BabyBoii
macrumors regular
how can you get 3000+ patents every year and have the same looking devices for 10+ years
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Apple's Patent Grants Declined in 2025 as Innovation Slows
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I7guy
macrumors Westmere
Phones aren’t cars. How. How often do you want the form factor changed? I like this form factor and have gotten used to it.
Mrkevinfinnerty
macrumors 68040
mdriftmeyer
macrumors 68040
Apple MessagePad
macrumors regular
Patents have nothing to do with innovation. Typical bad reporting here. 99% of the patents Apple is granted never see the light of day. Judging a companies ability to innovate has nothing to do with innovation at all. Plenty of companies that have no patents and are considered incredibly innovative. Those with the most patents granted in a year aren't always considered the most innovative either.
- 1. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (6,377 patents)
- 2. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) Ltd. (3,989 patents)
- 3. Qualcomm Inc (3,422 patents)
- 4. Apple Inc (3,082 patents)
- 5. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (3,046 patents)
Seems probable that a lack of growth in patent filing for 2025 indicates the company spent its resources on other aspects, such as creating non-novel solutions (LLMs from other companies, etc) which required no patent filing.
needsomecoffee
macrumors 6502a
Not all patents are equal. Some claims much more robust than others. I worked at an very large, engineering-driven consumer product company. Mgmt decided to pay listed inventors a $5K bonus for patents submitted/awarded. Engineers quickly starting having "patent parties" where they would take existing patents, and find a simple way tweak them so as to submit a new patent. Virtually none of these filings provided meaningful protections for the biz. Lots of smart folks, though, started making large amounts of bonuses. CEO had promised shareholders we'd focus on invention, and provided the big uptick in patents as proof. Yeah, the count of patents submitted can be misleading.
G5isAlive
Contributor
As someone with over 30 patents from a small biotech company I can tell you quantity has nothing to do with quality with really only three of mine being innovative and the rest derivative. But naive investors pay attention to quantity because they cant evaluate true innovation. In that way they are a lot like some folks here. The fact that Apple may be shifting focus from quantity sounds smart to me. And as has been said, trade secrets, NOT patenting but keeping the knowledge to yourself, is a big part of IP strategy. Might explain why Apple has been so aggressive in employees leaking their secrets. Shrugs.
maxoakland
macrumors 68000
Not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I think it's absurd to count the number of patents as proof or lack of proof of innovation, but on the other hand I think it's pretty obvious Apple's innovation has slowed
I feel that this analysis might be lacking depth. What one needs to look at are trends by patent category. For example, many of the patents filed before 2025 were in relation to the Apple car development (now canned), and a large number of patents over the last couple of years concerned the in-house WiFi development (which should be slowing down now that the baseline technology is in consumer hands). I've been tracking fundamental Apple patents related to chip design, and I don't have the impression that the rate of innovation has slowed down. Quite the opposite, there was a variety of really interesting CPU/GPU patents released in 2025, and they continue to regularly publish new NPU patents as well.
