The US Patent and Trademark Office recently published the latest of Apple's seemingly never-ending stream of patents. Nope, it ain't as revolutionary as a new iPod, an ultra-portable Tablet Mac, a world without buttons, or whatever they'll call the used-to-be-iPhone now. It's something as prosaic and ho-hum as... a guard system for a notebook's disk drive slots, says Apple patent watcher and decrypter MacNN.

Wait... maybe it's not so prosaic at all. Apple does have a point when it says in its patent abstract that "Unquestionably, portable computers are subjected to a host of insults." Insults? What Apple meant is that often, when transporting a notebook, people often get careless and either dump the laptop in a bag full of odds and ends, or dump odds and ends into their laptop carrying case - right with the laptop. Eventually, something harmful's gonna stick itself through a floppy's slot (or even an open-slot CD/DVD drive), and play havoc with some sensitive tech innards inside. Things like paper clips, chewing-gum, toothpicks, guitar picks, show tickets, business cards, and so forth.

The Apple patent, which incidentally was filed last year but only saw the light of blog today, hinges on an "actuated guard" that swings across the slot of a floppy disk or optical disc drive when not in use. This blocks off access to the port when it's not in use. No other details were provided in MacNN, so we cannot draw a better picture of how this will work. The best we can do is simply say that it's really as prosaic as giving the disk drive a stronger door to keep the unwanted out, but that's Apple patents for you.