How Would a MacBook With a Foldable Display Work?

Amid reports of Apple working on a notebook with a foldable display, how could such a device be implemented?

According to Ross Young, an analyst with the Display Supply Chain Consultants, Apple is looking into the possibility of offering notebooks with foldable displays. The company is said to be talking with its suppliers about smaller displays. Young said that this display size could allow for higher resolutions.

Young has revealed a wide range of accurate insights into Apple's plans, such as the size of the sixth-generation iPad mini, the ProMotion display, and the MacBook Pro's mini. He says that the foldable notebook could be a whole new product category for Apple, but with so little known about the mysterious new form factor at this very early stage, there appear to be three main options for how Apple could conceive of the device.

All-Screen MacBook

An all-screen MacBook with a display that spans the entire interior of the clamshell design is the most obvious implementation for a foldable Apple notebook. Young speculated that the implementation could result in a dual-use product that could work as a notebook with a full-size on-screen keyboard when folded and as a monitor when unfolded.

There are two drawbacks to this design. Apple has a well-known reluctance to offer a touch-screen based Mac, with company executives often publicly shooting down the possibility of it ever offering such a device. For example, former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive has said that a touchscreen Mac would not be a particularly useful or appropriate application of Multi-Touch.

macOS is designed for mouse or trackpad input, rather than touch. Craig Federighi, Apple's engineering chief, said in 2020 that Apple designed and evolved the look of macOS in a way that felt comfortable and natural across a family of devices. There are potential issues with the ergonomics of a touchscreen keyboard and trackpad. An all-touchscreen MacBook seems to be out of step with the company's thinking in recent years.

The 20-inch display size is being explored by Apple. The 11-inch MacBook Air is the smallest display Apple has ever offered on a MacBook. The smaller on-screen keyboard on the current iPad Pro models would be the same size as the one on the other portion of the display.

Foldable Display With Physical Keyboard

A MacBook with a vertically longer display that folds at the hinge and meets the device's physical keyboard is a more out of left field form factor. The benefits of a larger display with room for peripheral on-screen content, while still retaining the benefits of a physical keyboard and trackpad, could be offered by this solution.

The Touch Bar could be revived without sacrificing function keys. Federighi explained that the MacBook Pro form factor with the Touch Bar avoids the problems caused by other touchscreen laptops.

We really feel that the ergonomics of using a Mac are that your hands are rested on a surface, and that lifting your arm up to poke a screen is a pretty fatiguing thing to do.

Extending the display of the MacBook would comply with Apple's demands of not lifting one's arms to touch the screen while offering a new location for touch input, regardless of whether or not the Touch Bar is revived.

In this instance, the 20-inch display size could be more plausible, potentially offering an even larger MacBook Pro to sit above the 16-inch model in the lineup, like the 17-inch MacBook Pro that the company offered between 2006 and 2011.

Just a Foldable iPad Pro?

While Young described the device as a foldable notebook, there is a chance that it could actually be a foldable iPad Pro. The device running iPadOS could make more sense if it were a touch-based all-screen notebook.

This thinking would line up with Apple's current outlook. John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, pointed to the iPad when asked about the touchscreen Macs.

We make the world's best touch computer on an iPad. It's totally optimized for that. And the Mac is totally optimized for indirect input. We haven't really felt a reason to change that.

There have been rumors of Apple working on a foldable iPad Pro in the past.

This implementation could also be related to the larger iPad Pro rumors. Mark Gurman suggested last summer that Apple was working on bigger iPad models that could blur the lines between tablets and laptops.

I'm told that Apple has engineers and designers exploring larger iPads that could hit stores a couple of years down the road at the earliest. They're unlikely for next year—with Apple's attention on a redesigned iPad Pro in the current sizes for 2022—and it's possible they never come at all. But a big iPad would be the perfect device for many people, including me, and would continue to blur the lines between tablet and laptop.

Two Apple suppliers are preparing to supply the company with larger displays for future iPad models.

Larger display sizes may bring the iPad closer to the Mac than ever before, but there would need to be software improvements to properly take advantage of the larger display. Some users complain that iPadOS does not take full advantage of the hardware that the ‌iPad Pro; has to offer, making it more difficult to use.

Gurman believes that Apple will eventually need to allow Mac apps and a Mac-like multitasking experience with more flexible arrangements of app windows on the iPad Pro. By the time the larger iPad comes to market, it is likely that further iteration of iPadOS will improve the experience to take better advantage of the hardware.

Release Date

Young said that the launch timeframe for Apple's foldable notebook is likely later than 2025, with 2026 or 2027 being floated as reasonable possibilities, but there is still a chance Apple will abandon the project long before then.

Young said that Apple's long-rumored foldable iPhone has been delayed until 2025, a significant delay compared to previous predictions.