Ah yes, another piece of never-produced vaporware dragged out to prove that Apple never does anything new. Add it to the oft-quoted Xerox Parc legend. And of course everyone knows that the iPad was really invented by some unknown prop designer on the set of
2001, A Space Odyssey.
Except, thats not really how things work. And it certainly isn't what Apple's Intellectual Property claims are about.
Someone announces a multi-touch phone in November of 2006? Call me unimpressed. (Hint, do you think Apple's iPhone team didn't already have a few hundred working prototypes of the original iPhone by that time? Since the phone was actually announced less than two months later, I suspect they were already in production.)
I urge anyone interested in debating Apple's contribution to computing in general to read the excellent
Malcolm Gladwell piece that appeared in the
New Yorker last year. To (briefly) summarize: Steve Jobs saw at Xerox a computer that had graphical windows, and that used a contraption called a "mouse" to move a pointer around.
Except what he saw couldn't be sold, and certainly couldn't be used by anyone not intimately familiar with how to operate it. The mouse cost $300 and used steel ball bearings, and needed to be serviced every two weeks. Working out all the little details that made it a) affordable and b) easy for the average consumer to understand and use is what Apple did.
Apple's "mistake" at that time? It didn't patent the hundred little things it put into the original Mac OS. Of course, the whole idea of software patents was pretty new at that time. The landmark
Diamond v. Diehr case came out in 1981; and since this concerned an algorithm used in an process for the industrial curing of rubber, it didn't seem particularly appropriate. (Of course, software has always been subject to copyright protection - you can cut and paste code from a decompiled competitors product - but a decent coder can always figure out a way to reverse engineer.) Apple was a young company, going through a tumultuous period.
Apple went on to see Microsoft copy a lot of the things that made the Mac special. They sued - but because they hadn't
patented any of the software innovations they'd created, they ultimately lost.
Steve Jobs, and Apple, learned a lesson: Patent everything and anything you can. Patent "Scroll and Bounce Back", patent "Swipe to unlock", patent the method that highlights, and makes a clickable link of every phone number, e-mail address etc. in an electronic message. Filing a Patent application only costs a few thousand dollars. Maybe 9 out of 10 are either rejected, or otherwise turn out to be worthless. But you only need a few to be found a) valid and b) infringed by a competitor before you begin to make their life very unpleasant indeed. (There is a different story on Standard-Essential Patents, but thats another topic.)
So: Anyone can come up with a thin glass panel with icons on it, and claim they really invented the iPhone. What Apple did was figure out, and patent, all the details that actually made it work. There's a huge difference.
