6 ms·

Why is that comment being voted down? It's exactly on point.

CamperBob2 8y ago
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it. Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not. As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.
- krustyburger 8y ago
  This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one. And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears. Or do people think Apple invented that, too? And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
    - nicky0 8y ago
      Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.
      - CamperBob2 8y ago
        It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense. It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew. To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
        sumedh 8y ago
        > It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew. How exactly does this contribute to the discussion, To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
        CamperBob2 8y ago
        To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
        sumedh 8y ago
        So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?
        CamperBob2 8y ago
        So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place? To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years). The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history. Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
    - sjwright 8y ago
      If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?
  - bildung 8y ago
    Multitouch and the accompanying interface was most probably developed by Synaptics, Apples touchscreen supplier: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-captured-on-video-051947/ https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c...
    - sbuk 8y ago
      They bought a company called FingerWorks in 2005 - Synaptics had nothing to do with the iPhone.
  - exodust 8y ago
    > This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one. Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook. > I think it only seems obvious after the fact. It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design. There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Who was going to do it? Microsoft was stuck on making Windows Mobile a small PC. RIM was poo pooing the touchscreen two years after the iPhone came out. Google was aping the Blackberry with the Android and completely started over after the iPhone came out. Nokia didn't have the OS or the platform to make a full fledge smart phone. But they were the most likely.
  - frankietwenty9 8y ago
    LG Prada? Don't get me wrong - the iPhone was ground breaking. It's the hundred little details that made it special. But would someone else have done it? Yes. Is this relevant? No
    - macintux 8y ago
      Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually. But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        You mean like the HTC Dream?
    - scarface74 8y ago
      The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?
      - CamperBob2 8y ago
- macintux 8y ago
  Which explains the incessant mockery Apple received when they revealed it. Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops. The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.
- bildung 8y ago
  To support the obviousness of multitouch interfaces Camperbob mentions: See this prototype from Synaptics from 2006: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-captured-on-video-051947/ https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c... The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    At best that is an iteration of Blackberry or Nokia-style smart phone interfaces. It doesn't look particularly impressive, even for 2006.
    - bildung 8y ago
      That was the point: The evolution of stylus-based interfaces to multi-touch was clear to the major players in the field, and the direction the necessary UX changes had to evolve to were obvious.
  - sbuk 8y ago
    That tech demo came a year after Apple acquired FingerWorks; who had been producing and selling multitouch technologies since 1998.
    - bildung 8y ago
      Thanks, didn't know that.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  I reminded by that quote for The Social Network. “If you invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    But Facebook wasn't a thing that had to be "invented." It was simply an incremental refinement of things that already existed. Only its marketing was innovative -- the key idea being to build, then connect, audiences of homogeneous users at colleges. And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.

The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it. Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not. As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.

krustyburger 8y ago
This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one. And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears. Or do people think Apple invented that, too? And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
  - nicky0 8y ago
    Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
      It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense. It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew. To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
      - sumedh 8y ago
        > It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew. How exactly does this contribute to the discussion, To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
        CamperBob2 8y ago
        To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
        sumedh 8y ago
        So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?
        CamperBob2 8y ago
        So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place? To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years). The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history. Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?
- bildung 8y ago
  Multitouch and the accompanying interface was most probably developed by Synaptics, Apples touchscreen supplier: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-captured-on-video-051947/ https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c...
  - sbuk 8y ago
    They bought a company called FingerWorks in 2005 - Synaptics had nothing to do with the iPhone.
- exodust 8y ago
  > This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one. Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook. > I think it only seems obvious after the fact. It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design. There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.
scarface74 8y ago
Who was going to do it? Microsoft was stuck on making Windows Mobile a small PC. RIM was poo pooing the touchscreen two years after the iPhone came out. Google was aping the Blackberry with the Android and completely started over after the iPhone came out. Nokia didn't have the OS or the platform to make a full fledge smart phone. But they were the most likely.
- frankietwenty9 8y ago
  LG Prada? Don't get me wrong - the iPhone was ground breaking. It's the hundred little details that made it special. But would someone else have done it? Yes. Is this relevant? No
  - macintux 8y ago
    Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually. But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You mean like the HTC Dream?
  - scarface74 8y ago
    The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?
    - CamperBob2 8y ago
macintux 8y ago
Which explains the incessant mockery Apple received when they revealed it. Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops. The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.
bildung 8y ago
To support the obviousness of multitouch interfaces Camperbob mentions: See this prototype from Synaptics from 2006: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-captured-on-video-051947/ https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c... The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.
- sjwright 8y ago
  At best that is an iteration of Blackberry or Nokia-style smart phone interfaces. It doesn't look particularly impressive, even for 2006.
  - bildung 8y ago
    That was the point: The evolution of stylus-based interfaces to multi-touch was clear to the major players in the field, and the direction the necessary UX changes had to evolve to were obvious.
- sbuk 8y ago
  That tech demo came a year after Apple acquired FingerWorks; who had been producing and selling multitouch technologies since 1998.
  - bildung 8y ago
    Thanks, didn't know that.
madeofpalk 8y ago
I reminded by that quote for The Social Network. “If you invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  But Facebook wasn't a thing that had to be "invented." It was simply an incremental refinement of things that already existed. Only its marketing was innovative -- the key idea being to build, then connect, audiences of homogeneous users at colleges. And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.