Apple was granted 45 patents today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but the two most interesting of the bunch involved an application of bone conduction technology to fade out background noise and a water resistant speaker port.
Bone conduction technology, used frequently for assistive hearing devices, has been around for quite some time, and transfers sound to the inner ear by vibrating the skull around it. Bone conduction can also explain why your recorded voice typically sounds different from the voice you hear when you speak.
Apple’s twist on this technology uses accelerometers that measure vibrations caused by your vocal chords and compares it what is being fed into the microphone. This means the next iPhone or iOS device could use your skull’s vibration to fade out the background noise — let’s say you’re on the phone on a busy street — and only allow your voice to pass to the phone call.
The water-resistant speaker port is the latest in a line of water-resistant patents Apple has been granted recently, and this one seems to cover the technology used for the button port that Apple implemented into the Apple Watch (seen in the iFixIt video shown below). In short, a combination of a o-ring seal and a “protective mesh umbrella” help direct the liquid from sensitive components using pressure, along with a hydrophobic coating if all else fails.
Apple has an incentive to make sure their devices are water resistant with the advent of the iPhone Upgrade Program. The more iPhones that return to Apple intact from their time in the wild, the more parts and resale profit Apple can recapture.
