The US Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple two patents on Tuesday. The patents suggest that the future iPhone may eventually be completely covered by seamless glass, and the body will have no interfaces, and may even have a wraparound Display screen .
The first of the two patents is simply called a “glass enclosure” and describes how handheld computing devices use glass as the enclosure. Although the patent picture shows the old iPod, the application documents also show that it can be applied to almost any handheld device, such as a smart phone.
Apple believes that the design challenge facing equipment manufacturers is that the shell structure usually involves multiple layers of interlayers, connected by some kind of fastening mechanism (such as screws), which makes assembly time-consuming and cumbersome.
Apple’s solution requires a case made of glass, but unlike the glass back of the iPhone, the case that Apple hopes to produce is a component, a possibly seamless case.
The glass can be squeezed into a tube, so that a device with rounded edges and a tubular body can be manufactured. According to different implementations, glass can be placed on the top and bottom of the tube with additional pieces of glass to completely enclose the electronic components inside.
The glass manufacturing process flow chart shows that Apple hopes to make a hollow tube and then cut out parts of the tube to achieve specific functions, such as speaker holes. The edge of the glass will be treated as a chamfer or radius edge, the surface will be polished, textured, protected with an additional coating, and then the lid will be placed and sealed.
In addition, the all-glass iPhone without ports will have stronger water resistance.
The application was filed on August 12, 2019, and its inventors are listed as Christopher Prest and Emery A. Sanford.
The second patent is “Electronic Equipment with Wrapped Display”, which on the surface seems to match the “glass shell” patent. The patented display screen can have a similar surround property, which surrounds the electronic device encapsulated inside.
The screen can take the form of a hollow display cover structure, which can be a cylinder or tube. The structure can be produced with sapphire or other crystals or transparent materials, and end caps can also be used to fix internal electronic devices.
The screen itself will consist of a flexible display layer, which can be an OLED panel or other technology, laid inside the housing. Since it is also an extruded glass tube, the wrap-around display does not have to take the same shape as a standard smartphone.
The application listed its inventors as Scott A. Myers, Derek Wright and Fletcher R. Rothkopf, and it was submitted on December 29, 2017.
Naijatechnews understands that Apple submits a large number of patent applications every week. Although the existence of these applications indicates areas of interest to the Apple R&D team, it does not guarantee that these concepts will appear in future products or services.
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