Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/25/folding-macbook-rumors-spread.html
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Don’t… don’t all MacBooks already fold? That’s like, their main feature.
(… I’ll see myself out.)
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hmmm … “folding” yet there seems to be a seam …? (“folding” vs “hinged”?)
I will never buy one until not buying one becomes inconvenient.
were i ever to bother to get a tattoo (yet they remain inconvenient?) i think i’d steal that sage wisdom as a guiding principle of life (writ in a suitable crevice)
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Yeah I don’t get it. Phones and tablets, sure. But what possible use would a folding screen serve for a laptop with a physical keyboard? It’s not just a bad idea because it will break, it’s a bad idea because it has no purpose in the first place.
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I am using a foldable laptop since a few months, and I am quite happy with it. But it’s something for a small minority of people needing a laptop and having very long commutes. As a tablet it’s not useable, but it’s good to read in the train or to work with an attached keyboard.
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It makes more sense than a folding phone in some ways, I suppose - the phone gets opened more times per day, and is more likely to get dirt and lint in its gaps (and the dirt and oil from touching the screen), whereas a laptop is likely to be carried in its own case. I don’t know how flat the screen can get, and how useful the current models are with screens that don’t go completely flat, though.
You could have a much bigger screen this way - in theory twice as big with the same laptop size. The keyboard may determine the minimum size, but with current designs, if you want/need a bigger screen, you’re stuck with a device larger than the minimum keyboard size. If you could have a folding screen that’s sufficiently usable when opened, that really changes the form factor of a closed laptop.
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Or will they remove the physical keyboard and replace it with a touchscreen below the usual laptop hinge?
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TBH, I don’t even see how they’re useful on a phone or tablet. The proportions are just awkward and only provide a weirdly slim phone or a weirdly square tablet. And then of course, there the whole “why?” of it all. Like, what need does it actually meet? It’s pretty telling in the ads for folding devices that they can’t seem to come up with selling points other than “slightly smaller when folded” or “kind of a half-assed tripod for selfies”.
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I shudder to think… it seems hard to believe anyone would think eliminating a physical, tactile keyboard on a work-centered laptop would be a winning idea, especially after the company apparently learned its lesson with the “touch bar” thing.
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I agree, but we are talking about Apple designers, here. 
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I think Apple learned their lesson with the touch bar thingie - I don’t think they’d be remotely so silly as to do a whole touch keyboard. Someone else, might try to make such a monstrosity (assuming they haven’t already - I’m really not familiar with the folding laptop/tablet lines that exist now).
Replacing the keyboard with a screen keyboard sounds horrible, but it sounds horrible in a way I could see Apple trying.
I can also imagine a widescreen laptop, imagine opening it normally, then opening up two panels that are half the width of the laptop and hinged at the sides? Feels a bit awkward.
Folding/rolling/etc screens really seem a lot more effective in phones to me. A little screen that fits in your pocket and opens up to something bigger when you have space is useful, assuming you can solve all the problems inherent in “folding a complex sandwich of electronics and glass”; a decent-sized screen that fits in your bag and unfolds into something bigger doesn’t feel like a huge improvement even if they have a magical screen technology that stands up to years and years of constant abuse at the hinges.
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The part of this idea that I find it hardest to imagine Apple liking is how it would complicate the current party line on touchscreens.
A folding screen macbook would presumably be a touchscreen device(Apple would absolutely tell themselves and everyone else that their haptic feedback implementation was actually an actually adequate typing experience; but seems much less likely to go for the lowbrow crimes against keyboards route of including a removable garbage-tier bluetooth thing like a Yoga Book 9i or similar); and that would mean that there’s now a MacOS touchscreen device and it’s unavoidably at the very top of the price list for macbooks so there’s still going to be a band of either non-touch or touchscreen but still conventional clamshell laptops between the touchscreen oddball and the ipads.
That just seems like a recipe for nagging awkwardness: it’s going to be a bad look if your hyper-pricey halo product is left with software that only technically supports its available input devices but clearly doesn’t have its heart in it; and it’s also going to be a bad look if you go all Win8 on MacOS in the grips of the mad delusion that a UI can totally serve two masters coherently; since that’s going to be a catastrophic experience on the laptops cheap enough to actually sell in volume or any laptops when docked; along with encouraging the ongoing sense of constraint from the expensive tier of ipads.
Doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t do it, they are no stranger to either major shakeups or hubris; but it would involve wading into a somewhat sticky area in ways that just technically supporting a software keyboard and letting OEMs who feel lucky make bad 2-in-1s does not.
why not use an ipad tho? or is it that you need the freedom of a full fledged OS but also desire a massive screen and to use USB or bt for the keyboard? (It’s my understanding the foldables are not touch screens)
LOL, no.
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… why stop at half the width
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I see a guy at one of the local coffee shops with one of these and it’s fucking hilarious.
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I had to doodle some horrible aberrations.
The Big T. Fits a double wide screen into the closed footprint of your current laptop, except about 1.5-2x thicker.
Feels pretty unstable.
The Compact. Fits a normal laptop screen into the footprint of a keyboard. Don’t ask me where the trackpad went. I guess it’s all touchscreen because Apple is being BRAVE again.
I feel like there’s something almost appealing in the idea of a tablet the size of a keyboard that can open up into a computer? It’s around the size of a folded newspaper that landed on your front porch back in the days of print and that’s oddly appealing. It feels more like something I’d stick into a purse rather than a bag and that feels like it’s going somewhere interesting. Iterate on this a few times and it might almost be good! It’s probably too heavy to use as a tablet if it’s weight is close to current laptops though.
Also it occurred to me while drawing these that folding up any kind of technology sandwich like this is going to have very tight tolerances, possibly tight enough that adding the thickness of stickers or a keyboard cover or something like that could fuck up your expensive new Origami Book, and honestly I could see Apple’s response to that being a big “you’re holding it wrong” kind of shrug, so that’d be fun to watch!
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Aaaand if I recall correctly Apple owns some patents around the idea of a flexible screen that can be manipulated from below, so covering the entire interior surface of your current laptop with a screen, and having the bottom half be a screen keyboard with some actual tactile depth to it, might be where they’re going. If they can get an experience closer to typing on actual keys than a smooth piece of glass, that sounds a lot less awkward than the bullshit I just doodled; every keycap would be customizable, and you could turn it sideways and shut off the keyboard for a great e-book experience.
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… can you tell what he’s doing with it?
Gaming? Coding? Day-trading?
