Patents stories

Apple patent gives your charger the keys to your laptop

Evan Ackerman
Friday, January 6, 2012 - 1:40pm
 
There's a reason that we're all still carrying physical keys around with us: they're simple, they're reliable, and while you might forget the key itself somewhere, you don't need to remember anything else besides how to put the key in a lock. A recently-spotted patent from Apple suggests that it's trying to make laptop chargers work the exact same way.

12 gaming-changing Apple patents we'd love to see in the iPhone 5

Raymond Wong
Friday, September 30, 2011 - 6:44am
 
Here we go. Hurry up and breath all that fresh air in, because this is the last weekend before Apple takes wraps off the next iPhone (tentatively called the iPhone 4S/5). Will it have that 4-inch screen? Will it have that teardrop aluminum body? Will it have that faster dual-core A5 processor with 1GB of RAM and a spiffy 8-megapixel rear camera? Maybe that elongated multi-gesture home button? That's anybody's guess. The next iPhone will no doubt attract a lot of attention and coverage next Tuesday, so to get the train rolling early, we've collected some of the craziest patents in Apple's portfolio that might make it into the new smartphone. Hey, Apple owns the patents to build the tech, who's to say it won't surprise everybody with a few of them?

Future iPhones could decide what you're allowed to photo, film

Kevin Hall
Friday, June 3, 2011 - 9:53am
 
Picture this (because one day your iPhone may not let you): you're at a concert seeing your favorite band. You want to get a simple picture to remember the moment forever, so you whip out your iPhone 9000, but the camera button doesn't work. Your iPhone knows you don't have the commercial right to take that picture and has denied you.

Does Apple want to replace your mouse with an iPod Touch?

Kevin Hall
Thursday, January 20, 2011 - 11:13am
 
A patent filed by Apple shows what could be the next evolution of the company's line of mice: a touchscreen device with its own built-in processor. Of course, you could already be rocking a touch surface using Apple's Magic Mouse (essentially just an external trackpad, which is a little redundant for laptop users), but this patent still makes you wonder.

Pages