Thursday 4 April 2013
A new Apple patent applications published today show how the company might be thinking about competing with recent innovations from other big tech companies with similar, but different designs.It describes a convertible MacBook design, with a touch-sensitive screen that separates from the base.
The first design for a convertible MacBook may look familiar, since it actually resembles a lot of designs available from Windows device makers, and some previous Android tablet designs. The screen detaches from the keyboard and body portion, which isn’t in itself terribly unique, but the screen in Apple’s version communicates with the brains in the base via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless communication protocols, meaning all the serious computing work is still handled by the traditionally located GPU and CPU. The screen itself is touch-sensitive, but doesn’t act as a standalone tablet in quite the same way it does in some new Windows device designs.
The screen also can charge wirelessly via the same kind of tech used in induction charging, drawing power from the base. What Apple describes here isn’t so much a convertible tablet, but more of a MacBook with a screen that solves the clumsy issue of how to use touch effectively on a notebook by allowing it to temporarily come off the base for more ergonomic touch-based interaction. Apple has talked about how touch doesn’t work on a traditional computer form factor in the past; this is one way around that.
