Before I say anything, yes I know that there are many docking stations available for many different kinds of laptops – but none like this. A new patent revealed today showcases what is for all intensive purposes an iMac as a docking station for a MacBook. If that makes no sense just look at the great mock-up Gizmodo did above, which very nicely follows the patent drawings.

As you can see, the small MacBook laptop would simply slide into the side of the iMac monitor just as a flash memory card may slide into a digital camera. The idea and look are so seamless that it’s amazing no one has ever thought of this before, but then again not everyone is Apple.

If this patent holds up, it looks like Apple is once again creating something that is absolutely perfect for my needs. While I love having a laptop for its portability not only on the road but in my apartment, I do the majority of my work on my iMac simply because it not only has a larger screen, but an external monitor hooked up as well. It’s simply quicker to do more work at my desk, but syncing data no matter if it’s with .Mac or any other solution, is still a pain – especially for my iTunes library. I crave to have just one computer, but that’s never really be a viable option – until now.

With laptop sales way up and desktop sales rather stagnant, some have wondered if desktop computing would even fade away. This is something that can certainly prolong that life well into the future – provided it’s as easy as the diagram makes it look. Knowing Apple, it likely is.

One concern would definitely be price here. Is Apple going to charge you the same $1,200 – $1,500 for an iMac docking station as they would for the real deal? Assuming it had no innards besides the hookups for the laptop input, I’m sure they could get it down for a few hundred dollars. Basically it’d be a monitor with connections.

Could this be one of the surprising things unveiled at MacWorld in a couple weeks? Well the patent was originally filed in July of 2006, so one would have to assume Apple could very well have been working on it for a while. Plus, as the thing looks exactly like an iMac, people may have already seen it and not known. This would be a great surprise.