Apple is developing a notebook with a foldable screen. Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), an international display supply chain consultancy, said apple is exploring MacBook notebooks with foldable screens that are around 20 inches in size and can achieve 4K or higher resolutions.
Ross Young has a very good reputation in the industry, and has previously accurately exposed the ProMotion display of the iPhone13 Pro, the display size and bezels of the sixth-generation iPadmini, the mini LED display and ProMotion of the 14- and 16-inch MacBookPro, and so on, so his credibility is very high.
Foldable notebooks could make up a whole new product category for Apple, he said, but at this very early stage, little is known about this mysterious new form factor, and there seem to be three main options for how Apple conceives of the device.
● Full-screen MacBook
Perhaps the most obvious implementation of a foldable Apple notebook is the full-screen MacBook, which also covers the screen in the hinged section. Young seems to be speculating that this implementation could result in a dual-purpose product that, he says, can be used as a notebook with a full-size on-screen keyboard when folded, and as a display when used with an external keyboard when unfolded.
The possibility of this design has two major drawbacks. The first is Apple's well-known silence about offering touchscreen-based Macs, which company executives often publicly dismiss as a possibility of offering such a device. For example, Jony Ive, a former apple design director, has said that touchscreen Macs aren't a particularly useful or suitable multi-touch app.
macOS is heavily optimized for inter-touch panel or mouse input, rather than touch. In 2020, Apple head of engineering, Craig Federighi, said that Apple designed and developed the look of macOS to make the entire family of devices feel comfortable and natural, and things like touch were not considered at all. That's not to mention the potential ergonomics issues with touchscreen keyboards and trackpads. As a result, the full-touch Screen MacBook seems at odds with what the company has been thinking in recent years.
● Collapsible display with physical keyboard
A more unexpected form factor might be the MacBook's vertically extended display, folded at the hinge to connect to the device's physical keyboard. This solution can provide the benefits of a larger display, providing space for the peripheral content on the screen while still retaining the benefits of a physical keyboard and trackpad.
The design can also provide a way to recover touch bars without sacrificing physical function keys. In another interview, Federighi explained that the MacBook Pro form factor with the Touch Bar is designed to avoid the ergonomic problems caused by other touchscreen laptops.
"We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac is that it's quite tiring to put your hand on a surface and raise your arm to poke the screen," he says. Whether the Touch Bar is restored or not, expanding the MacBook's display in this way will meet Apple's ergonomic requirements of not raising your arms to touch the screen while providing a new position for touch input.
In this case, the 20-inch display size could be more convincing, potentially offering a larger MacBook Pro that sits atop the 16-inch model in the product line, similar to the 17-inch MacBook Pro the company offered between 2006 and 2011.
● Just fold the iPad Pro
While Young describes the device as a "foldable notebook," if it were a full-screen device, it could actually be a foldable iPad Pro. After all, a touch-based full-screen notebook running macOS can affect the evolution of iPad Pro, so devices running iPadOS might make more sense.
This idea also seems to be in line with Apple's current prospects. Last year, when asked about touchscreen Macs, John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, mentioned the iPad. "We made the best touch computers in the world on iPad," he says. It is completely optimized for this purpose. The Mac, on the other hand, is entirely optimized for indirect input. We don't see any reason to change that."
In the past, there have been many rumors that Apple is developing a foldable iPad Pro, so we will not be surprised if Apple finally launches such a product.
It's worth noting that this implementation could also be consistent with rumors of a larger iPad Pro. Last summer, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said Apple was working on a larger iPad model that could further "blur" the line between tablets and laptops.
"I've been told that Apple engineers and designers are exploring a bigger iPad that could be available in a few years at the earliest," he said. Such a product is unlikely to appear next year — Apple will focus on the existing size iPad Pro redesigned in 2022, and it's possible that it won't appear at all. However, for many people, including me, the large iPad will be the perfect device and will continue to blur the line between tablets and laptops".