Apple has filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for an unusual keyboard for the MacBook. The company is preparing an input device with a detachable key that can be used as a mouse.
The button contains a position sensor and a small battery. The drawings attached to the documentation show various extraction options: one or more keys at a time, vertically or horizontally, from the side or from above, and so on.
Apple believes that such a system is suitable for solving high-precision tasks in the field of design, computer-aided design and modeling, as well as editing large and complex files, where the mouse prevails over the trackpad.
Carrying a separate mouse along with a laptop can be cumbersome, Cupertino said. In such cases, a portable input device comes in handy.
It is worth noting that patent applications are not always implemented, so it is not worth considering them as the company’s plans being implemented.
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