What if Apple phones coming after iPhone 13 could tell you when your screen got damaged or cracked?
A recently published Apple patent reveals that the company has explored advanced displays capable of detecting damage to the display via a “strain-sensing resistor” that aggregates strain measurements. Presumably, this would allow the phone to find cracks that are too small to be noticed and alert users to the damage before it escalates and potentially harms them or the phone’s delicate internal components.
The patent not only covers static screens, but also includes “flexible screens,” potentially including a foldable Apple phone like the so-called iPhone Flip, as AppleInsider pointed out. It’s still unclear what type of display Apple would use in its own foldable, but given that earlier devices in the niche like the original Samsung Galaxy Fold had more scratch-prone screens than handsets with glass screens, detecting damage to the screen might be helpful. We know Apple is concerned – a previous patent conceptualized a crack prevention layer for foldable phone screens.
Apple Patent No. 11,087,670 showing a circuit design for detecting cracks in a screen (Image Credit: Apple / USPTO)
While future flat, foldable iPhones may be better suited for crack-detection screen technology given the frequency with which users damage phone screens, the patent doesn’t limit its technology to only handsets. Indeed, it openly lists different categories of products in which such display technology could appear, such as computers and wristwatches.
In other words, we could see everything from MacBook Pros and iMacs to Apple Watches and iPads automatically detecting cracks which would be universally useful. There’s no reason Apple shouldn’t include it.
(Image credit: Avenir)
This presupposes a lot of sensing technology, however – we don’t know if it would be just as feasible to implement it in a large 27-inch iMac display as it does in the latest iPhones, which hit a 6.7-inch display. . It would make sense to roll it out in Apple phones first and then roll it out in its wider lineup.
Finally, it would be fair for Apple to outperform its competitors in the display arena given that it generally lags behind when it comes to mobile screen technology – we’ve only just had OLED displays in the lineup. iPhone 12 from last year, years after Samsung and other Android phone makers added them to their high-end phones.
We don’t expect Apple to roll out crack detection anytime soon, especially since this is the first time we’ve heard of it. Currently, the company is slowly upgrading the displays on its devices to mini LEDs like in the 2021 12.9-inch iPad Pro (and, rumored to be, 2021 MacBook Pro laptops), so crack detection could. to be the next screen technology that comes next as the next unmissable breakthrough in the Apple lineup.
–
