iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max they will be without notch, barring last-second surprises – highly unlikely, given the amount of rumors that have emerged so far – they will be the first Apple smartphones to be equipped with a double hole to accommodate cameras and sensors. Yeah, i sensors: why did the Cupertino company to reduce so drastically the dimensions of the components? PatentlyApple tries to answer by showing a patent released yesterday by the USPTO named “Light-folded Projector“in which the technology behind this new design could be described with which we want to maximize the viewing area of ​​the display.

From the iPhone X – the first model to adopt the notch solution – to the iPhone 14 Pro, the evolution of technology is – and will be – evident, in the middle there was a intermediate step with the iPhone 13 the notch kept it, however reducing its size. Recall that originally the notch contained the infrared camera, the flood illuminatorthe proximity sensor, the ambient light sensor, the speaker, the microphone, the front camera and the dot projector.

A few have been made on the iPhone 13 changes which made it possible to reduce the area occupied by the notch: first of all speaker and microphone have been moved to the edgethen all the components that make up the Face ID technology were grouped. Now on the iPhone 14 Pro there will be one new revolutionwith the circular hole designed to accommodate the front camera and the pill-shaped one for all the other sensors.

Apple’s solution is called light-folded projector. In a nutshell, the IR light emitter would have been moved from the notch to below the display, while maintaining the position of both the front camera and the IR receiver. To make the displaced element project infrared light in a certain direction, the engineers from Cupertino have developed a sort of prism to rotate the beam 90 degrees. The prism is smaller than the infrared emitter, thus freeing up space for the display.

Will this really be Apple’s technological response to the disappearance of the notch? For more information, please consult the patent which can be found by accessing the link in SOURCE and entering in the search field 20220268976.

• Apple iPhone 13 is available online from Amazon to 799 euros.