8 ms·

This is silly, touch screen technology, faster ARM cpus and the rest make these things possible and came from elsewhere. My first computer with a GUI was 100mhz

• Nicole060 14y ago
  If it was so obvious then why did it take a company that had NO history in making cell phones to make a good one with a usable touchscreen and gestures ? Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore) And they were on that market way before Apple. Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.
  • drats 14y ago
    People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.
    • chipotle_coyote 14y ago
      "Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation. That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.) A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.) There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has. If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.
    • ricardobeat 14y ago
      The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input. If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.
  • mattmcknight 14y ago
    But that's not what the patents were for that were at issue in this case. They did it better, that's why they won in the marketplace. Now that other competitors are catching up in quality, they are turning to the illegitimate patents they were awarded to abuse the world legal system to go after them.
  • alok-g 14y ago
    Obviousness here is being talked about with regards to "patents". It is highly possible to create a new good design without creating new inventions. That Nokia, RIM and others could not do it does not necessarily imply that Apple had some really unique inventions that enabled it to do so. (That Apple claims to be so is a different thing. That Samsung willfully copied their design elements is also a different thing.)
  • bornhuetter 14y ago
    The market was waiting for capacitive touchscreens to become viable. You can't use multitouch properly on resistive screens (or non-touchscreen devices). Apple pounced as soon as capacitive screens became viable - albeit extremely expensive at the time. The first iPhone was "ahead of its time" in the sense that the market wasn't really ready for it. The first iPhone was an expensive PoS - it wasn't until the app store came along and the price came down that it turned into a good phone. No-one really thought to patent the obvious design decisions that would come with the viability of a large capacitive touchscreen - rectangular, large screen, few physical buttons, multitouch gestures such as pinch to zoom (that already existed elsewhere). Apple are absolute masters at combining existing technology into an attractive package. They also have excellent timing at bringing products to market (just before the market is ready for them - see original iPod, iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air). But to say that these "innovations" wouldn't have happened anyway is disingenuous - no competent observer seriously believes that the market would not have moved on to large capacitive touchscreen devices over the last 5 years. Apple deserve plenty of credit for their OS animations, smoothness of UI and (either praise or damnation depending on your point of view) the curated app store. They don't deserve credit for "inventing the capacitive touchscreen phone".
    • Nicole060 14y ago
      Funny, I never said they invented the capacitive touchscreen, but that's apple haters for you. What they did that no one else did before is to put the right gestures, the right UI, environment to make it work. I had a LG Prada, it had a capacitive touchscreen so I obviously know Apple didn't invent it.. except the LG Prada was also behaving the same as Windows XP on a tablet. You use widgets like scrollbars instead of gesture everywhere. That's no iPhone. "The first iPhone was an expensive PoS" ? it was the first phone with a good web browser, that's already quite something in itself. I can't imagine browsing the web on a phone without double tap to fit a paragraph, pinch to zoom and a good engine like Webkit. That made it a feature phone, more than a smartphone, at the time, with the lack of things like installable software, but it was a damn good feature phone, and for those who use lot of webapps, it was probably better than most smartphones too. For the record, I hate the app store. I hate not being able to install software outside of the curated app store. But I give credit where it's due, even if there are a lot of things I hate about Apple, they did make the one touch phone that was actually usable, as opposed to POS like LG Prada or Samsung Croix (pre-android touchscreens) interface. It is really obvious looking at some of the ac adapters and dock connectors that Samsung intended to copy the whole appearance of the earlier iPhones to ride on Apple's coattails. Samsung tried to copy everything from the UI to the trade dress to patented technology. They behaved like shady Chinese companies making cheap knock offs.
  • mbell 14y ago
    At the time the iphone was released I had one of the early HTC touch screen + slide out keyboard phones (Tytn or something like that). I recall laughing about the first iphones. Terrible e-mail support, no MMS, my year old phone had twice the capabilities. I couldn't understand why anyone would want such an expensive phone that was so functionally handicapped. What I didn't understand at the time was that the phone was never targeted at me, it was targeted at the general consumers who didn't care that it couldn't handle 5 e-mail accounts, VPN, etc, etc. The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building. Apple lept ahead of the incumbents by realizing that a 'smartphone' could be a device every consumer wanted, rather than something that 'business folks' used. It wasn't so much that the incumbents couldn't have thought up something very similar, it was that they were caught up dealing with their current target markets: business people whom needed a blackberry or Wmobile phone with exchange support, whom didn't want change, they wanted a device that did its job and didn't require them to think about it. Its very difficult for a company to have the foresight to produce a product that they know their current customers will hate. This is classic incumbents vs newcomers leap frogging, if you haven't read "The Innovator's Dilemma" its worth checking out as it speaks directly to this pattern of development.
    • slantyyz 14y ago
      >> The iphone wasn't so much a matter of technological inovation as it was one of market building I disagree. I think the iPhone was the first smartphone that worked. The killer app on the phone was that it was the first phone to have a modern mobile browser. It was not a browser that "didn't suck", it was a damned good browser. I had an Eee at the time, and I would pick the tiny-by-comparison screen of the iPhone's browser over the Eee any day. Why? Because the smart tap-to-zoom really used the screen real estate effectively. On the Eee, I'd have to use both horizontal and vertical scrolling to read some content. No mobile browser before the iPhone's version of Safari even came remotely close.
      • mbell 14y ago
        The problem is that it didn't work as a 'smartphone' at all. It couldn't connect to blackberry's e-mail server, it couldn't connect to exchange, it couldn't send an MMS, it couldn't multitask or run background apps, it couldn't copy-paste. The iPhone was completely incapable of replacing existing smartphones for quite some time. It took blackberry's monopoly on 'push' e-mail dying and several updates to iOS before it could actually compete in the existing smartphone market. What original iPhone is, was the first 'smartphone' like device that every consumer wanted.
  • drumdance 14y ago
    Only Apple had the supply chain to deliver a product at a reasonable cost.
    • Nicole060 14y ago
      You can't be serious. Samsung has a far better supply chain than Apple. In fact, Samsung IS PART of Apple's supply chain. But Samsung is not the kind of company that would take risks with a market and they'd rather ride on the coattails of those who are willing to push the innovation into the hands of the consumers, and it's not something specific to their mobile division, it's the same for their digital cameras, home appliances.. I've seen during the history of photography most of the big names doing something that may have impacted the market, while Samsung is just saying "hey, me-too!" months laters.
      • drumdance 14y ago
        How many small devices -- not television sets -- had Samsung delivered before 2010 when the Galaxy S was launched? How many iPods had Apple delivered before the iPhone? To cite a simple example: the iPod disk drive system was based on exclusive access to Toshiba's then-new hardware. Apple did many, many deals of that nature, including outright acquisitions, to gain a technology advantage. Samsung has done a lot to keep up, but only after watching Apple do it first.
    • taligent 14y ago
      Sorry but I actually laughed when you said this. You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. Apple was in NO way comparable to the likes of Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Motorola etc who had decades of pre-existing relationships in the mobile and component industries. Not to mention those companies were competing for lowest cost in some areas so had plenty of optimisation work already built into their supply chains.
      • drumdance 14y ago
        Is the iPhone an extension of the iPod, or conventional mobile technology? Apple did a hella lot to create the iPod supply chain and, because they sold direct to consumers instead of through carriers, knew a lot more about how to deliver the ideal experience.
• timmyd 14y ago
  What I am not questioning is it's considered valid under law according to this case in the United States and abstracting yourself from the view of hating or not hating patent law - that's the test here. It is irrelevant what a group of people can come up with 1 sec past the filing date, even on the other side of the world - the test is, given the available knowledge at the time of filing the patent and relevant to a person who is skilled in the art of the current available knowledge - would they be able to replicate the features detailed in the invention specification (essentially off my head). In this case - it was ruled no. Despite all the prior art presented to the jury, despite all the previous evidence and so on and so on - it was considered wilfull infringement and a lot of the evidence presented showed that Samsung basically said "this feature of Apples is cool! lets copy that" ... which is pretty striking to lay-persons not skilled in law as jurors and tends to heavily weigh in their mind. And again, patent law considers - in some detail - that blends can in fact be new inventions. Patent law in the United States is very different to the rest of the world however and that has to be considered in this - the tests in Europe are much stricter and that's why many software patents aren't available there. For context - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...
• slantyyz 14y ago
  You wouldn't even need to put a bunch of geniuses in a room together for an afternoon. All you would have to do is get a team to watch any episode of Star Trek:TNG and create something like the slates the Enterprise crew used. But the thing is, if the hardware components and UI skills existed, why wasn't anyone able to do it in the past? I think the answer is that on the manufacturer side, nobody cared about end-users, and the nature of the business was that the carriers dictated a lot about what went into a phone. So with the iPhone, here comes Apple, managing to get a carrier to play Apple's game, and saying "take our phone and its UX or leave it". So sure, you might have been able to get a bunch of geniuses to come up with such a phone, but you probably would have had no ability to get it on the market successfully, because you wouldn't have been able to get any carrier buy-in without the clout of a company that has sold millions upon millions of portable media devices like Apple. Until Apple came around, phone manufacturers treated the carriers as the customers, not the end-users. So if you take it that context, I doubt that something like the iPhone was at all obvious to the HTCs, Samsungs and RIMs of the world.
  • drumdance 14y ago
    I think it's even simpler. Only Apple had the supply chain to build an affordable device. Everyone else knew the outcome would be too expensive relative to the feature set. I love my iPad, but there's no way I would pay $1500 for it. It's just not that good. Only Apple could build one at a competitive cost.
    • slantyyz 14y ago
      >> Only Apple had the supply chain to build an affordable device Don't disagree, but if you flash back to 2007, there was still a huge outcry over the "high" price of the iPhone. People back then had forgotten that they had paid just as much for the first Razr.
      • mbreese 14y ago
        Also, don't forget that the first iPhone got a $100+ (150?) price break after the first month. They had no idea how popular it was going to be. Not even Apple had appreciated exactly how much the market was waiting for a good touchscreen phone.
• huxley 14y ago
  My first computer with a GUI was 8MHz. I used a touchscreen with a light-pen in 1979. There have been countless groups of graduate students brainstorming since then. I think you'll find nothing is obvious until after it's been done. If you directly present someone with the problem, you are already leading them to the solution. The real difficulty is finding just the right problem to fix, there are millions of possible "problems" or things to change in a phone.
• rayiner 14y ago
  Just because you can see the logical evolutionary history of a design in hindsight does not mean it's obvious. One of the considerations for "obviousness" is "failure of others." Companies failed for a decade to have usable touch-screen devices before Apple came out with the iPhone. Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones. Multi-touch was a game-changer and it wasn't obvious.
  • vibrunazo 14y ago
    You're reinterpreting what's written to fit your argument. Failure of others should be considered to define obviousness when you come up with something new that succeeds where others failed. Not because you can patent something someone else invented just because you sold better than the original inventor. That's absurd. Apple's inventions existed before, so there's prior art, that's all. It's this simple.
    • taligent 14y ago
      If everything Apple has done existed before then it should have been EASY to find clear examples of prior art to convince the jury of this. But there were no clear examples. Just stretches of the imagination e.g. Star Trek.
  • wvenable 14y ago
    > Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones. That's revisionist history right there -- every single phone from HTC going back to the original PDA/phone Pocket PC hybrids looked like iPhones. But they didn't have multitouch.
• Zenst 14y ago
  155 comments and only one mentioning Star Trek. That too me says how we ended up in this situation. Apple did good, they made a standard out of the portable mp3 players and slowly got to the stage were the only thing to add was the phone part, they then slowly got the feature sets inplace, all with elegant, simple and usage designs. Many obvious, if you study human interaction then swiping to turn a page to open another is clear cut as it's intuative. So yes some already exist and many cases of prior art, but it is all about the patent's (feel a Weird Al song a comming on) baby. Another factor was the technology, Sony P800 springs to mind and been many other touch screens since with what was the PDA domain and eventual death of. What with camera's, filofax's, payphones the mobile phone is borging alot of markets, soon be sole internet as well eventualy, already is for some today. But as is the rule in IT, everybody always hates the leader, be it IBM in there day, Microsoft in there time and now Apple. Each company going thru that hate phase grows a large lawyer department and carry's on until somebody else takes the limelight and the hate away from them. It's one of the cycle of life in many area's sadly, but true. Bottom line and back to Star Trek and SCI-FI in general, you can bet Hollywood had patented there technology imaginations. Now if only we could get the anti-pirate lawyers turned into anti SCI-FI IP lawyers and chasing technology companies then we would truely have a circular centipede moment and some potentualy good TV veiwing as it is after all, a geek soap opera.