As published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office today, Apple has applied for a new patent for an electronic device that would function as an accessory for the iPhones that are on the market today.
The patent describes how an iPhone could be used as the TrackPad of the company's future MacBook computers. The idea is not so far fetched if you look at the fact that today, the new MacBook Pros have expanded the size of the trackPad they use, making it very similar to the current size of the 7-inch iPhone 5.5 Plus.
Specifically, there is talk of a accessory called "thin" (thin in Spanish) that apparently has a very similar shape to a MacBook, with the aluminum unibody body as an "enclosure" where we would house our iPhone to attach it as if it were the TrackPad of our computer.
This accessory would have everything you need to function like a conventional computer (screen, physical keyboard, GPU, ports, etc ...). As a CPU, it would be the iPhone that would perform that function. There is talk that even the place where we would house the iPhone has a Lightning connector or some type of smart connector.
We would be talking about a "New TrackPad", which would allow us to have features that we currently do not have, such as Force Touch or haptic feedback. The accessory, of course, would be practically entirely powered and powered by iOS.
Apparently, the accessory itself would have an internal GPU to help once the iPhone is running as TrackPad and host of the computer itself, to control and have more power in the graphic representation that would appear on the large screen of the accessory itself.
Although the filed patent has come to light today, This application for Apple laptops was first submitted in September 2016 and credits engineer Brett W. Degner as its inventor.
Today, there are many applications to convert, in an inelegant way, our iPhone into a normal TrackPad. Although there is no application that does its job perfectly, this solution proposed by Apple would be much more efficient.