Posted on Friday, January 04 2008 @ 12:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
The guys from Art Lebedev won't be happy as Apple just filed a patent for a dynamic keyboard with OLEDs behind each movable key.
Apple's patent application for this OLED keyboard hid in the background since March of last year, and the exciting thing is it looks a whole lot like Art Lebedev's as-yet-unreleased Optimus keyboard. While this kind of flexibility is right in line with Apple's latest keyboard exploits, we're wondering how the company will be able to make the price anywhere near reasonable, since Lebedev has continuously tried to get us used to the idea of spending over a thousand dollars on such a keyboard.
Lebedev's manufacturing cost is said to be astromical for each keyboard, so maybe Apple could bring that price down with economies of scale. Heck, a rep for peripheral company Razer told us he thinks his company could do the same thing and sell for under $500, so it can't be impossible.
One important advantage Apple has is that it has control of the operating system software, and according to the patent application, the software applications would talk to circuitry inside each key that could control what was displayed on its OLED.
Source: Gizmodo
