GoKawiilThere have long been reports and rumours about Apple working on a foldable clamshell device that is either an iPad, a Mac, one of each, or a hybrid of the two.
A recent report said that although this was once a priority for new CEO John Ternus, the project had been cancelled – but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate …
Personally, I think the concept of a hybrid Mac and iPad has essentially been superseded by events. There are iPhone and iPad apps that will run on today’s Macs, and for many of us, iPhone mirroring is another tool we can use to achieve the same thing. We’re also seeing increasing convergence between the operating systems, and I’m sure that will continue: we’re now long past the point where Apple was arguing that we would be converging a toaster and a fridge.
But I do think we will eventually end up with an all-screen foldable Mac once the technology exists to make a soft keyboard a viable replacement for a hard one. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it will happen.
The intermediate step of dynamic keyboards
The reason I think it is still a long way off is my belief that there will be an interim step in the form of dynamic hardware keyboards. It’s literally a decade since I talked about why I think these are the future, and while this type of tech is in use today for niche applications, they still haven’t yet hit the mainstream.
The Sonder Keyboard was one early attempt, using miniature e-ink displays to remap the labels and functions of the keys.
For example, a QWERTY keyboard is almost irrelevant to someone who spends all day video editing in Final Cut Pro, which is why there’s a market for both physical keyboards and overlays.
How much smarter would it be if our MacBook keyboard or desktop Magic keyboard could adapt its labels to match the app we are using at the time?
Soft keyboards that feel like hard ones
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