// 9TO5MAC — MOBILE & WEB
A foldable Mac is years away, but Apple is still working on it
There have long been reports and rumours about Apple working on a foldable clamshell device that is either an iPad, a Mac, one of each, or a hybrid of the two.
A recent report said that although this was once a priority for new CEO John Ternus, the project had been cancelled – but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate …
Personally, I think the concept of a hybrid Mac and iPad has essentially been superseded by events. There are iPhone and iPad apps that will run on today’s Macs, and for many of us, iPhone mirroring is another tool we can use to achieve the same thing. We’re also seeing increasing convergence between the operating systems, and I’m sure that will continue: we’re now long past the point where Apple was arguing that we would be converging a toaster and a fridge.
But I do think we will eventually end up with an all-screen foldable Mac once the technology exists to make a soft keyboard a viable replacement for a hard one. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it will happen.
The reason I think it is still a long way off is my belief that there will be an interim step in the form of dynamic hardware keyboards. It’s literally a decade since I talked about why I think these are the future, and while this type of tech is in use today for niche applications, they still haven’t yet hit the mainstream.
The Sonder Keyboard was one early attempt, using miniature e-ink displays to remap the labels and functions of the keys.
For example, a QWERTY keyboard is almost irrelevant to someone who spends all day video editing in Final Cut Pro, which is why there’s a market for both physical keyboards and overlays.
How much smarter would it be if our MacBook keyboard or desktop Magic keyboard could adapt its labels to match the app we are using at the time?
The longer term goal, however, is entirely soft keyboards. I said back in 2016 that the very same argument Steve Jobs laid out then for virtual keys on a smartphone when introducing the iPhone could be applied equally to a Mac keyboard.
What’s wrong with their user interfaces? They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for it.