Apple engineers are hard at work developing new technologies for Mac owners and in a recent patent it is revealed to us the fact that Apple plans to develop new models of thinner and lighter keyboards. In its patent, Apple describes the methods by which it could manufacture smaller but equally performing keyboards plus a new system for recognizing keys pressed by users. Apple wants to modify the classic system of buttons that have a rubber "clip" under them that is used to make contact with the electronic part of the device, but the company's technology is not quite that simple.
One of the most common keyboard types is the "dome switch," in which the key pushes down on a rubber dome located beneath the key. Other types of keyboards include capacitive, mechanical switch, Hall-effect, membrane, and roll-up, and each offer their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of two important categories: response (positive feedback that the key has been pressed) and travel ( the distance needed to push the key). Apple's solution is a single support lever keyboard mechanism, which the proposed invention says would allow the keyboard cap to be made of almost any material, but would also provide stability to each key.
Apple intends to modify not only the system on which the keyboard works, but also the design of its buttons, but we are talking about a technology that seems to be far from being implemented in a company product. Apple engineers register extremely many patents but few of them are ever used and this seems to be one of them.
