A brand new Apple patent filed this week has revealed the corporate is learning a brand new MacBook keyboard that would present adjustable suggestions to customers, letting them fluctuate the tactile pressure and the audible suggestions of every key relying on how onerous you press it, customization, and different components.
If that sounds quite a bit like a mechanical keyboard for Mac then you definitely’re fairly proper. A brand new patent filed by Apple this week titled “keyboard with adjustable suggestions” notes a brand new methodology “for controlling suggestions supplied by key mechanisms of a keyboard or by an analogous enter system”, particularly “a keyboard system with adjustable and variable suggestions.” The embedded photographs reveal a MacBook keyboard within the first occasion, however there’s no purpose to imagine this couldn’t even be utilized to Apple’s desktop Mac keyboards as nicely.
Within the patent, Apple notes that the present state of mechanical keyboard testing and prototyping “will be excessively costly and gradual” and that experimenting with new tech or pressure suggestions profiles for key switches requires constructing whole prototype keyboards, basically trial and error. What’s extra, a keyboard that feels “snug and satisfying” to at least one consumer “will be deemed utterly insufficient in really feel to a different.” So making keyboards is pricey, and everybody has completely different tastes. Thankfully, Apple might need an answer.
The patent
Apple has patented a keyboard that features the usual key mechanism and keycap of any nice mechanical keyboard. Nevertheless, it additionally contains an encoder to transduce the place of the keycap and an actuator “to use an output pressure to the keycap,” very similar to haptic suggestions on an iPhone or MacBook trackpad.
The actuator’s pressure will be adjusted in quite a lot of alternative ways. As an example,, it may be programmed to ship completely different suggestions relying on how onerous you press a key, or the place the bottom line is positioned on the keyboard. Theoretically, as an example, you possibly can set your W, A, S, D, keys to offer distinctive suggestions within the fashion of a gaming keyboard. The patent reveals macOS interface photographs that allow you to alter the pressure suggestions profile of every key and reveals how customers may have presets and customized settings. Customers would be capable to change many components together with “really feel, tactility, smoothness, roughness, sound, journey distance, perceived journey distance, and extra.
This patent would possibly by no means see the sunshine of day, however Apple has efficiently leveraged tactile and haptic suggestions in lots of its previous and current units. Notably, the iPhone SE’s solid-state Residence Button and the haptic suggestions of the MacBook trackpad, to call however two. If Apple did launch a MacBook with an adjustable keyboard, it could virtually positively be the finest MacBook ever made.
