Apple would like to review the design of laptops in the coming years. After the general euphoria linked to the pandemic in 2020, device sales have since more than calmed down and the Cupertino company is trying to find a technical innovation that will allow it to reach new sales records.
She could have found this solution with this brand new product, still under development. The idea would be to replace the computer's keyboard and trackpad with... a second screen. THEMacBookwould then be a huge screen, folded in two at its center.
With this project, presented in detail in a recently discovered patent, Apple wants to reinvent laptops. This evolution is ultimately quite logical when we take a step back and look at the evolution of the new technology market over the last 15 years.
Apple was one of the pioneering companies in touchscreen, at a time when all cell phones used physical keyboards. When the iPhone was launched in 2007, it wasBlackBerrywhich dominates the market with its small phone with a physical keyboard.
A few years later, Apple will once again highlight virtual keyboards with the iPad, a large tablet with a single screen. Seeing these developments, it is logical to think that MacBooks are next on the list.
Make “believe” in a physical keyboard
To convince as many people as possible, Apple would like to use a technology that it masters at its fingertips: “haptic feedback”. This feature, already used on the iPhone or on MacBook trackpads, allows you to “simulate” a physical press on a button.
By using haptic feedback on a virtual keyboard, the way of typing would always be the same for the user, with the difference that its keys do not exist and that they can therefore be configured according to the needs of the moment. We can imagine an application like Photoshop which would not use an AZERTY keyboard as we are used to, but rather a series of shortcuts and actions predefined by the user.
With the evolutiond’Apple Intelligence, and more broadly AI, it is quite easy to imagine a keyboard capable of adapting to the user to offer them what they need most at that moment. In any case, this dual-screen Mac doesn't seem to be coming out any time soon.
Apple's newly discovered patents are just a drop in an ocean of development. Because if the Cupertino company wants to push this project to the end, it must think about the cost of the latter. But this is surely the biggest obstacle at the moment for a computer with two screens.
