If there’s one aspect of smartphones or tablets that has advanced at a breathtaking pace is the processor, both the central processing and the graphical processing. From measly single core CPUs barely reaching the 1GHz mark, we now have quad-core touting Android smartphones with equally fast GPUs. Apple has been at the forefront of chip design. From the A4 in the original iPhone 4 to the A6X in the iPad 4, the A series of SoC from Apple have generally been faster than any competing product from other vendors.
Of course with great power comes great heat dissipation. This latest patent from Apple shows that the company might be planning a radical solution. Mechanical fans in portable devices like the iPhone and iPad. The diagram above shows cooling and alert system with vibrator (136), motor (118), clutch (134), fan (146), and headphone jack air input port (108). Lots more details are given and you can read it here.
With increasingly powerful CPUs, Apple is of the belief that heat will eventually overtake the current passive solutions applied in smartphones. How Apple intends to implement an actual fan cooling system in devices when they seem to be getting thin by the day is something we’d have to wait and see.