Apple still won't make us a touch-screen Mac, but it is at least considering adding touch-sensitive displays on just about every surface that surrounds the MacBook Pro keyboard as the next best thing.
Detail from the patent showing an image of a surprised rabbit perhaps being edited using the smaller displays by the keyboard
Unbelievably, it was 2016 when Apple first introduced the Touch Bar, the touch-sensitive display that sat atop MacBook Pro keyboards. For something that looked good but didn't really catch on, it lasted a long time, too.
But the end of the Touch Bar in October 2023 may not truly be its final demise. While the Touch Bar was not in any way updated during its seven years on the market, a newly-granted patent shows that it was only part of a plan to make more use of the base of a laptop. Called "Portable Computer With Dynamic Display Interface," it describes a laptop with "a light-transmissive cover defining a first touch-sensitive input region along a first side of the keyboard and a second touch-sensitive input region along a second side of the keyboard."
The base of the MacBook Pro could also include "a second display under the second touch-sensitive input region." And then a third touch-sensitive display could lie "along a third side of the keyboard."
So in this proposal just about every part of the base of a MacBook Pro becomes a touch-sensitive display. It doesn't appear to concern replacing the keyboard with a touch-sensitive display, but it certainly does propose changing the trackpad into one.
"Notably... the particular size, shape, or other characteristic of a trackpad region may change depending on the mode of the laptop," says Apple. "This may allow the user interface experience to be tailored for different applications or functions of the laptop computer."
During word processing, the MacBook Pro could even dispense with the trackpad and instead give touch controls for features like copy and paste
Sometimes Apple refers to up to three separate displays, but other times "the dynamic display... may completely surround the keyboard." Curiously, even that description does not appear to intend to refer to a keyboard being entirely surrounded.
Instead, and perhaps ironically, the area where the Touch Bar used to go is not referred to as one of the options. That could be because the patent was applied for in 2019, when the Touch Bar was still there.
Or it could be that Apple has run scared of the reaction the Touch Bar got. Its chief criticisms, though, would seem to also apply to this new idea of having multiple displays on the MacBook Pro.
As good as the Touch Bar could be, it was not tactile. So since the controls it displayed would change depending on what application you were in, there was no facility to build up muscle memory and know where a control was without looking.
Perhaps one display could show the full image while the user zooms in on a portion on the main screen
Similarly, display control services dotted around the keyboard and palm rest don't sound conducive to concentrating on your work. However, the business of the Touch Bar not being tactile has been addressed.
"The dynamic display interface may also use haptic outputs to provide tactile feedback to a user," says the patent. "[The] second roughness that is smoother than the first roughness."
Here the idea is that you can sense when you swipe across from one region of the base to another, it's clear what controls you're going over. Therefore "touch and/or force inputs applied to a trackpad region may control other functions and/or operations of the device as well."
Back in 2018, Apple was granted a patent for changing the whole base surface of the MacBook Pro into a touch-sensitive one. In that case, it was specifically so that different keyboards could be displayed to suit whatever application was being used.
Apple does get very many patents every year and it's never evidence that a new product is coming. But that Apple keeps returning to this idea does at least suggest that it is serious about making more of the MacBook Pro base.