I wonder if this is about education.
Essentially I think Apple have realised their new developer pipe is drying up; the devices are too expensive for hobbyists and they are vastly too expensive for almost all schools on earth.
The Pi 400 is a wholly credible device in those markets; it solves a lot of the practicality issues of the earlier machines.
A device with even an old style A14 or the M1 in an M2 future, tucked inside a keyboard, could be made viable for this market, I think, and it's seemed obvious to me for some time that the only reason Apple don't make the Apple TV into a general purpose education computing device is that they don't care about the market.
If they've started to care about that market again, it's a good thing.
There is no reason why it cant be squeezed down to $299. Basically the iPad ( $329 ) without screen. Or more like with A14 but $399.
Cool idea, the problem is I still dont understand where the target market are, the two above doesn't seems very Apple to me. There are ~700M business PC ( both laptop and desktop ), I would imagine this is attractive enough for Apple to make exception.
Is this actually happening? New iOS apps seem to be coming along in a flood like usual.
Design patents only protect key aspects of product design, they are more limited, and -- evidently like this one -- they're kept secret until they are granted.
There's a good chance this device is actually going to happen.
If it's not a design patent then they are really only claiming one or two small elements of this as innovation. Read any patent; they're all like this at some level.
This is to protect (somewhat) against lookalikes.
One interesting part is that they mention an inductive charging coil. Cursory reading didn’t tell me whether that’s for keeping a mouse charged or for charging the device.
Right. Fits with my understanding. Basically they (and others -- HP/LG) use these patent classes to protect aspects of technical designs in the way that Coca Cola used design patents to protect their classic bottle shape.
So possibly not an actual design patent but something with the same narrow scope.
I guess it's an open question as to whether they should be allowed, but they surely seem largely to be easy to avoid in good faith.
You can't embed a Pi 400 in a robot, you wouldn't stick it on the side of a 3D printer, turn it into a streaming media player, etc.
I suspect the Pi 400 sells better at specific times of the year -- at Christmas and when schools are spending their rare IT budgets. But it's also the first product of its kind from them.