“Over the years, Apple has dreamt up a revolutionary styled docking station, some smart docks, docks based on straight forward inductive charging methods and some with loopy inductive charging methods and yet we still have Apple’s plain old boring dock,” Jack Purcher reports (and opines) for Patently Apple.

“But it seems that Apple isn’t done just yet with designing new docks and today we see that their design team went over the edge with a dozen or more docking systems,” Purcher reports. “And this time around, most of them involve mating a power-clip to a docking station that could also end up being your MacBook or iMac.”

Purcher writes, “One of these designs may end up making it to market one of these days or they’ll all simply end up in Jony Ive’s toy box to rust with all of the other rejected ideas.”

Apple patent application: Power/data clips and docking station systems

Apple patent application: Power/data clips and docking station systems


 
Much more, including many additional illustrations from Apple’s patent application, in the full article here.