It looks that way according to Appleinside.com. Four months ago, three Apple engineers filled a 41-page patent outlining the devices potential applications. Once attached to a snowboard it will apparently be able to record and display such information as loft time (read air time), speed, peak loft time, average loft time, total loft time, average speed, and distance traveled, all of which will be recorded successively.

These handy diagrams should easily explain how it will all work:

Uhm...yeah.

Thankfully Apple's not making snowboards. The designs look a little 3 decades ago. 

Now, if they can actually get it to work, it appears to have some real usefulness. How often have you wondered if that park jump is a big as they say it is? How many people can accurately judge a 100-foot distance? For years the size of backcountry jumps has been guesstimated and having a solid, quantitative number to ascribe to that pants-shitting gap you just cleared would be nice.

But the real strength of the device lies not in its number crunching but in the ability to deliver indisputable bragging rights, something that the developers even included in their patent filing:

For example, suppose two users ski only blue, intermediate slopes with the exact same skill and aggressiveness except that one user chooses to sit in the bar for three hours having a couple of cocktails. At the end of an eight hour day--providing the power sensor is activated for the whole day--the skier who skied all eight hours will have a power measurement that is 8/5 that of his cocktail-drinking companion. They can thereafter quantitatively talk about how easy or how difficult their ski day was. As for another example, suppose a third friend skis only double-diamond slopes and he takes four hours out to drink beer. At the end of the day, his power measure may still be greater than his friends depending upon how hard he skied during his active time. He could therefore boast--with quantitative power data to back him up--that he had more exercise than either of his friends even though he was drinking half the day.

I don't know who can still ride after taking four hours off to drink beer but that's some bragging rights right there. 

Will this technology every reach the market place and if it does will it gain acceptance? Only time will tell, but if any one can do it, it’s probably Apple.

Read the all the techno mumbo jumbo here.