Apple considered click-wheel iPads in the past, an old patent reveals

Many of you probably still remember the iconic click-wheel design of Apple’s iPod from the early 2000s. The now discontinued music player featured many interesting innovations and one design aspect that is iconic and recognizable to this day. The click wheel!

Now it turns out that Apple once considered implementing the same click wheel feature in the user interface of the iPad. The information comes from an old patent filing discovered on Google Patents by the Reddit user u/PurplrIsSus1985. The filing, which dates back to 2005, describes various virtual scroll wheel and virtual knob implementations that resembled the iPod’s click wheel.

The patent also mentions other user interface features, such as multi-touch gestures like pinch-to-zoom. However, Apple ultimately did not pursue this idea and instead chose to include touch functionality in the iPad’s user interface.

It’s clear that the company wanted to emulate the same “wheel” experience in order to make the user interface more familiar, but in the end, Apple decided that such an interface element was unnecessary on a touchscreen device.