MacBook hidden glass trackpad in Apple patent and LG Gram series notebooks have been preliminarily realized.

CTOnews.com, January 9 (Xinhua)-- Apple won two technology patents in August / November last year, outlining the concept of a glass trackpad that will be introduced on the MacBook model in the future. At CES 2023, the glass trackpad described in Apple's patent has been initially implemented on LG's latest Gram series of notebooks.

Apple outlined a flexible glass touchpad in its previous patent. As shown in figure FIG. 2A below, the touch pad can access the force input / tactile output interface. More specifically, the Apple finger force input / tactile output interface # 1200 also includes a tactile actuator # 1214, which may contain a piezoelectric element. Using this structure, the actuation of the force sensor introduces the bending moment into the supporting structure to produce tactile output through the outer surface.

Above, FIG. 3 outlines a layer of glass design, and the new force input / tactile output actuators can be distributed over the entire width of the future MacBook, which will reduce the thickness of the MacBook while eliminating the dedicated traditional touchpad area

CTOnews.com learned that LG introduced a very cool feature in the latest Gram series of notebooks: hiding the trackpad. When the user places his finger on the touchpad area, the light under the glass lights up to show the trackpad area presented in the video clip. This is definitely a possible feature of glass MacBook to provide it with a concise design.

As Apple's engineering team worked on a possible future glass MacBook, they saw that LG Gram introduced a hidden trackpad function, which made the possibility of future glass MacBook more reasonable. It confirms that glass may be an emerging trend for PC and laptops, and Apple is at the top of this trend.