Ah yes! Another Apple patent to swoon over! What mad genius will we glimpse in the minds of Cupertino’s engineers through the soothsaying of this sheath of dry legalese and blusterless line drawings? An Apple Tablet that also sports the incredible dual-function of the radioactive lumen output of a tanning lamp? The iPoiuyt: a brand new Shuffle in the impossible shape of a blivet? Some sultrily seamless and unibody sex bot?
If only. Instead, the latest Apple patent, published on Thursday but filed in June 2008, describes a new universal dock for the iPhone and iPod. The idea is to get rid of all of those cheap plastic iPod dock adapters and instead use an elastic, form-fitting substance which moulds itself around each of the iPod line’s unique shapes.
It’s not a bad solution, but I wouldn’t exactly expect this patent to ever become a retail product. Squishy elastic rubber doesn’t exactly seem like a good fit for Apple. I would imagine that future iPods and iPhones will adopt a charging and docking system similar to the Palm Pre’s galvanized lozenge, the Touchstone Charger, as soon as wireless USB makes a little more headway.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
