By news@appleinsider.com (William Gallagher) A flat touch surface isn’t enough — thirty years after it retired the trackball in favor of touch-sensitive trackpads on PowerBooks, Apple could be planning to combine the two ideas into a new input device for the MacBook Pro.If Apple did make a trackball again, it would be a touch-sensitive one.First Apple did that thing of putting the trackball at the front of a laptop while moving the keyboard to the back — and everyone followed suit. Then in 1994 it introduced the PowerBook 500 series that had a trackpad, and everyone followed suit.In 2024, a newly-granted patent suggests that Apple could be finally putting two and two together, to get a touch-sensitive trackball. That is definitely one clear example use case for the patent “Spherical or highly curved touch-sensitive surfaces.” Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Source:: Apple Insider