I'm not making any claims on whether or not they should be able to patent these things. That's not the point. At all. Before arguing the validity of patents, t

I'm not making any claims on whether or not they should be able to patent these things. That's not the point. At all. Before arguing the validity of patents, the point you were trying to make is that Apple has a "how dare they" attitude towards Microsoft and Google as they enter into markets which Apple first resides. I'm saying it's not that. They expect others to come into the PC market, they expect others to come into the touchscreen smartphone market. When they get there, they compete with them. Their tiff with Microsoft in the 90's, in my opinion, was not that they made an OS with a GUI, rather that they made an inferior OS with a GUI which lacked originality and innovation and ended up with 95% market share.