Looking at the image a chill went down my spine. If one thing characterizes Apple products, it is their minimalist design and their sobriety on all their devices. Little colored lights, the minimum essentials, and the smaller the better.
Today a new patent was known that Apple has won regarding alphanumeric keyboards. A variable key backlighting system. This would allow the intensity and color of the interior key lighting to be changed using software. Do not panic. We will rely on the good sense of Tim Cook and his team.
The header image is not a render but a real image. Hugh Jeffreys has modified his old MacBook Pro and added colored LEDs under the keyboard. This can give us a very rough idea of what future Apple keyboards could look like. Knowing those from Cupertino, I am sure that the design will be much more minimalist than Jeffreys's experiment, of dubious result, too "gamer" for my taste.
Today a new patent granted on the same subject has been officially published at the United States Patent and Trademark Office entitled "Mixed entrance lighting using multiple light sources with switchable operating status". The great difference of this granted patent with respect to the 2015 patent is that the Lighting system it could be extended beyond the keyboard and possibly used in other future Apple products.
Input devices include computer keyboards, trackpads, buttons on instrument control panels, computer mouse buttons etc.
Apple patent 10.528.152 was originally filed in the third quarter of 2017 and published today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
This does not mean that the company's next keyboards already use this technology. There are many patents of ideas that in the end never come to fruition. We will see in the future if Apple uses that system.
