Apple have probably thrown the laptop world into a frenzy with a patent filed in September late last year. A laptop/notebook chassis that docks a phone which in turn becomes a high tech track pad which acts as a touchscreen – which works:

 

An electronic accessory device, comprising: an operational component that provides an output to a user; a housing carrying the operational component, the housing having a recess; and a control interface coupled to the operational component and configured to receive a control signal from an electronic host device when the electronic host device is positioned within the recess and coupled to the control interface, wherein the electronic accessory device is inoperable without the electronic host device being coupled to the control interface.

 

The patent is basically just a shell with a screen, with the phone providing all of the power. Yet the chassis according to the patent is a lot more than just a shell:

In various embodiments, the electronic accessory device can be considered a “thin” device, in that it extends the functionality of another device but is inoperable by itself as a stand-alone device. As such, the accessory device can have little or no independent processing resources in the form of a CPU or similar comprehensive processor. The accessory device, however, can provide auxiliary processing resources, such a graphical processing unit, or GPU, or other processing resources that can support the functions of the portable computing device.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!