Apple has a grudge against actual physical buttons, primarily the ones that take up way too much space. The enterprise has filed a patent that describes the structure of “compact pivoting input devices”, which will considerably reduce the internal volume that a button usually takes.
It’s not just room saving, while, this system can give programmable feed-back. This sort of buttons can provide different haptic comments, configured by a software package, and will also be power-sensitive.
The patent presents the Apple iPhone energy button as an instance, so that’s most likely to start with a use case, but these devices can discover other uses as nicely. Alternatively of just buttons, this can be applied for toggles as perfectly (and the iPhone has one of those on its side as well). There are many extra potential uses far too, say a super-thin keyboard cover for the iPad.
Actually patent goes into excruciating detail of the operation, but basically the mechanism is similar to a speaker – an electric coil surrounds a permanent magnet. When power is applied, it moves the magnet, providing haptic feedback.
The magnet alone doesn’t move much “just 10 microns or .01 mm” but that’s a sample. Also, there’s a stress sensor at the base to sign up presses (and the force of the press as well).
Apple previously transformed the Home button on the Apple iPhone into a preset capacitive sensor that relies on the Taptic feedback to provide the “click” feeling. Similar to the touchpads on MacBooks. These are fixed though, while these new mechanisms will move however slightly, which may have a major impact on the realism of the “click”.
