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Opinion: Apple may or may not buy Sonder, but dynamic hardware keyboards are the future

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<p>Following speculation that Apple may be looking to acquire Sonder Keyboard, the startup yesterday confirmed to us that it has <a href="https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/13/apple-foxconn-sonder-keyboard-dynamic/" target="_blank">been in discussions[/url] with Apple’s procurement board. Coincidentally or not, the company’s <a href="https://www.sonderdesign.com" target="_blank">website[/url] was not accessible at the time of writing (that may simply be yesterday’s story driving too much traffic to it, of course).</p>
<p>Sonder was not the first company to make a keyboard with dynamically-assigned keys. Patents for the idea go back as far as <a href="https://www.google.com/patents/US4078257" target="_blank">the 1970s[/url], and the first commercially-available one was the German-made <a href="http://www.e3-keys.com/english/history.htm" target="_blank">LC Board[/url] in the 1980s.</p>
<p>The Optimus Maximus was one of the better-known examples of the technology, later superseded by the <a href="http://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/popularis/" target="_blank">Optimus Popularis[/url], in which each key is an individual color LCD display. At $1500, it hasn’t exactly made it into the mainstream, and other examples have <a href="http://www.killerkeys.com/Pro" target="_blank">come and gone[/url].</p>
<p>But Sonder’s approach has a realistic shot at making dynamic hardware keyboards a mainstream technology …</p>
<p> <a href="https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/14/sonder-keyboard-apple-future/#more-450179" class="more-link">more…[/url]</p>
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