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Oh snap! You got me there! Next thing you know, I'm going to get sued by Apple for making, well, ANYHING with round corners!

#datpatent

Let's all cheer for onesidedly for Apple as they bully their way into a market monopoly!

What a ridiculous and pointless post. I'm not entirely convinced at this point you aren't simply doing this because you enjoy trolling. It's probably not going to pay off to respond, but it's a Friday night and I'm bored, so sure, why not.

First, there is a big difference between believing that Xiaomis behavior is poor and clearly copying and believing Apple should (or even is) be allowed to bully their way in to a market monopoly.

Second, let's talk about that monopoly argument. It's ridiculous. Like it's barely worth refuting, but it's a Friday evening and I'm bored so let's do it.
A monopoly requires total or near total control of a market. Apple doesn't even have HALF of the smartphone market, let alone most of it. So not close to a monopoly. Further, they are not attacking or trying to shut down ALL possible phone makers, nor are the members here. Nokia phones for example don't look like iPhones like Samsung and Xiaomi devices do, and thus you haven't seen issues there. Same with LG or Motorola.

Third, let's talk about the fact that people have repeatedly requested you provide a definition of what you consider invention and innovation, because you keep attacking Apple and it's fans in their claims but have not substantiated your own position in the slightest. At the very least it would allow people to understand the basis from which you are coming from. That you continually avoid it is that you have realized based on examples of myself and others that your definition is not one that's broadly accepted, and therefore your argument is undermined.

Fourth, to the actual original source of the argument. The problem people (and Apple) have is not that Xiaomi is making a smart phone. Or that one or two elements of the phone are similar to the iPhone. It's that taken in combination the designs is nearly identical or intended to be conflated with or confused with the competition. There is a long history in this country and others of companies being able to defend from copycat products like that. From a legal standpoint, at least outside China/Korea, Apple is on rock solid legal ground in attacking companies like Xiaomi for this kind of copying and has already won against Samsung for its behavior. Trade dress is ABSOLUTELY protectable and defensible in the courts. Apple isn't trying to stop others from making smartphones anymore than McDonalds tries to stop others from selling hamburgers. But McDonalds could, would and should go after a company that tried to mimic it's logos, coloring and packaging, same with Coca-Cola or Volkswagen, etc.

Fifth, there is a significant and again legally valid difference between copying a product in the same category (i.e. smartphones) and applying design styles from one product to something from a completely different category. Apple can go after someone from mimicking the iPhone to make another phone, but if someone used similar design elements to make, say, a cheese grater, that would be completely protected. This speaks to Ives use of design elements from product designs by Rams, etc. this type of omage is seen by all but a few such as yourself as completely different from outright copying and has no true bearing on the situation at hand.

You don't have to agree with anyone that Xiaomi is in the wrong with their blatant copying of Apple. You don't have to like Apples business approach. You don't even have to make coherent arguments, but if you intend for people to take you seriously and want to have any hopes of changing people's minds you really would do well to respond to specific critiques, actually address the question of your definitions that are at the heart of your arguments, and drop the ludicrous ad hominem attacks and blatant exaggerations. People aren't ignoring and disagreeing with you because they are brainwashed idiots, they are ignoring and disagreeing with you because you are terrible at presenting your arguments and defending your positions.
 
LOL, yeah, the whole chamfered edge, rounded corners, etc. is pure nonsense. Nobody owns the design. Apple, and apple fans, need to get over themselves.

Yeah. This VP reduces the conversation to the chamfered edges and you agree to his terms of conversation and ignore the almost carbon cloning of the apple brand.

Basically what we have here is that you have a bias, someone who supports your bias changes the terms of the conversation and you adjust you world view to agree to the new terms so that you can maintain your bias. We all do it, but yours is an extreme case in the particular instance.
 
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I can't find myself buying a phone with fixed 'back' button on the right. It's just silly. Just no.
 
iPods: not the first MP3 players to market. Nor the first hard drive based MP3 player to market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player#IXI

iPhone: Not the first smartphone to market - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone

iPad: not the first Tablet to Market - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer

Mac: not the first Personal Computer to Market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers

Newton: Not the first PDA to market - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant


now, none of that doesn't mean that Apple didnt' do an excellent job at what they did. Many of those are excellent. the iPod was my favourite MP3 player I ever owned. I enjoy my MacBook Air immensely.

But would you like to try again with another list?
I don't need another list because I didn't claim anything that you refuted. The iPod was an invention. It had a unique feature set that did not exist before it was invented.
 
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Fourth, to the actual original source of the argument. The problem people (and Apple) have is not that Xiaomi is making a smart phone. Or that one or two elements of the phone are similar to the iPhone. It's that taken in combination the designs is nearly identical or intended to be conflated with or confused with the competition.

Not a valid argument nowadays, since Xioami is well known to be an Apple competitor. Nobody buying one of their phones is thinking they're buying an iPhone or one licensed by Apple. (The same thing goes for Samsung phones. That's why they have that big "Samsung" label on them, too.)

There is a long history in this country and others of companies being able to defend from copycat products like that. From a legal standpoint, at least outside China/Korea, Apple is on rock solid legal ground in attacking companies like Xiaomi for this kind of copying and has already won against Samsung for its behavior.

Apple LOST their trade dress lawsuits against Samsung. Trade dress must be non-functional, and the Appeals Court overturned all the California trial jury awards because Apple's designs were functional (even their lawyers had said so).

Please read my posts here:

Trade dress loss - Prior art

Unregistered trade dress loss - functionality

Registered trade dress loss - functionality

Examples of other trade dress - and why they didn't infringe
 
It doesn't matter that Apple copies others. I'm just glad iOS 9 will get Samsung's split view and PiP, Android's proper keyboard that shows lower/UPPER case keys and many others. The broken keyboard is one of the most annoying things about iOS on my iPad. Second would be lack of background multitasking that I hope is fixed in iOS 10.
Wait I thought Apple stole split view from Microsoft?!? So did Microsoft steal it from Samsung then?
 
No doubt they make good quality hardware? That's a big statement. Do you have any evidence that they produce good quality hardware? Just wondering. In a thread that should be about a copycat, but then turns into random unfounded accusations against Apple, I wouldn't want to accept a statement like that without good evidence.


I know 2 guys who use mi3 and my brother using redmi, they have used it for over a year now and fully satisfied with the overall performance and quality for camera, sound, earphones. When i said good quality hardware, i'm talking about in comparison to other manufacturers at the same cost. Same goes for Motorola Moto G, its a pretty solid hardware and looks premium too, that too is being used in house for more than a year.
 
I don't need another list because I didn't claim anything that you refuted. The iPod was an invention. It had a unique feature set that did not exist before it was invented.

no, the iPod was a brand name for an existing product market
if you would LIKE to discuss then features that Apple invented that were included in the iPod, go ahead and name them


saying "Apple invented the iPod" is the same as saying "Kleenex invented Kleenex" a brand of tissue paper
YTes, sure, they invented the brand "iPod", but that is not the subject here. We are talking about technological invention, not brand names.

on your very same logic, I just invented the "MarkBrand" version of steak and eggs. I"M AN INVENTOR NOW!
 
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no, the iPod was a brand name for an existing product market
if you would LIKE to discuss then features that Apple invented that were included in the iPod, go ahead and name them


saying "Apple invented the iPod" is the same as saying "Kleenex invented Kleenex" a brand of tissue paper
YTes, sure, they invented the brand "iPod", but that is not the subject here. We are talking about technological invention, not brand names.

on your very same logic, I just invented the "MarkBrand" version of steak and eggs. I"M AN INVENTOR NOW!
It should be telling that you need to keep changing/ignoring what I say to make your point. I didn't say Apple invented the music player market. (They didn't.) I didn't say they invented features that were included in the iPod. (They probably did, but I'm too lazy to look it up.)

The iPod wasn't simply a rebranded version of an existing product. Just like the iPhone wasn't a rebranding of an existing smartphone. They both had a unique feature sets that didn't exist before they were invented. Just because we can call both a Treo and a iPhone "smartphones" doesn't mean they are the same thing.

Read the definition of "invention" that you posted.
 
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"every smartphone looks like every other smartphone on the market"

Well of course they do after they all copied the iPhone.

Exactly. It's very easy to say "it's just how things are" when you wait for someone else to figure out how it should be.
 
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Apple did not pay Xerox.

During 1978-80, Apple was looking for venture capital, and so was offering angel investors pre-IPO stock options. One of the several takers was Xerox Development Corporation (XDC), a financial investment branch of Xerox.

Jobs used the XDC investment connection to talk his way into a demo by PARC, an entirely different division. However, Apple themselves have never claimed that this included a license, not even when Xerox sued them years later for failing to cite Xerox as a base source for their GUI.

Not your fault, but that's a commonly repeated myth started by people who (as so often happens) didn't understand what they were reading, and so made up something incorrect that they could understand.

Xerox already had overlapping windows. They also had a fast blitter algorithm, so they simply redrew everything underneath when the topmost window was moved.

What one of the Apple developers THOUGHT he saw at Xerox, was overlapping windows that only updated the screen regions that had just been uncovered. So he wrote his code that way. Nice, but this is something that any GUI developer does if they have the time (or the need because of a slow system). Did it myself in the early days. It's not rocket science.

Interestingly, Xerox found through testing that most office workers immediately arranged their windows to be non-overlapping (as many people still do on large or multiple monitors), so one version of their GUI defaulted to tiling windows on startup. I suspect this fed the myth as well.

In addition the PARC developers tried to hold back showing the best stuff, since they were convinced that Apple was going to steal it all.

All that said, Apple did add many of their own innovations, of course, as did others.
Hmmm, I don't recall that being what I read in "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane," but it's been a good while since I've read it, and of course, it's only one book on the subject of the early period of Apple (and the beginning of the personal computer). Do you know of other books covering this subject during that time?
 
Hmmm, I don't recall that being what I read in "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane," but it's been a good while since I've read it, and of course, it's only one book on the subject of the early period of Apple (and the beginning of the personal computer). Do you know of other books covering this subject during that time?

There is a good PBS documentary on the subject. I don't remember the name of the program since it's been a few years since I saw it. Perhaps you can find it on their site.
 
Not even smart, they copied that stupid little atv remote. I have one (with atv3) and it's a ridiculous little remote.
Their remote looks like a smashup of the ATV remote and the remote from the FireTV Stick.

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What I think I've learned from this thread:

You can only invent something once.... but you can innovate again and again.

The first smartphone ever was the IBM Simon in 1992

So every smartphone imagined or created after 1992 was just an improvement of the original work done by IBM for the Simon.

In short... IBM invented the smartphone... but many companies innovated in the smartphone market in the decades that followed.
I'd never even heard of the Simon (which after reading more about it and its time on the market, is not too surprising) so thanks for mentioning it.

http://time.com/3137005/first-smartphone-ibm-simon/
 
I LOVE the argument "guys, there's only one way to build a smartphone"

Apple seems to build one that looks different every other year. Nobody was talking aluminum on phones before Apple. I have never heard of the word chamfer before Apple. I don't remember "gold" being a necessary color for every lineup.

It's getting ridiculous. I don't care that Apple didn't come up with any of their ideas. Even if I accept that and the common argument that Apple is nothing but a marketing company, than can we all agree that every company copies Apple's marketing "innovations"?
 
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I LOVE the argument "guys, there's only one way to build a smartphone"

Apple seems to build one that looks different every other year. Nobody was talking aluminum on phones before Apple. I have never heard of the word chamfer before Apple. I don't remember "gold" being a necessary color for every lineup.

It's getting ridiculous. I don't care that Apple didn't come up with any of their ideas. Even if I accept that and the common argument that Apple is nothing but a marketing company, than can we all agree that every company copies Apple's marketing "innovations"?

So true. Every phone looks the same, except for the one Apple releases every two years.

In those two years every smartphone starts to look the same...until Apple releases another design. And during those two years we get and endless influx of Android fans who claim that there is only one way to make a smartphone. Rinse...repeat.
 
Hmmm, I don't recall that being what I read in "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane," but it's been a good while since I've read it, and of course, it's only one book on the subject of the early period of Apple (and the beginning of the personal computer). Do you know of other books covering this subject during that time?

I don't think that book had anything on this. Perhaps you're thinking of Arstechnica's GUI history article which said this:

"One critical advance from the Lisa team came from an Apple engineer who was not a former PARC employee, but had seen the demonstration of Smalltalk. He thought he had witnessed the Alto's ability to redraw portions of obscured windows when a topmost window was moved: this was called "regions". In fact, the Alto did not have this ability, but merely redrew the entire window when the user selected it. Despite the difficulty of this task, regions were implemented in the Lisa architecture and remain in GUIs to this day." -Ars

A lot of people have misread that paragraph, thinking it meant Xerox didn't have overlapping windows. On the contrary, it means that the Apple engineer saw how fast the overlapping Xerox windows were, and assumed it miust be using some kind of optimization. Btw, this was not "critical", unless you had slow graphics.

The system that Apple saw at Xerox in 1979, Smalltalk, had overlapping windows, and Alan Kay wrote a history of it where he notes that he came up with the idea of them for the 1972 version, a time before Apple ever existed:

"Development of the Smalltalk-72 System and Applications
...
Overlapping windows were the first project tackled ..."
- Kay
 
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Sure... The chamfered edge is the only thing...

Xiaomi isn't a bad company just a shame with the culture of copying. I am not sure they can overcome this. In the end, it is not going to be to their advantage. Who wants a copycat product? Maybe Chinese customers don't care, but many places in the world do.

It's fine to take inspiration of many things Apple. Maybe even the one more thing keynote, the product presentation and shots - Apple has pioneered this but it should not be possible to then have a monopoly on it.

But the direct 1:1 copies of Apple products are shameful and embarrassing. They need to flush this out of their system. Maybe let some of the copycat designers go.

On the Mi note up there, to say it with Hugo Barra, there's only one way to design a top speaker and camera assembly , and it just so happens to look exactly like any iPhone ever made...
 
I don't think the phone looks like an iPhone but the marketing material and website design sure do borrow a great deal
 
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