As other leading smartphone makers are perfecting devices with vertically or horizontally folding screens, recently published patent information suggests Cupertino might take a different route. A patent for “electronic devices with rollable displays” filed last October and published on July 13 references a device with a display that could be moved between an unrolled state where it is planar and a rolled state for storage.
Filing a patent means little to nothing for a company like Apple regarding future consumer products. All it likely means is that a patent engineer managed to throw something together outside existing prior art that they could file. Maybe they will do something with it, maybe they won’t. If they do, they will have a patent portfolio that will hopefully give them some legal protection from patent trolls and competitors that will attempt to block them.