The wheels never stop turning over at Apple headquarters with the iPhone 8 (didn't the iPhone 7s just come out?) set to be released this fall and now this..
A new patent made public on Thursday (via AppleInsider) suggests Apple is exploring the idea of turning your iPhone into a "brain" that powers a device similar to a Macbook.
The details are rather broad and vague. In a nutshell, the patent describes a thin laptop-like shell (referred to as an "accessory device") without a processor.
Instead, you'd dock a "smart phone, media player, tablet computer, or other portable computing device" into the accessory device that would serve as the processor.
"The accessory device, however, can provide auxiliary processing resources, such a graphical processing unit, or GPU, or other processing resources that can support the functions of the portable computing device."
The patent comes with two different illustrations for how this would work for phones and tablets. For phones, there'd be a slot on the accessory device instead of a trackpad.
Tablets, however, would dock right into the space where a laptop's screen would normally be.
With smartphones now the most-used and most personal computers, it's a no-brainer for Apple to create a way to let users better access the device that has all their personal data. Sure, you could always use cloud services, but it's not always so easy.
But like all patents, the ideas that are described may never make it into commercial products. So don't get too excited just yet.
