One single paragraph from one of the many court documents (via!) in the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Samsung. One single paragraph that not only perfectly highlights the hypocrisy of technology companies, but also the complete and utter disjoint between a technology company’s legal, marketing, and engineering departments.
Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple “firsts” with the iPhone. As one Apple employee explained to an overly exuberant Apple marketer, “I don’t know how many things we can come up with that you can legitimately claim we did first. Certainly we have the first successful versions of many features, but that’s different than launching something to market first.” In this vein, the employee methodically explained that Palm, Nokia and others had first invented the iPhone’s most prominent features.
The marketing department has no clue about the technology it needs to advertise. The legal department cleverly writes its patent application despite knowing full well that the technology it tries to patent is not new. Meanwhile, the engineer – the actual person implementing the technology – knows exactly what is going on, but is gagged from openly speaking his or her mind. The only thing I’m not sure about is which of these three is the biggest hypocrite.
Intellectual property – and patents in particular – has ruined the technology industry with lies, deceit, and hypocrisy. We just stood by and let it happen.
Can this not become “Thom’s soapbox regarding the patents” again. Boring, done to death, not interested. You have a blog, why not use it?
Some of us are interested.
Cool – then maybe we could post one story. But so far there appear to be multiple stories; stories that add little to the actual facts and verdicts. When there are 4 different stories on the same subject and most of the guts of them is a link to another article and Thom’s fairly biased opinion, makes me wonder why I bother reading this site any more.
It should make you wonder why you clicked this headline and kept reading and want to remove this article so nobody can read it. Why?
Oh, pigheaded one, I didn’t read more than the title, because all the ground has been covered in other articles already posted. If this was the *only* article I’d agree with you.
There could easily be one article and Thom could update it. And Thom has a blog he could use.
I see you’re getting modded down, which is a real shame. Even patent haters have got to get tired of seeing this shit get posted over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
I mean, it’s not like you can go to a tech site/blog anymore that hasn’t been hijacked by liberals, who use them as their personal and political soapbox, so they end up talking about things like net neutrality, patents, etc. ad nauseam. Not that I don’t disagree with them on most things, but the point has been made time and time again. I don’t see the logic in posting article # 7,000 on the subject. I guess they think, ‘maybe if I post this for the 7,000th time, somebody in power will read this and change their mind about patents, then they will introduce a bill that gets grassroots support, and …’
No, sorry… not gonna happen. These are definitely important subjects, but this is not the correct venue to have your voice heard. It’s one thing to inform, but most of these bloggers are just ranting at this point.
Edited 2014-05-07 17:33 UTC
Being against bone-headed patents is a liberal thing now? Odd… Seems like it’d be more of a small government ideal.
Government granted monopolies over vague concepts has the possibility of really crushing the future livelihood of software developers like myself, and crushing competition from any non-giant-corporation who can’t afford to file hundreds of frivolous/vague patents every year.
It’s stuff that does matter in the tech world, even if you get sad about hearing about it too much… You can’t just hand-wave the problems away.
It’s important to me and many others, so I don’t mind seeing the articles so I can stay up to date on the current playing field…
Those of you who don’t care, can just stop reading the posts; I don’t like watching sports on tv, but I don’t go on an angry tirade because it’s on in every bar I visit.
Then again, every 10 articles I see with people praising Apple for the new thing they’ve invented (20 years after it’s been in use elsewhere), or even better, the thing they’re going to bestow on us that’ll be so much better (Apple TV, iWatch, etc) does get to me, so maybe I should be more empathetic to your plight 😀
No, but writing biased, one-sided articles from a liberal point of view is. But I actually agree with them on this subject, so that’s not really the point. I’m just picking on them because conservatives are not the ones who are guilty of sabotaging tech blogs and using them for their own political agendas.
The question is, are software patents really impacting the little guys RIGHT NOW in a negative way? Are startups being forced to close up shop because they’re being attacked by some mega corporations or patent trolls? If so, why don’t tech sites report on THOSE, instead of telling us about every goddamn finger gesture-esque silly patent lawsuits that these big corporations are suing each other over?
I actually have a filter in my RSS reader that automatically purges any articles with the word ‘patent’ in the title. And do you know why? Because I don’t give a shit anymore. If you want people like me to REALLY pay attention, then you only talk about patents and other such things when it REALLY matters. For everything else, someone needs to create a ‘patentnews.com’ blog where those of you who are interested in the nitty gritty details of every f**king patent case currently on the books can geek out on that stuff until your hearts content.
As it is, if you keep blasting the rest of us with this bullshit, we’re eventually going to tune out, and then you won’t be able to get our attention when it’s really needed.
Edited 2014-05-07 23:15 UTC
So sticking your fingers in your ears and singing loudly makes the problem go away?
Apple gets away with being the first or second most profitable company in the world while also pushing for protectionism laws to cement them in place at the expense of future innovation from any competition… I guess it’s okay because only Apple is innovative, so no worries.
And yes, small companies are getting raked over the patent coals every day because of the side-effect of the richest tech companies in the world (Apple, along with MS, Amazon, Oracle, etc) validating vague concepts as patents… Just one of many examples: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130102/08174721543/patent-troll-…
For me? Yes, because I’m not the one getting sued, and I doubt you are either. Hence, it doesn’t concern me. I don’t give two shits about how many millions these rich commercial bastards have to pay each other in patent lawsuits. They can sue each other until they’re blue in the face for all I care. I don’t see any of them lobbying hard in Washington to end software patents, so they get zero sympathy from me when they get their asses handed to them in court.
The ONLY time I want to know about these things is when some product gets banned or some company/individual is put out of business. But since such things rarely happen, it’s not enough fodder for tech bloggers to post their daily rants. In a way, their constant posting on the subject probably is doing more harm than good, by causing most of us to tune out early. Same with net neutrality.
OSnews is like the Free Software Foundation, is like a liberal education.
Patent war spreads culture to OSNews and spreads the reality of software development practices to the legal professions.
Info Tech and Capitalist actions are huge and need to be kept in the news for the sake of the uninitiated. With news we can moderate our own environment. The forum moderators needs to admit articles that submit their “perfect little world” to “the big world” when they deem it necessary to risk it.
The big world has show-stopper bugs. We’ve become plutocracy. How about raising technocrats to patch the problem?
* https://perens.com/
* http://sdt.bz/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=64063&page=1
This story in particular is interesting because it’s someone at Apple admitting that they are not actually the innovators that they claim to be, but mere marketers.
See…that’s total BS, IMHO….the seamless operation of my IOS devices proves for me that Apple are far more than mere marketers….they execute with fine attention to detail…so, what is your definition of innovation??
And what does the seamless operation of my Nexus 4 prove?
luck?
Try again
OK….there are a few hundred million people on the planet that would see your marketing vs innovation comment as BS.
Yes, because marketing worked on them.
Listen, there are very few things at the moment or in the past 15 years that you can truly call revolutionary in the IT world. Most of it was evolutionary – people and companies putting their building blocks on top of other people’s building blocks. Apple did this, Microsoft did this, Google did this, everybody did this. Apple did not create capacitive touch screens, nor did they invent multi-touch or touch interfaces. They took an existing concept and built upon it.
Apple and Google took different approaches to building their platforms, approaches that brought them more or less to the same place today. In the beginning Apple made their products very polished, but very limiting – hence the silky smooth performance. Google took the Swiss army knife approach, making their devices into mini-PCs that could also make calls – hence the versatility of early Android devices compared to iDevices, but also the questionable performance.
In time, Apple made their products more versatile and Google optimized their products making them smoother. So, technically, at the moment you can’t go wrong with either platform (as long as you don’t buy a $10 underpowered piece of crap phone with Android 2.3).
Now, about the innovation – I’m not saying that Apple doesn’t innovate, but so does Google and Samsung and Microsoft and Nokia and everyone in tech. Every time they come up with a new feature – that is innovation. There’s nothing special about that. But Apple has the marketing genius to make people believe that they are the only ones that innovate and invent new things even when they’re not the first ones to the table. Here comes into play the hypocrisy that Thom was mentioning. They know very well what they invented, where they innovated and where not. But they can’t admit any of that publicly because they have an image to maintain. Their products are sold by image alone.
Also they made it about status. There are a lot of (shallow) people that think that because you don’t have an Apple (or lately to my surprise a Samsung!?) you are poor or out of touch or old fashioned.
And also there are a lot of not technical people who don’t know that Android 4.3+ is light years from 4.0 or 2.3 and think that Android devices are laggy and slow. These are the same people that don’t need flexibility and freedom or don’t understand that these traits have a noticeable cost in terms of performance (fortunately that is not the case anymore and most Android 4.4 devices are silky smooth).
On the marketing front things are a little different. Google and their partners have a multitude of marketing strategies, usually centered around certain products, where it’s all about the features. Apple on the other hand is focusing more on the subjective and emotional side – how does your device make you feel, how does it make you look etc. Because it doesn’t appeal to your rational side they can also charge a premium for it.
That is why there are the hundreds of millions of people swearing by Apple’s products and that’s why they are willing to pay an (unjustified) premium on their products. Don’t get me wrong, there are also people paying too much for certain over-hyped Android devices.
“We just stood by and let it happen.”
Nope, we have, for those who are not yet brainwashed, a possibility :
Boycott !
Kochise
Well, as it is a nice thought, the knowledgeable is the minority. The consumer market doesn’t care about ethics. They want their shiny new gadget. They don’t care about patent wars, Intellectual property, etc. They just want that new shiny blue LED on their new smartphone so that they appear to be sophisticated and “think different”. So while “we” may boycott, the numbers are so insignificant, that it’s just business as usual.
Plus, almost anyone visiting this site already knows why soft patents are evil.
But since venture capitalists are making money off soft-patents, and lawyers are making even more, soft patents are not going away (many elected representatives are lawyers btw).
Now, don’t get me wrong, articles like the above pointing out the lies and hypocrisy stemming from soft patents are good, we just don’t need to be reminded for the 90th time why soft patents are evil.
Edited 2014-05-07 14:46 UTC
And who does not do that. Did Google invent anything at all? Did Samsung when we know that their business model is to copy companies and then wait till they sue and then wait them out.
Fact is of it wasn’t for Apple, Samsung and Google would be making Blackberries.
I think it would be Symbian 60 devices, actually.
Does it matter? Apple didn’t invent much if any of the tech in the iPhone either, but it was a pretty important device.
iPhone was a nice polish of some under-utilized tech… I think the inclusion of a decent browser (man how much all the others sucked) even if it couldn’t MMS or run Apps or copy and paste didn’t mean it wasn’t a cool product to people.
I had experienced the same thing years before on a Nokia N770 that came out in 2005 (but had no cell-phone chip) and people had been using Palms and Blackberries forever for everything except a decent browser.
Breaking the carrier phone choke-hold was their biggest accomplishment (and making capacitive touch screen ui more polished).
But none of that matters if they just pull a Wright Brothers and try to lock up stupid crap like magnetic release power cords and rounded corners / shapes or using a calendar, calculator, email, links, or spell-check in monopoly-granted use forever…
Apple has a problem with control, they try to squeeze the market so much that it slips through their fingers until they lose it (look at the Apple II for example)… Insane profit margins don’t last forever, but they try to make them do so by getting protectionism from Uncle Sam.
Giving them a pass because you like their products isn’t a very smart move.
And who does not do that. Did Google invent anything at all? Did Samsung when we know that their business model is to copy companies and then wait till they sue and then wait them out.
Fact is of it wasn’t for Apple, Samsung and Google would be making Blackberries.
The mantra of Apple has been for years that although they might not have invented something, they were the first to make that something “work” and work so well that people would flock to stores to buy it.
Sure there were “smartphones” years before the iPhone, but the iPhone was the first smartphone that sold in any sort of quantities. Samsung copied some of the iPhone’s features, which is wrong to do, and courts and juries have assessed some fines as a result. The system worked. Maybe not as “well” as either Samsung or Apple would have liked, but whatever, it’s time to move on.
Microsoft made tablets years before the iPad started flying off of shelves. They were awful clunky things that no one wanted and Microsoft discontinued each and every model. (Microsoft is still trying to come up with a tablet that will sell) Diamond, Creative Labs, Dell, etc all made portable music players, but none sold anything like the iPod did. That’s what this paragraph is all about. It’s not some big revelation or secret at all, it’s been common knowledge for years and years.
Edited 2014-05-07 11:23 UTC
The question is: should the fact that Apple was the first company to successfully market a decent implementation of previously existing features mean that they have the right to claim exclusivity over those previously existing features?
In order to market a device such as the iPhone where lots of things have to come together and work actually involves a lot of engineering. Square pegs and round holes if you like.
There are undoubtedly nifty things going on under the hood in an iPhone to make the whole thing work. The same goes for Androids and Windows phones.
Apple found some tricks that probably no one had thought of before to get the previously square peg to fit nicely in the round hole. The went out and patented it. The nifty stuff was not the end result but how they got there.
If you change the technology are to cars and think of how it might be possible to fit a Chevvy V8 engine into a Mini chassis. There are some innovative bits of engineering to be done in order to make it work. Shouldn’t my creative engine mounting design be rewarded?
If someone else comes along and copies that engine mounting without giving me due compensation (which may not be financial, such a Creative Commons license) then I’d be peed off.
Sure Apple took a lot of existing stuff and made it work together in ways that possible no one else had thought of but it appears that Samsung came along and just took what Apple had done and used it themselves. This probably does not warrant a patent trial but pure theft of IP. Rather than a fine, the head of Samsung should be serving time. Fines are just bread and butter for Samsung. Just go back and look at how many cases they have where they have stolen IP from another company.
Send the CEO to jail for a few years and things might change. Until then the only weapon any company has against someone stealing their patented IP is to sue. Then the only winners are the shyster lawyers.
Human civilization is nothing but a giant pile of continuously evolving technology. There are truly very, very few new inventions; almost everything is a slight tweak on previous work.
Software patents are particularly troublesome since they patent all possible solutions to the problem, not just a specific solution. That’s because they patent the algorithm, not the code implementing the algorithm.
Consider how harmful this would be applied to mechanical inventions. The Wright brothers could have patented ‘airplane’ and stopped all forward progress for 20 years. Of course many people would not agree with granting such an absolute monopoly and you’d get lots of ‘infringement’.
But the problem is not in the infringement the problem is that the monopoly granted was too broad. That patent on ‘airplane’ gave the Wright brothers a monopoly on jets too something they never even conceived of.
So you should get a patent on your specific solution for mounting an engine. But you should not be able to get a patent on the concept of putting a V8 into a mini. And that’s the problem with software patents.
Edited 2014-05-07 13:53 UTC
Exactly. If Apple did come up with some truly original and ingenius solutions to some engineering problems, then of course they’re theirs to have and use, and they’re entitled to protect them. But rounded corners and a thin bezel on a phone are neither of those things, nor are most of the things Apple are trying to claim. To go back to the car analogy, yes, Apple should be able to protect their specific engine mounts, but not the concept of an engine mount…
Bad analogy.
By protecting the shape and overall design of their product, Apple do not protect the concept of a tablet/smartphone.
They however try to protect the design(look) of their product as car manufacturers do (Ferrari even protect their red color!). Try to make a car which looks like a Porsche 911 and tell me what would happen then.
Car manufacturers are able to design hundreds of different models without copying each other more than what is acceptable. And the engineering constraints are the same for all. Why should it be different for smartphone manufacturers?
Please, stop pretending that by trying to protect slide to unlock or the design of the iPad they try to prevent anybody from competing.
Apple want to protect their design as car manufacturers do. The difference is that in the IT world, protecting a design is not common, because usually products are just poorly designed and their is nothing to protect.
Edited 2014-05-07 14:36 UTC
The modern smartphone is a screen with a bezel. Of course the bezel will be rounded to some degree because you don’t want the phone to break the first time you drop it. It’s obvious.
It’s like having a patent on the concept of car and force other manufacturers to put the door through the roof, use 5 wheels, a stick for changing the direction and a bathtub for seating.
But Apple do not try to protect any rectangular shape with rounded corners: their design patents are actually a lot more detailed.
People pretend that Apple did try to patent “rectangle with rounded corners”, but this is just plain BS.
On the design patent we are talking about, current Samsung smartphones do not infringe: Apple do not try to sue Samsung on this patent for recent models. And many OEM were able to make non infringing smartphones since the begining.
But the first Galaxy S or the Galaxy Tab were infringing: how is it that Samsung is now able to make a non-infringing product and not a few years ago?
According to this article http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rectangl… even if there is more detail, only the solid lines count and in this case the only solid lines are the ones in the contour.
Rounded corners and thin bezel were not design innovations. Children’s slates used that exact design 150 years ago. In fact the form factor dates back over 4000 years to Mesopotamian clay tablets.
Design patents are not standard patents: they are not protecting innovation but they are protecting a brand or product identity. The design does not have to be innovative the same way a logo or a brand does not have to be innovative to be protected.
Edited 2014-05-08 08:04 UTC
As long as you don’t copy the badges or call it a Porsche their isn’t much they can do. In China you can buy very close and totally legal ‘copies’ of just about any luxury car.
The 911 looks like it does because it is rear engined. [Porsche actually tried to replace the 911 back in the 1970s with modern front engined designs – they didn’t sell well.] No one else makes a rear engined car so no one would one would bother trying to copy the totally outdated 1960s design of the 911.
A lot of cars look very similar to each other. The Honda Jazz and Mitsubishi Colt were cheaper (and arguably better) virtual clones of the previous Mercedes A Class. This was a very conscious effort to capitalise on a popular model.
Edited 2014-05-08 07:29 UTC
At some point the look stops being “outdated” and becomes classic. I think the 911’s look is great. Updating it would only bring about a “New Coke” disaster. Same for the Corvette.
Although I wasn’t sure if you were claiming that a rear engine design is outdated. I have to assume that you weren’t, because rear engine designs are all about the weight distribution. Look at Formula 1 cars and where their engine is. The rear placement obviously has something going for it.
Other cars have a rear engine too. Lotus. Audi.
In engines, “rear mount” refers to engine’s center of gravity being past the rear axle of the care, not it being “behind the driver.” The cars you’re thinking of are technically “center mount.”
The only modern example of a rear mount engine I can think of right now are the Smart and Tesla cars.
Ah, okay. That’s a more technical definition of rear engine than I am used to. Most people I talk to just call mid engines rear engines.
I’ve driven a 911 (rear) and I didn’t think it felt that much different in cornering from a MR2 (mid). Of course I didn’t push either one out to the edge, because they weren’t my cars.
It depends the vintage of the 911. Most 911 prior to computerized stability systems handled notoriously bad, to the point of being dangerous. The “genius” of Porsche was their marketing; as they managed to convince a few generations of drivers that bad handling was actually a “feature.”
Not, that I would complain if anyone was to give me a late model 911 😉
The ‘unsafe at any speed’ Chevrolet Corvair was heavily influenced by the 911.
The MR2 and older 911s are both examples of really dangerous cars.
If the driver practices with them, both corner like almost nothing else.
Rear engined cars are actually (very) tail heavy. Open wheeled race cars are rear engined because the extra weight over the rear wheels increases traction. Rear engines are a poor choice for road cars because they have a very unfortunate habit of spinning out of control if the rear tyres lose traction on a corner.
Many professional race drivers think that the 911 is an utter abomination as a road car.
The 911 is the only true rear engined car (engine behind the wheelbase). The rest are mid-engined.
Porsche is now moving to conventional front engined vehicles such as the Panamera and Cayenne.
All those cars you mentioned are mid-engined.
Uhm yes, they *did* that. And yes, it did slow down progress for a good decade or two, at least in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
Plenty of Symbian smartphones sold before iPhone…
And the world largely leapfrogged dedicated music players for music listening, went to listening to music on mobile phones (if you look at iPod sales, they really took off in ~2006 with iPod Nano; and in 2007 ~20% of European mobile phone owners used them for music listening …just that 20% on one continent is a number in the range of all iPods ever made)
Nice find and nice analysis. When explained and then described how the patent system almost forces companies like Apple to lie and exploit the system you realize just how wrong the foundation is. (Similar to how money has corrupted the political system.) Any ideas on how to actually fix the patent system so companies like Apple can no longer nuke their competition? Imagine how great the industry would be now if Apple had not got in the way!
The sliver lining is that the whole Apple vs Samsung cockfight proved how difficult it is to patent “look and feel”, even with the unfair legal framework of “software patents” in place.
Because “look and feel” is not invented, it’s slightly built upon prior works. For example, Symbian UIQ and Nokia’s Hildon had many of the “look and feel” concepts the iPhone uses.
All Apple has to show is a patent for “slide to unlock” (already abandoned by Android since ICS), and a patent for “spring back menu” (already abandoned since 2.3). Yawn…
The bad news is that “software patents” have legitimized lock-in by the use of proprietary standards. Want to interface with FAT32 filesystems? You have to be “licensed” by MS (licensing doesn’t have to follow FRAND rules). Same for MS Exchange. Same for WMV. Etcetera.
Edited 2014-05-07 13:30 UTC
1 – There is nothing new here. Marketing always attempts to oversell everything, that’s their cause. Show me the company with a marketing department more honest than the next.
2 – Apple “invents” as much or more as any other consumer computer company. These machines literally have thousands of physical parts running millions of lines of code. If the patent system was as bad as you claim, mostly everything electronic we own would be the intellectual property of Thomas Edison, IBM, Tesla, AT&T, HP, or some other early innovator with active lawyers.
3 – Do you acknowledge that most new Apple products bring forth a slew of knockoffs, usually from Asian companies, within months of hitting the market? These other devices take the entire look and concept of Apple’s product, make it cheaper with less quality, usually put an old android or other skin-able interface on it, and undercut Apple’s devices in mainstream retail. This has been going on as long as I can remember – back into the early 90’s at least. By the time the iMac came out it was obvious and continues to this day. There’s so many examples of this.
If any company has a right to defend itself against this practice it’s Apple. They spend 2-3 years doing R&D and design on a product, going through multiple iterations in total secrecy, refining and/or creating entirely new products, and building the ecosystem and marketing for the product to succeed. Then within days of announcing there’s a link to something “coming soon” that looks almost exactly the same, is marketed as the same but more affordable, and usually runs poorly for the sad sap who fell for the apple knockoff again.
Competition is great. Knockoffs are crap and hurt everyone. The patent system is supposed to help against illegal knockoffs. Devices have gotten so complicated it’s easy to rename similar technologies and slip under the nose of obvious. But stealing is still stealing.
4 – I know Apple is just a corp and capable of bad things. But they are also a company that has stated from day 1 that their mission is to make technology useable for the average person and to design best-in-class devices, that they intend to SELL to individual CUSTOMERS. This is not ad-sponsored stuff like Google, free junk for the budget bin, or enterprise-level sales, so perhaps knockoffs hurt Apple more than others.
Companies have a right to defend their product development and their intellectual property. If OSNewz.com popped up from some foreign land with the same web design, same colors, same logo, and started running paraphrased articles from OSNews.com you would notice Thom. If they started showing up in searches and advertising right next to OSNews you would at least consider legal action. If your traffic was taking a noticeable hit and your advertisers couldn’t tell the difference, or went to OSNewz because they charge a penny less per click-through, I think you’d take action. This is unfair competition.
And my example above is about just a website with little capital investment. Imagine if it took millions of dollars to get OSNews online every month and along comes OSNewz with a copy/paste mentality – surely you’d use a bit of those millions to try to knock OSNewz out of the market.
I don’t really care what OS people want to use, as long as they don’t bitch about it to me. I mainly use Apple’s because they make me bitch the least, and I run Windows alongside OSX when I need it for some client work. And as soon as people know that you are “into computers” they want help with their windows. It’s been a pleasure to say “sorry I’m a mac guy” when they have a crappy PC problem, and how many of them end up with an Apple and thanking me in the long run.
Yes, cheap Chinese knock-offs are one thing – they’re made to look like Apple products, sometimes right down to the logo. But that’s a totally different matter to Samsung. Their phones don’t look like iPhones, and they’ve put a huge amount of work into it themselves, considering the internal hardware is totally different. It’s not like making a “similar” product makes the main logic PCB any easier to develop at all. Likewise for the software. Android doesn’t look like iOS at all in itself. What some people think (and I’m guessing this is where you’re getting confused/offended), is that a screen full of regularly-spaced icons equals the OS. Well, it doesn’t, and it’s the only part that looks similar. And guess what? Apple weren’t the first to have a regular grid of icons. Not by a long shot.
I guess you don’t remember the Galaxy S: the first Samsung Galaxy smartphone was a knock off.
Samsung did get a lot of traction at a very strategic moment because they copied the iPhone and were thus able to move quicker than their competitors at that time. And I am not talking about Apple, but about HTC, LG and others.
Edited 2014-05-07 14:50 UTC
Yep, I do indeed remember the S, and I remember wondering what the hell the fuss is about. It’s the same form factor, but doesn’t looke like an iPhone. I never once confused the two, nor do I know anyone who ever did. Did you?
You are right, there’s a difference between a cheap knockoff and what Samsung is currently doing.
But in the early years of iPhone, Samsung was the number one violator. I can’t even remember Samsung having smartphone devices before their black screen, steel frame, iPhone knockoff.
Samsung was the number one offender in 2008-2010, and given their market penetration, they were the most successful.
Since Samsung is also a major vendor for Apple, I think they asked for this fight. Just like Microsoft did in 1982 – when they were hired to write apps for the new MacOS, they began their version of MacOS called Windows and violated their NDA, leading to major lawsuits between Apple and MS in the early 90’s.
If you partner with a company as a vendor and then compete directly with that company without that company knowing you are entering that market, bad blood arises. It’s like the OSNewz.com idea being done by Thom’s old roommate.
btw — I don’t blindly support apple’s legal strategies, i’d like to see alot of this go away. I agree that all of this legal wrangling does hurt the industry.
But I think that allowing unabashed copying of expensively designed products will lead to the total collapse of the industry. Why work towards making any closed-source product if there’s no protection against copying? If there’s no chance of Apple dragging you into court for $27 million it’s open season for knockoffs.
Look at the music industry – as soon as easy copying was widespread, the industry (which was profitable for 40+ years) totally fell apart. If no one is paying for innovation or quality it will go away, or find other profitable markets.
Yes people still make music, but the industry of recording, distributing, marketing, and recommending music for people has all but died. Actual sound quality, composition quality, and performance quality have all declined in the last 10 years. Could these be connected? Money makes the world go round — computers are expensive to design and build, and music is expensive to record and distribute, but people want free or else, and these markets suffer greatly.
The Chinese phones are blatant counterfeits. This has nothing to do with patenting ‘look and feel’.
Claiming firsts was pretty much Jobs MO.
Here is but one example:
http://www.righto.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html
It seems to have become part of Apple’s “dna”…
Its things like this that cause me to want to distance myself from Apple and its products. For the few years I feel that Apple has not done anything innovative, its been the same seven or eight products just thinner and glossier.
Not to mention that Apple and its child company Rockstar are one of the biggest patent trolls. Are they that insecure in their sales that they have to put out the same product every year and sue everyone puts out something that even remotely resembles an iPhone or iPad.
Microsoft may be considered the “evil empire” but they haven’t patent trolled nearly as much as Apple. So, I ask you, who’s the real evil empire?
“Intellectual property – and patents in particular – has ruined the technology industry with lies, deceit, and hypocrisy. We just stood by and let it happen.”
Don’t buy from uber patent trolls.
Edited 2014-05-07 16:23 UTC
.. do what they’re supposed to.
Apple’s ‘innovation’ has always been about making technology accessible not inventing it per se. As Jobs went on about at great length, Apple’s place is at the intersection of technology and humanity. Not technology for technologies sake. On paper pretty much every single thing in the iPhone existed previously. No one combined it in a way that didn’t suck. That was the Apple engineers job. Job well done.
The job of the lawyer is to maximise Apples IP assets and limits it legal liabilities. This means patenting the living daylights out of everything. Job well done (ethical discussions about the failure of the patent system as a whole don’t generally form part of said lawyer doing his/her job).
The job of the marketing team is to…. wait for it… … DRIVE SALES. and by any god damn metric on the planet, job well freking done.
pretty much every single commercial company that exists tries to operate this way.
Edited 2014-05-07 18:25 UTC
Every single reader of this blog is a geek and a nerd and was against software patents(or even hardware patents) for years (I don’t count the exceptions among you). None of this is news. It happened just as we expected it would. We don’t have a reason to get angry now, it’s justified to be angry, but it won’t help at all.
The only thing that can help is to explain how dumb all of this is, to people that have no understanding of how software is developed and how hardware is developed and how software and hardware are always built from a combination of prior innovations. Patents on software are simply absurd, the same thing is probably true of 99% of hardware patents. There are countless of arguments to prove that. Can we ever explain them to the populace, so that THEY will get mad?
The document is “SAMSUNG’S TRIAL BRIEF” Full of Samsung’s version of “truth”. I guess reading isn’t a skill around these parts and neither is Thom’s ability to report. Hilarious.
Steve Jobs was a sociopath and a pathological liar. He also believed his own BS. In Jobs eyes everything that came out of Apple was original and unique. He genuinely believed that every other company were stealing his ‘original’ ideas.
I don’t know about pathological lying, but there were some personality disorders at play with Mr. Jobs. In the end his hubris caught up with him with extreme prejudice.
Apple could be following the same path interestingly enough…
Edited 2014-05-08 17:57 UTC
jealous much?
you are going to be watching society worship that pathological lying sociopath for quite some time, because he completely revolutionized the PC and the gadget industry.
you know what steve jobs “invented”?
• “no we don’t need that feature”
• “that is shit, you can do better”
• “we won’t release this unless it’s the best and easiest to use in it’s class (insanely great)”
• when in doubt turn to design classics and liberal arts over nerd’s opinions. most engineers know nothing about overall physical product design because they focus on the detailed design of their specialty.
• BREAKOUT !!
Some of you act like every company, every millionaire tech guy acts like this. Jobs’ was one of a kind, and just about every tech CEO studies at the school of Jobs now. Of course he was just the fearless leader of alot of amazing engineers and designers, but that’s a hell of a ship to keep afloat.
In my experience the apple hate ends when I pull out my 4 year old phone that still works better than most new Droids. The apple hate ends when I run 4 OS’s quickly on a 3 lb laptop carved out of a single blob of aluminum. The apple hate ends when people burn through 3 no-name PC’s in the time my mac starts to get dirty and needs some windex. Or when I upgrade my RAM or HD in 5 minutes. Or when my screen looks as good on Day 1 as Day 1388. Or when I produce 8 albums on the same laptop I use for coding. Or when….. I guess never for some.
So all you need is some good marketers to do what Apple does, right? So where’s the Disneyâ„¢ gadget ecosystem? Where’s the Nikeâ„¢ mobile health and exercise ecosystem? Where’s the Coca-Cola® tablet? Where’s the Comedy Centralâ„¢ video editor and the Sonyâ„¢ music ecosystem? They don’t much exist because Apple succeeds at execution. This leads to high quality and high customer satisfaction, whereas marketing scams lead to disappointment and lawsuits.
methinks you might be the sociopath, what could have possibly made you so mad about apple and it’s deceased CEO? Waiting for that call from the Apple store genius bar?
Creepy cult of personality is creepy…
I agree the line-sitters on day 1 are pretty creepy, more like get a life, ya know? I have never sat in some line waiting for a piece of technology, that’s stupid.
But maybe you should consider the millions of regular people who rely on apple products to make a living, and have for many years, and who are continually impressed with the products the company puts it’s logo on. Regardless of who/what/when/where — you remember when something is made right and doesn’t let you down, and you remember when something is a piece of crap.
I’ve never, ever been sold a piece of crap by Apple in 30 years. In IT for most of that time and apple’s hardware is generally built/assembled better and has been for over a decade now. The “apple tax” is well worth the increase in life and reliability.
That makes me a fan of their work and there’s nothing creepy about rewarding the companies that don’t leave you out to dry after collecting your money.
I think worshiping any company or product is creepy. At least pick the companies that earn your money to support, nothing creepy about buying the best tool for the job.
If that is the case, you are either trying to have it both ways or lack basic self awareness.
Cheers.
Apple have have had plenty of absolutely shit products – the LC series and G3 Cube come to mind.
How can Apple products be better if they are made in the same factories using the same components as every other major brand?
You just proved my point UncleFester — you had to go back decades to name a crappy apple product. I’ve owned probably 25 Apple products since the ones you mentioned.
Bonus points for asking the big question — if Apple is using the same parts and the same factories, how do they build better devices? How do they do it?
That’s what people love about Apple – basic execution of an idea and the value proposition for it.
I’ve been on the internet for a long time, and Apple owners generally own it for longer, enjoy longer, and purchase another one from that company.
Something about european OS news readers – some of you just don’t understand the basic ROI concept. If I drop $1300 on a critical piece of my business it better go through hell and back with me or I’ll get a different brand/type. Many american programmers buy their own rigs, and we use it day and night, and we are pretty mobile because there is free wifi everywhere here.
The macbook line has been the best all around laptop for so many years now I wonder if you guys are halfway through a post staring at one, wanting one.
I challenge all apple haters left to go to an apple store, walk out with a macbook or air, use it for 2 weeks, then decide if you want to take it back. Or go into an apple store with any old used mac you can borrow and ask for some help. Watch your irrational apple hate melt away in the world of customer service and quality products.
Apple is primarily an industrial design and marketing company like Dyson or Bang & Olufsen.
The totally original Apple inventions can probably be counted on one hand.
Many Apple products succeeded through totally unplanned sheer luck. The original Mac was considered an expensive gimmick until Pagemaker and laser printers created the desktop publishing revolution. The iPhone succeeded because it was jail broken despite the protests of Apple.
Apple’s post Jobs innovation is basically non-existent. They are surviving on inertia and trying to extend the lifespan of existing products with limited success. The phone 5C was an overpriced marketing disaster.
If you think the 5C was an overpriced marketing disaster you are out to lunch, man.
That phone was by far the best $49 phone in the US (with 2 year plan). My buddy has been throwing his around without case since the weekend it came out, no problems.
How can their cheapest phone be an overpriced disaster. You guys have some crazy pricing outside the US. The 5C was the cheapest best phone you could get in the states.
There seems to be a huge amount of confusion about what various words mean, words like ‘innovation’, ‘invention’, creativity’, etc. Words like those are often thrown around as if they mean the same thing. This article, by the analyst Horace Dediu, entitled “Innoveracy: Misunderstanding Innovation” is pretty good at clearing all this up. Worth a look.
http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innova…
What does this have to do with the article at hand?
I thought the topic of the article was broadly about innovation and the article I linked to was, I thought, relevant to that broad topic and of quite a high standard with some new ways of thinking about the topic which I had not come across before.
So I thought people might find it interesting.
I guess you didn’t