There have long been reports and rumours about Apple working on a foldable clamshell device that is either an iPad, a Mac, one of each, or a hybrid of the two. A recent report said that although this was once a priority for new CEO John Ternus, the project had been cancelled – but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. Personally, I think the concept of a hybrid Mac and iPad has essentially been superseded by events.

There are iPhone and iPad apps that will run on today’s Macs, and for many of us, iPhone mirroring is another tool we can use to achieve the same thing. We’re also seeing increasing convergence between the operating systems, and I’m sure that will continue. But I do think we will eventually end up with an all-screen foldable Mac once the technology exists to make a soft keyboard a viable replacement for a hard one.

That isn’t going to happen anytime soon, but it will happen. The reason I think it is still a long way off is my belief that there will be an interim step in the form of dynamic hardware keyboards.