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Stella

macrumors G3
Apr 21, 2003
8,837
6,334
Canada
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing this out Stella. :)

(and to think I owned a sonyerricsoon with a touch screen and stylus... I AM growing old indeed...)

Yes a lot of those phones back then used stylus.

Only 6 or 7 years ago. What type of phones are going to be around in 2018?
 

Michael Scrip

macrumors 604
Mar 4, 2011
7,922
12,470
NC
Oh, and I managed to find this image... Wasn't Steve who stole from Picasso who said that good artists steal? Well he was right.

Image

You can steal all you want... just make sure the people you steal from don't have copyrights or trademarks on a particular design.

Guess what happened when Apple stole the design of the Swiss clock... the Swiss owned the rights and Apple was forced to pay.

I guess Braun did not trademark their designs in the 1960s.
 

Kwill

macrumors 68000
Mar 10, 2003
1,595
1
I smell a few lawsuits from some very unhappy companies that have been bullied by Apple...

They are the very ones challenging the original patent on the grounds that since they have since copied it, it must be invalid.
 

TheJae

macrumors regular
Mar 8, 2008
142
28
HKG
Wow, talk about some BS! Guess that's what happens when you have the political power of Google and their Korean and Chinese friends.

Excuse me my friend, did you just include Chinese into the list to make it more impressive?
 

erzhik

macrumors 6502
Dec 2, 2010
486
395
Wow, talk about some BS! Guess that's what happens when you have the political power of Google and their Korean and Chinese friends.

boo-hoo cry me a river. Apple has more political power than any other company. Or do you think Apple is the only company that plays fair? Every major company has political power.
 

MacFoodPoisoner

macrumors regular
Dec 1, 2012
150
0
You can steal all you want... just make sure the people you steal from don't have copyrights or trademarks on a particular design.

Guess what happened when Apple stole the design of the Swiss clock... the Swiss owned the rights and Apple was forced to pay.

I guess Braun did not trademark their designs in the 1960s.

Apple shouldn't tout themselves, and pat themselves in the back as some kind of design uber innovator when they are not, that's what it boils down to, they 've ripped others as much, or maybe even much more so than anyone else.

Their patents for the iphone are at best dubious and the court decision in the states, jury member with an agenda notwithstanding, was a political one. It couldn't have played out any other way.

As an aside besides the swiss clock they paid creative around 200 million for a patent on the ipod. That's when Steve went ballistic and had every apple designer and engineer spending a few hours a month with a lawyer and started patenting everything. Of course from that understandable move to have come to a point where your legal dept. is more costly than your r&d one is, in my mind, a downhill trajectory.
 

iGrip

macrumors 68000
Jul 1, 2010
1,626
0
I think people don't realize how the phone landscape was back in 2007. People thought Apple was going to introduce a phone with a click wheel. That shows how "obvious" the iPhone was.

I remember when the iPhone first came out. It had little storage, no downloadable apps, no 3G on the crappy ATT network and it cost a small fortune. It was nuts.

Then I saw it in an ATT store and nearly instantly concluded that it was the greatest piece of consumer electronics gear ever made. It changed everything/
 

Michael Scrip

macrumors 604
Mar 4, 2011
7,922
12,470
NC
Apple shouldn't tout themselves, and pat themselves in the back as some kind of design uber innovator when they are not, that's what it boils down to, they 've ripped others as much, or maybe even much more so than anyone else.

Their patents for the iphone are at best dubious and the court decision in the states, jury member with an agenda notwithstanding, was a political one. It couldn't have played out any other way.

As an aside besides the swiss clock they paid creative around 200 million for a patent on the ipod. That's when Steve went ballistic and had every apple designer and engineer spending a few hours a month with a lawyer and started patenting everything. Of course from that understandable move to have come to a point where your legal dept. is more costly than your r&d one is, in my mind, a downhill trajectory.

Good points...

I guess the next question is... since Apple is guilty of copying Braun... does that make it OK for Samsung to copy Apple?

Or...

Since Apple was so unimaginative and had to copy Braun... does that mean that Samsung is also unimaginative because they had to copy Apple?
 

blackhand1001

macrumors 68030
Jan 6, 2009
2,599
33
Best. Reply. Ever.

Wonderfully biting on so many levels :)



That's probably true.

I think software is unique, though, in the ease of creating a process. Probably the closest activity is writing music or a book. Incredibly easy to plink or type away and come up with something novel... yet with an overall theme that could be invented just as easily by someone else. That's why copyrights still make more sense than patents for software.

I'm especially against the gesture patents that Apple tries to get, such as using two fingers to do something. To someone like me, who's been doing touch for decades, that's like patenting a music chord. Just because no one else tried to patent it, or it's something an examiner has never seen, does not make it worthy of sole ownership.



Are you sure you didn't mean inertial scrolling? Because I highly doubt that most people bought an iPhone because of bounce back at the end of a page. Heck, more people buy Android phones today without it, so what does that say about its draw?

In the recent California trial, Apple themselves set a top hoped-for value of only about $2 per phone for use of that patent. That's just three thousandths of the iPhone's retail price. Hardly a major piece in their eyes.

2 dollars for a bounce back is still 500 times more than its worth. Even most major patents don't fetch that much.

I like androids edge glow better than the bounce back anyway.
 

saichampa

macrumors newbie
Dec 7, 2012
1
0
Why the "bounce back effect" (elastic scrolling)? That is an ingenious part of the iOS user interface. Any app that doesn't implement it feels like it's broken.

Because it's not an invention, because it's obvious, and because like many of Apple's patents, it's an attempt at stifling competition instead of using the patent system for what it's supposed to be used for.
 

kdarling

macrumors P6
From Wired:

"It is simply too early to make any sweeping conclusions at this point," Brian Love, an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, said. "Office action rejections during re-examination are common and rarely are fatal to the entire patent.

Not that rarely. See my previous post #67 which presents USPTO supplied statistics:

In one out of eight cases (12%), ALL the claims are invalidated. In 70%, at least some of the claims are rescinded or modified.

So yeah... Apple was ahead of pretty much every other phone manufacturer in 2007.

The sad thing is... all those other companies have been making phones for years.

As I keep saying, that's exactly why Apple was able to leapfrog them. The older companies had legacy apps and screens to support, and the fear of losing their current buyers held them back from making too large a change, even though their R&D concepts were quite similar to what Apple did. (*)

Likewise, five years after the iPhone came out, Apple is in a similar legacy support and customer situation. That's why they only make baby steps in changing the screen size and/or adding features.

Such is life. A neverending cycle of the same situations and mistakes playing out again and again. The older you get, the more you notice the repetition.

(*)E.g. Samsung's 2006 internal concepts for phones and UIs, which btw, were banned from the California trial due to a legal technicality Apple used. Imagine if the jury had seen these:

samsung_phone_concepts.png
samsung_ui_concept.png
 

MacFoodPoisoner

macrumors regular
Dec 1, 2012
150
0
Good points...

I guess the next question is... since Apple is guilty of copying Braun... does that make it OK for Samsung to copy Apple?

Or...

Since Apple was so unimaginative and had to copy Braun... does that mean that Samsung is also unimaginative because they had to copy Apple?

Samsung to me is the epitome of unimaginative when it comes to design, lol!:) Despite my standing up for them in forums because on one hand I 've pretty much had it with apple appropriating ALL good design as pretty much their own invention, and on the other hand because I think apple desperately need to be put back in a position of competing with others instead of bullying them into submission, waaayyy overcharging even for their standards, taking away upgradability options from their users, constantly force obsoleting devices, while at the same time maintaining very poor standards in their software design with ios stagnating and os x becoming arguably worse in many respects. (Sony though, despite becoming sluggish in terms of hardware updates, is still excellent in design, I absolutely love what they've done with the tablet concept to make it look like an open book, although disappointingly they 've tapered it in their newer tablet to look more like what the others are offering...)

sony_tablet_s1_1-420-100_size_9.jpg


An example of average design, at best, is imho the new imac. Other vendors has presented aio's with touchscreens, aio's that are beasts with powerful desktop parts, in upgradability options and open up easily with a lever, aio's that are excellent in terms of ergonomics, etc. And apple comes up with a slim beer bellied mac, with a glued up screen, almost the same foot, and virtually no ergonomics again, and you get Phil Schiller on stage (who without Steve is just another vapid marketing exec, inexplicably full of himself) touting the imac as some kind of pinnacle of aio design and we are supposed to worship at apple's feet...
 
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bearcatrp

macrumors 68000
Sep 24, 2008
1,728
67
Boon Docks USA
Wow, talk about some BS! Guess that's what happens when you have the political power of Google and their Korean and Chinese friends.

How do you know if Google had any hand in this. If you assume this then you could assume apple payed off someone to get this through. Someone challenged it, got reviewed and the facts came out.
+1 for getting it right. Just like rounded corners. Give me a break. There are plenty of things made prior with rounded corners. If you believe apple deserves a patent for rounded corners, I'll sell you some ocean front property in Kansas, with rounded beaches!
 

charlituna

macrumors G3
Jun 11, 2008
9,636
816
Los Angeles, CA
Speaking of jumping to denounce, you should probably actually, you know read the article and not just parrot what an effusive anti-Apple troll spouts as fact. The patent was not invalidated for prior art, it was invalidated because the USPTO thought it was obvious.

Obvious at the time of the application or obvious now.

It's easy to look back and say something is obvious but was it at the time? If the answer is no, it wasn't then the claim should stand
 

Breckenridge

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2006
111
0
Telluride, Colorado
Are you trying to say that Steve Jobs would not allow a ruling by an independent body? Or are you speaking in irony?

True, nevertheless, the judge in the case just bought an iPhone and after using it for few weeks, getting lost few times like I just did today using apple maps, scratched the heck out of the sides and was made fun of by colleagues for missing the best Christmas party ever; he decided that the Steve jobs patents are nothing but BS. Stevie would've shoved the maps and the paint job on the iPhone 5 up someone's beehive before it made it out to the public.
 
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