A flat touch surface isn’t enough — thirty years after it retired the trackball in favor of touch-sensitive trackpads on PowerBooks, Apple could be planning to combine the two ideas into a new input device for the MacBook Pro.
First Apple did that thing of putting the trackball at the front of a laptop while moving the keyboard to the back — and everyone followed suit. Then in 1994 it introduced the PowerBook 500 series that had a trackpad, and everyone followed suit.
In 2024, a newly-granted patent suggests that Apple could be finally putting two and two together, to get a touch-sensitive trackball. That is definitely one clear example use case for the patent “Spherical or highly curved touch-sensitive surfaces.”
