A recently discovered patent filed by Apple in 2004, seems to point to a new feature that could help protect your portable electronics from getting stolen.

By utilizing the accelerometers built into devices such as the iPhone or MacBook, this new feature can look for certain movements that are characteristic of theft. In the event of your iPhone or MacBook being stolen, it could either turn on an alarm, lock itself up or even a combination of the two.

What we want to know is what exactly these characteristics are that differentiate thievery and just irrational movements caused by the user? We can just see the alarm triggering in the middle of a call, because an angry bee was chasing us.

Patent interface drawings after the jump.