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Apple Files for Patents on Interface Technology, Bottom-Side Optical Drive

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An article on MacNN describes how Apple has filed for two patents with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office today as to a continuation patent for its Expose technology as well as a bottom-side optical drive for its future notebook computers.
The interface continuation patent application described the Expose feature that’s been used in Mac OS X since version 10.3 to view and hide overlapping objects on a computer screen.
The second patent application, entitled “Access system for a portable device” and “Disk drive media access system”, describes a bottom-side optical disk drive which could further slim down the necessary size for laptop computers.
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bottom-loading-odd.jpg
An article on MacNN describes how Apple has filed for two patents with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office today as to a continuation patent for its Expose technology as well as a bottom-side optical drive for its future notebook computers.
The interface continuation patent application described the Expose feature that’s been used in Mac OS X since version 10.3 to view and hide overlapping objects on a computer screen.
The second patent application, entitled “Access system for a portable device” and “Disk drive media access system”, describes a bottom-side optical disk drive which could further slim down the necessary size for laptop computers.
This system would display an “invert” icon indicating when the laptop enters an eject mode and display arrows on the screen to tell the reader to invert the laptop to properly eject a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. The patent also describes how future Apple laptops could contain a mobile motion module which uses three gravitational access points to detect the position of the laptop, such as if it were falling to the floor. This system could the use this data to park the heads of the hard drive, thereby avoiding a “head crash”, which can damage the platters of a hard drive and lead to data loss.
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