- Patent describes the AirPods case as a wireless audio transmitter
- Touching screen with both finger and apple pencils
- Sound mixture and control options also included
As the famous tagline expressed it, Apple likes to think differently – and its most different thinking tends to emerge in patents, like this new one for the ultimate AirPods case, spotted by patent.
Apple has archived interesting AirPods patents in ages and as patentlessly notes Apple, it filed a design with a touch screen back in 2023. And now there is a recently published patent application that takes the idea much longer.
What’s in the latest Apple AirPods patent?
The recently published patent describes the AirPods case as a node for portable audio devices with a large square touch screen on the front. This screen appears with a four-icon grille, a now play screen and a photo tape. But it’s the next picture that is really interesting because it has a turntable in it.
In the images delivered in the application, the AirPods case is connected via a cable to a turntable and then broadcast the sound from the case to AirPods. It is also shown to accept handwriting or apple pencil input on the touch screen.
There is more: The patent also describes two cases that are tapped or pushed together to initiate sound sharing or synchronization. And it describes the use of several audio sources that play at the same time in a set of earplugs, and to be able to use the AirPod case to adjust the relative volumes of each input that sounds like a really cool addition.
We’ve seen some of this before: For example, Bowers & Wilkins’ PI8 earplugs can have their case connected to wired audio sources to transfer to the earplugs and do so in APTX adaptive quality. And we’ve seen earplugs such as LG’s Live Beam 3, do so too.
But what is described in Apple’s patent looks like it could be more elegant, which of course is typically Apple and even more ambitious in some ways.
The bad news is that after decades of Apple Patent Watching, I know from experience that what is in a patent doesn’t always end up in the Apple store, and if it rarely does as soon as we want: Personally, I still wait for the touch screen MacBook, which always seems to be just a few years away.
While none of the technologies described in this patent is especially Outlandish or in addition, I still wouldn’t expect to see any of this in AirPods Pro 3-Men I think it’s a pretty good indication of where Apple sees at least some airpods going in the not too distant future.
