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How Would a MacBook With a Foldable Display Work?

I don’t think Apple could get away with selling a foldable display device. Apple products are expected to last years and if they don’t it’s somehow a national news story. If you buy a Samsung foldable phone and it cracks in half oh well you bought new technology so that’s the risk you took ?
 
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How about we first get rid of the bezels? That also gives the screen room to grow and would be very welcome.
 
Ion-X said:
I prefer a keyboard with tactile response (not just taptics) to let me know I’ve tapped the key without having to look. It’s just way, way faster and enables 130+ WPM typing.
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Lol I understand all of that, now I was never that fast of a typist when I worried about things like that in like Home Ec (?) many moons ago. Now since I was diagnosed terminal I doubt I could keep my brain focused long enough to maybe 130 Words per hour but that’s the nature of the beast I have to deal with now.
 
dermeister said:
Dear God it's the Return of the TouchBar by other means.
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I’ve always thought that the idea of the Touch Bar was a sound one (though maybe some apps make better use of it than others). The main issue with removing the function keys mostly comes from heavy duty applications, especially ports from Windows (where the f-keys are more commonly used for keyboard shortcuts), which tend to be the kind of applications that could benefit from appropriate Touch Bar use. (For instance, debugging using Netbeans or Eclipse uses the f-keys for its default key bindings, but a debugging playback toolbar located at the top of the keyboard would be more intuitive. Though, yes, you do lose the benefit of muscle memory for locking in the f-key’s location.) If this folding display idea has physical keys (including f-keys) but has a display area suitable for Touch Bar functionality, that would really be the best of both worlds.
 
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I highly doubt anyone types on their MacBook Pro while secretly wishing that they were typing on a virtual keyboard embedded in their folding screen. I could see that, I guess for an iPad. But I would not be interested in buying a laptop that relied on an onscreen keyboard.
 
I completely understand Apple’s resistance to a touch screen based Mac (touch screen laptops and and desktops demo well, but the gorilla arm issue seems to be real), that and they’ve got the iPad anyway.

But having a folding display with a lower surface that can act as a touch screen Mac would resolve the gorilla arm issues, and, if there were some way of including a physical keyboard in the same package, that would be great. As for a folding iPad, I’d have to think about that for a bit. I think I’d favor one that folds outward instead of inward (for sake of going from a smaller screen to an expanded screen). I suspect a foldable clamshell iPad would only be usable as a laptop or completely unfolded, limiting its portability.
 
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Havoc035 said:
How about we first get rid of the bezels? That also gives the screen room to grow and would be very welcome.
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It’s moving in that direction. People still want a camera and perhaps some sort of facial recognition so till under screen camera technology improves bezels won’t completely go away. Also as bezels get thinner they become less relevant. If you have a thick one inch (25 mm) border it’s taking up a significant amount of space but if it’s only a tenth of an inch (2.5 mm) it’s not as intrusive. I think there’s going to be a point where the bezel gets down to a certain size and then it’s sort of ignored. I’m not sure where Apple is on their latest MacBooks though.
 
If it's a foldable screen, I'd want it to fold sideways so that I get an super ultrawide screen. Make it a triple fold, so it's the equivalent of 3 screens and I'd offer up my first born. Win-win in my case. I get a special, deluxe, super, ultrawide screen and I get rid of an angsty teen.?
 
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ASUS ZenBook 17 Fold OLED anyone?!
ASUS-ZenBook-17-Fold-OLED.jpg
 
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A foldable iPad Pro would make more sense. I would never want to touch type on a MBP screen - it would be incredibly inefficient and slow. However it might make more sense for a non-pro for casual use.
 
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This does sound like one of the crazier leaks, in my opinion -- but a fun one nonetheless, even if I'm skeptical that such a product will reach customers, just like many of the other commenters in this thread.

That said: I think we all know that Apple has a leak problem. This site wouldn't exist otherwise, so clearly a lot of us are quite content for Apple to continue to have such a problem... we like hearing what they're going to announce before they do so. But it should probably go without saying that Apple's top brass doesn't like that at all. As such, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this is yet another attempt by Apple to ferret out the cause of these leaks. After all, it seems likely that the core of the problem comes from within there own employee base. Apple could potentially fire whoever it is for breach of contract or the like... if they can find them.

In that vein, recent changes could possibly have presented an opportunity. Now that Apple is literally using the same CPU for both the iPad and the Mac, it seems to me it would be mere child's play for a known/trusted Apple engineer to put macOS on a prototype "iPad Pro Max Fold" or some such thing, to show it off to one or more suspected internal leakers.

So, you know... if my crazy theory is correct (which I really think isn't nearly as crazy as the idea of such a device running macOS) it's quite possible that someone either just got fired or is about to be fired.

(Not that we'd necessarily ever end up finding out, of course.)
 
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I interpreted it like this: if you open it, it looks exactly like a normal MacBook. However, you can stretch the hinge completely open (just like on a Lenovo Yoga). Now, if you turn your laptop around, you’ll find your 20" screen. This way, you have both a normal MacBook and a 20" external screen.

The only issue might be that your exterior screen is completely unprotected, so while it might be iPhone-level scratch-resistant, you would want to be careful with it.
 
theluggage said:
I'd need a lot of convincing that the screen isn't going to fail after a fair amount of folding and unfolding - and the laptop examples illustrated don't really show any huge advantage over having dual screens with a gap. It's not like you're going to display any useful information on the fold itself.
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Yep, I'd be happy to have a folding screen (more likely on a phone-sized device that opens to tablet-sized) once they get them to work as well as they do in science fiction - where either the extended part is basically just made out of light, or something with the repetitive flexibility of cloth, that is, say, electrically charged to make it become rigid. But trying to bend normal electronics enough to fold the screen (and ending up with something that can fold/unfold up to dozens of times)? No thanks. I also had lots of people suggesting to me that voice input was entirely workable - in the 80's. And we've finally reached the point, decades later, where voice input works more often than not. I'd love a foldable screen but I'm expecting it's similarly far off.
 
Adarna said:
Looking forward to the thousands of posts complaining about the fragility of foldable screens and the creases from folding the screen.

I see these two being largely resolved roughly a decade later.
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What makes you think these are solvable problems? They are both issues in plenty of non-display-related areas
 
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