Apple Wins a Patent for a Cavity Antenna Designed for a Future MacBook 4G

Apple has received a Granted Patent that relates to a cavity antenna designed for a future MacBook 4G.

Apple's invention covers an antenna that may be formed from a conductive cavity that is located behind bezel region 18 noted in patent FIG. 1 above. An antenna with this type of configuration is shown in as antenna 22.

An advantage of forming the antenna behind the bezel is that this type of location allows incoming radio-frequency signals to reach the antenna without being impeded by conductive display or housing portions and allows radio-frequency signals to be freely transmitted from the antenna. If desired, other locations may be used for the antenna.

The MacBook may use antennas such as an antenna to handle communications over any communications bands of interest. For example, antennas and wireless communications circuitry in the MacBook may be used to handle cellular telephone communications in one or more frequency bands and data communications in one or more communications bands.

Cellular telephone communications could be handled using a multiband cellular telephone antenna and local area network data communications could be handled using a multiband wireless local area network antenna. As another example, the MacBook may have a single multiband antenna for handling communications in two or more data bands (e.g., at 2.4 GHz and at 5 GHz).

As shown in FIG. 1, a communications path such as path 24 may be used to interconnect the antenna and camera (26) to circuitry 28 noted in the lower right housing area. The path may be implemented, for example, using a flex circuit that is connected to a radio-frequency antenna module associated with the antenna and a camera module associated with camera. The circuitry may include wireless communications circuitry and other processing circuitry.

Apple credits Enrique Ayala Vazquez, Hao Xu, Gregory Spring, Bing Chiang, Eduardo Camacho and Douglas Kough as the inventors of this patent which was originally filed in Q3 2008 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

Apple Wins Patent for Touch Event Processing for Web Pages

Apple has received a Granted Patent that relates to touch event processing for web pages on iOS devices.

Apple states that web pages that are navigated with a touch sensitive device often need to respond to touch events generated by a user touching a web page with one or more fingers and making gestures. Conventional mouse event handlers cannot correctly interpret these touch events. Thus touch events require a different touch event model to correctly interpret touch events and to allow developers to fully utilize the capabilities of a touch sensitive display or device.

One or more touch input signals could be obtained from a touch sensitive device. If the touch input signals are associated with one or more regions of a web page displayed on the touch sensitive device, a touch event associated with the regions of a web page is processed by the web page. If the touch input signals are not associated with the regions of a web page, an application associated with the touch sensitive device processes the touch input signals.

Apple credits Gregory Bolsinga, Tim Omernick and Richard Williamson as the inventors of patent 8,174,502 which was originally filed in Q1 2008 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office.  

Granted Design Patents Issued to Apple

Apple has been granted six design patents today. The designs include a mysterious handheld device that has never made it to market; the defunct iPad keyboard-dock; the iPod nano's display module; iOS icons for Calendar and Camera; and the first iPad cover from Apple that has since been replaced with their new iPad Smart Cover. Update 10 AM MST: We've added a graphic below that illustrates Steve Jobs as one of the designers of the mysterious handheld pod-like device. And one last thing, the latest filing for this mysterious device design is noted as being September 2011. It would appear that Apple wants to keep this design alive.  

Final Patent Round-Up

Over and above the granted patents that were specifically reported on today, we present you with links to all of the other granted patents in our Final Patent Round-Up as follows:

Apple has been granted a patent 8,174,380 for their iPod Shuffle dock  

8,171,623 Method of manufacturing a printed circuit board

8,174,918 Passgate for dynamic circuitry

8,175,260 Echo-cancellation

8,175,265 Systems and methods for implementing block cipher algorithms on attacker-controlled systems

8,175,266 System and method of performing authentication

8,175,288 User interface for mixing sounds in a media application (likely related to Apple's Logic Pro application).

8,175,556 Methods for optimizing power amplifier settings for operation at different radio-frequency bands

8,176,257 Cache used both as cache and staging buffer

8,176,285 Importing media content items

8,176,299 Generating stop indicators based on conditional data dependency in vector processors

8,176,337 Computer object code obfuscation using boot installation

Notice

Patently Apple presents only a brief summary of granted patents with associated graphics for journalistic news purposes as each Granted Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any Granted Patent should be read in its entirety for full details. About Comments: Patently Apple reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit comments. 

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