. The first patent is all about controlling keyboard and gesture command sensitivities to accommodate public commuters while they work. The second is more dramatic and points to a new hybrid motion tracking desktop keyboard. The thing is that the latter is also being considered for use in Apple's MacBook line up. This would eliminate the use of trackpad and need for a touch display. There's no doubt that Apple is pushing hard to find a way to implement gestures on Apple's desktop and notebook products to support OS X Lion and beyond. At this point however, it's a little too early in the game to call the winner. Update 3:20 PM PST: New details have emerged about the motion tracking keyboard and are detailed herein.
While Apple is statistically the leading mobile devices company in the world today, the company has always been known for being a consumer friendly company in terms of selling easy to use hardware and software. In a patent application published yesterday by the USPTO, Apple is once again attempting to make the average consumer's life a little easier by inventing a new user friendly connector system. Some hardware systems have a plethora of ports and trying to mate the right connector to the right port isn't always easy for the non-geek. Apple's new system contemplates using various schemes to simplify that process by including magnetic connectors, haptic actuators that vibrate and other unique approaches to make setting up a new device, friendly. Sometimes simple is cool.
While Apple was undergoing their "Antennagate" moment earlier this year, Apple's engineers were long at work on a new kind of antenna which Apple dubs the "logo antenna." This new antenna is to hide behind the famous Apple logo thereby allowing it to gain a stronger signal without intervening metal or other conductive housing walls interfering. It's interesting to note that this is Apple's third telephonic Macbook related patent in the second half of 2010 and would all but confirm this is a definite trend Apple is focused on. And lastly, it should be noted that Apple foresees the logo antenna working itself down into miniatures and wearables such as wrist watches and pendants. It appears that Apple may have another winning invention on their hands.
Apple will ultimately introduce us to the "Telephonic MacBook" one shiny day. Perhaps when Apple's OS X Lion roars in next year we'll see their MacBook family integrate a blisteringly fast LTE solution - hopefully an LTE-Advanced solution. Obviously Apple wasn't' willing to provide this year's MacBook Air with a telephonic solution, so we'll just have to be patient. Until such time arrives, you could read about Apple's improved yet evolutionary tethering technology in today's patent.
Every once in a while I find that trying to read and decipher one of Apple's patents is painfully like being an archeologist trying to find meaning in an ancient manuscript that's written in some form of Sanskrit. I'm not even going to pretend to understand the depths of this never ending granted patent which contains in excess of 200 patent figures. All that matters is that Apple's granted patent states emphatically that the invention is about a new graphics processor and method. The graphics processor is specifically referred to as a Deferred Shading Graphics Processor or DSGP. The invention relates to computing systems, to 3D computer graphics and particularly to structure and method for a 3D graphics processor implementing differed shading and other enhanced features. The granted patent appears to be discussing a desktop/workstation graphics processor and interestingly, Apple may have acquired this patent. The lead inventor, listed as Jerome Duluk, used to work at NVIDIA.
In July of this year a job posting by Apple stated that they were working on a new revolutionary Mac OS X feature. Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published an Apple patent that could very well play a part of this revolutionary feature that Apple has in development. It's a cool virtual input device application that works in both 2D and 3D. The technology will somehow allow you to project an input device into the display of the unit that could then be used instead of the physical input device. For instance, a physical touchpad could be created virtually on your display and then used as you would your physical trackpad. That would require the display, in some applications, to be that of a touch display. The patent hints that it could also relate to gaming. That could mean adding virtual gamepad controls to the display if it's used in tablet mode or transferred to a tablet – like the iPad. This is one wild invention that will definitely take some time to fully understand and appreciate. But at the end of the day, we could all get a little buzzed thinking about what's in the works for us: Sweet!
The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 17 granted patents for Apple Inc. today. Amongst them are several major design patent wins pertaining to the original iPod touch and the all-metallic iMac which has received registered status in both Europe and China. Yet the most notable granted patents issued today in our opinion would have to be one that relates to Apple's notebook trackpad assembly and perhaps more importantly, two strategic patents relating to the notion of a future telephonic MacBook.
This is one of those patents that are for the super techno-geeks amongst us who love to get under the hood of their machines and tinker with everything. With that said – Apple's patent generally relates to cache memory management and, more particularly, to cache memory management in multi-core central processing units. Apple's patent steps into the area of bus snooping, a technique used in distributed shared memory systems and multiprocessors to achieve cache coherence. Apple's patent is about reducing snoop traffic which will provide Apple's entire line-up of Macs with better power efficiency for quad core systems and future Sandy Bridge configurations and beyond.
While most of us were getting ready for the iPad's arrival in January and Patently Apple hard at work preparing our major series called the Tablet Prophecies, a major iMac Touch patent was being quietly published in Europe. And while some of the graphic figures of today's patent did slip out in Europe, we were never able to verify whether they were legitimate or not. Well, today we finally get to post the Mother Lode of all information concerning the iMac Touch and it's absolutely brilliant! Ironically we had just posted a report on Saturday titled "Apple Patents Point to Future MacBooks with IPS & Touch Displays" when we discovered the European Filing. The naysayers will have to eat crow on this one, because Apple's method of transitioning from OS X to iOS is clearly outlined for both the iMac and MacBook – and it's a grand slam home run. Imagine having an iMac on your desktop one minute and a gigantic iPad the next. Imagine playing iGames on this dream machine - Wow! Imagine reading a double-page book on this - Unbelievable! Apple takes the mystery out of how OS X could finally co-exist with iOS on a Mac and you've got to see this one to believe it.
