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Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”. Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no

Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”. Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898 EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here is the filing (priority) date and the grant (publish date). It’s patents so it gets really complicated but essentially the later grant (after patent office/authority “review”) more or less makes the effective date the priority date - which to complicate matters even further can actually be the filing date of a referenced provisional patent that (in the US) can be as long as 12 months before the non-provisional (real) patent filing. Clear as mud, right?

hcks 4y ago
Lol, does Apple also owns a patent that prevents other manufacturers from making something else than pieces of plastic trash devices ?
foobiekr 4y ago
So is the thesis here that there is no other way to have non-crap sound on a laptop than this Apple patent? No alternative? No patent-non-infringing approach? Because if not, the real reason is as the author suggests: other manufacturers don't bother. I have been working a long time - decades - in a part of the industry that is not just patent happy but patent berserk and it has never been my experience that other approaches are not available when a single approach is patent-walled off.
- brudgers 4y ago
  I’m not saying there might not be another way. But iTunes and the other big music distribution power players have requirements and use encoding technologies based on loudness rather than power. [1] This is why your playlists don’t require adjusting the volume between songs from different artists/albums/eras/genres. So it is likely that Apple’s method works hand in hand with the technical constraints of iTunes requirements and other streaming encodings. And why the threat of Apple’s patent may be providing a moat. Like Dolby, except that licensing patents isn’t a core revenue stream for Apple. [1] TFA doesn’t cut a bright line between power and loudness within its argument. But that’s a critical part of contemporary audio engineering in today’s commercial music production.
  - rendaw 4y ago
    What audio encodings are loudness rather than power based? Does that mean they don't encode waveforms directly? > I’m not saying there might not be another way. Are you ggp?
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    How many people are using their macs to listen to iTunes? I get YouTube, Netflix, anything you can watch on chrome, but iTunes is more of a phone, home pod, Apple car thing, and even then many people use Spotify rather than iMusic. Are other providers using QuickTime or similar encodings for non-Apple provided media?
    - brudgers 4y ago
      It’s not Quicktime. All the streaming services normalize music on loudness. That’s why you aren’t constantly adjusting the volume of your speakers/headphones to compensate for the way each song was originally mixed and mastered. Apple/iTunes got there first.
rendaw 4y ago
The author replied in mastodon: > "Nobody else does it because Apple patented it" - except non-Apple phones do do it. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't invent this, even if they got a patent. Apple have a lot of BS patents. Other comments here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  In that discussion the author references that Apple only starting implementing this circa 2014/2016 - which happens to line up perfectly with when the patent was working it's way through the USPTO and granted. Generally speaking you can get early confidence on whether or not the patent is likely to be granted. Lexis Nexus and others actually offer specialized services to IP firms where they have the background and historical performance (office actions, grant rates, etc) of the random patent reviewer human at the USPTO that was assigned to review your application. This data, in conjunction with any early "office actions" sent by your reviewer, can give you a really good idea of whether or not the patent will be issued pretty early on in the process.
hn92726819 4y ago
I don't know much about patents. Can you explain why this patent is avoided by other manufacturers, but other apple patents seem to be happily copied? For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  It's a classic risk vs reward calculation. Basically "does this impact/benefit the user experience and therefore marketability and potential sales enough to justify potentially 'going to the mat' in court if they call us out on it". Where "going to the mat" is absurdly expensive patent litigation up to and including building an outdoor ice skating rink[0] (in TEXAS) to potentially influence jurors in Marshall, TX (a 22k person town which happens to be home of the Federal Eastern District of Texas - a court known to be very friendly to patent infringement suits, AKA a "rocket docket"[1]). Not only is the litigation and associated stunts like ice skating rinks expensive, if you lose there can be significant damages - like in the Apple vs Samsung case where Samsung lost and was ordered to pay over $1B in damages. Then you get to decide if you want to keep paying legal fees to appeal, etc. It's called the Apple/Samsung patent war because this stretched on for at least seven years - likely to the tune of 10s of millions or even 100s of millions of dollars in legal expenses. Then, when/if you lose, you're usually ordered to also pay the legal expenses of the other party. Apple vs Samsung was largely over key UI/UX components that are more or less standards for what users expect from a modern device. Samsung had to essentially calculate "do we try to work around these patents (and maybe get sued anyway) or offer a product in the marketplace that is markedly sub-standard vs a competitor product". Somewhat paradoxically, at the "startup scale" when I've dealt with patent prosecution (filing patents - terminology is kind of backwards) I've been specifically instructed by IP counsel not to do in-depth patent searches for existing/competing patents. If it can be proven you knowingly infringed on a patent the damages increase significantly because it can then be considered "willful infringement". Good IP counsel often offers a service that (essentially) puts up a little bit of a firewall between the "inventor" and this issue - the firm does searches you're not privy to and usually channels some information to you while not disclosing specifics of the patent. This communication has the benefit of being protected by attorney-client privilege which is almost impossible to pierce. For something like this I doubt many consumers are making a purchasing decision solely on what laptop speakers sound like. Most people don't really care, sure, it's a "nice to have" for your laptop speakers to sound better but from a sales and revenue standpoint the difference is likely minuscule. [0] - https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-the-only-outdoor-skating-rink-in-texas https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-t... [1] - https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/patently-unfair/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/patently-unfair/
sbaiddn 4y ago
Power engineers have been doing this for decades (a century?); estimating the temperature of a transformer or motor from a simple ODE to see if the relays need to trip. The parameters are derived from the electrical parameters of the transformer. Aside from applying it to speakers, whats novel?
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  I'm not arguing the merits of this patent (see my other comments). I'm attempting to provide some background on how this messed up system "functions". That said, this process is not "estimating" anything. It's taking high resolution direct measurements[0] of driver temperature with awareness of the frequency and amplitude of the audio signal (also factoring in crossover frequency) and doing a bunch of stuff (this is well outside my area of expertise) to essentially overpower the individual driver(s) well past their intended electrical and physical specifications. If I ever ended up on a jury for this (I wouldn't - I would get dismissed after one question in voir dire) even I would have a tough time associating (and recognizing as prior art) what you described with this process. [0] - I've since been corrected on this - it is an estimation (of sorts).
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    The "bunch of stuff" is precisely the part where estimation comes in. There is no direct temperature sensor to measure from, the only thing available is the voltage levels on the speaker. As the patent says it's a 2 level estimate: estimate of impedance from voltages -> estimate of temperature from modelling the speaker's physical parametrs as a function of the driving signal and impedance estimate. With patents it's not the general idea that's being patented. The patent itself cites many earlier patents which operate around the same general idea just with slightly different implementations on how the control process is fed and how it reacts.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      Appreciate the clarification - like I said this is well outside my area of expertise and my eyes glazed over pretty quickly in reading but at this point we're borderline in semantics. Exactly. In this case it's a "process". Generally speaking my take is there's almost never entirely new process (or design or anything else) in any "invention" - humans have been at this for hundreds of years and there's almost nothing that's entirely new. I don't think I've ever seen a filing without tons of references.
kergonath 4y ago
> Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”. It is not exclusive. I cannot believe that there is only one way of doing something like this. They just need to care enough to put some R&D money into this.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Sure, but as I've noted elsewhere if it goes to court it ends up in the hands of a jury. Let's just say that 12 random jurors off the street aren't exactly the HN crowd. In fact, I doubt a single HN user would ever make it on a jury for anything technical unless they lied or deliberately mislead counsel during juror questioning. "Juror number 7, what is your occupation?" "I'm a software developer..." "We move to dismiss this juror". In this case it could probably be argued for cause due to prejudice which means they can do it all day. A big part of the calculus here is banking on that.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, why would they not want to select someone who's a subject-matter expert? Is it regulatory capture or is there a more innocent reason?
    - shagie 4y ago
      People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings. ... Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish. Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't responding to an officer who was a native Spanish speaker claiming that he couldn't understand that dialect. Note that this wasn't relevant to the case - it was trying to explain why the defendant wasn't responding to the officer. The question of Spanish didn't come up in jury deliberations. After the case, I noted that while I didn't speak Spanish, I did understand French and could read ancient latin and greek... and took linguistics... and my mother was fluent in Spanish and understood several dialects (and used that fluency in a professional capacity) including Puerto Rican (where she had lived for several years). The differences between the PR Spanish and Mexican Spanish are things like the word for the fruit "orange" is a "china" ( http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartilla-Fonetica-Puerto-Rico-China1.png http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartil... )... but we're getting to things like is it a water fountain? or drinking fountain? No - it's a bubbler ( https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you_call_that_thing_you_drink_water_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you... ). This got a scowl from the public defender because I had beyond common knowledge that that line of questions of the officer about if he spoke PR Spanish was trying to catch him in something that he could come back to later (which he didn't). If the case had been decided on that he didn't understand the instructions of a different dialect (rather than he couldn't stand up, slurred his speech and had a strong oder of malt on his breath (note this was another bit that the public defender tried to bring into question as the officer said he smelled of alcohol which doesn't have a smell itself) my understanding of linguistics and language may have been grounds for disqualification and a mistrial. --- Subject matter expert evidence should be presented - not something that someone has more than a layman's understanding of being brought into the jury room (as that could also be wrong).
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
That’s not a patent. That’s a published version of a patent application. The patent has actually been granted thought. It’s here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9131302B2/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US9131302B2/
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  It was the first result when I put together the right search terms to find it and shows granted. Good enough for me. If you can find any differences in the claims or figures I'd be interested.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    I’m not gonna go through and compare the wording, but the difference is that one set is enforceable and the other isn’t.
golergka 4y ago
TBH, this is exactly the kind of innovation that patents are intended for.

hcks 4y ago

Lol, does Apple also owns a patent that prevents other manufacturers from making something else than pieces of plastic trash devices ?

foobiekr 4y ago

So is the thesis here that there is no other way to have non-crap sound on a laptop than this Apple patent? No alternative? No patent-non-infringing approach? Because if not, the real reason is as the author suggests: other manufacturers don't bother. I have been working a long time - decades - in a part of the industry that is not just patent happy but patent berserk and it has never been my experience that other approaches are not available when a single approach is patent-walled off.

brudgers 4y ago
I’m not saying there might not be another way. But iTunes and the other big music distribution power players have requirements and use encoding technologies based on loudness rather than power. [1] This is why your playlists don’t require adjusting the volume between songs from different artists/albums/eras/genres. So it is likely that Apple’s method works hand in hand with the technical constraints of iTunes requirements and other streaming encodings. And why the threat of Apple’s patent may be providing a moat. Like Dolby, except that licensing patents isn’t a core revenue stream for Apple. [1] TFA doesn’t cut a bright line between power and loudness within its argument. But that’s a critical part of contemporary audio engineering in today’s commercial music production.
- rendaw 4y ago
  What audio encodings are loudness rather than power based? Does that mean they don't encode waveforms directly? > I’m not saying there might not be another way. Are you ggp?
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  How many people are using their macs to listen to iTunes? I get YouTube, Netflix, anything you can watch on chrome, but iTunes is more of a phone, home pod, Apple car thing, and even then many people use Spotify rather than iMusic. Are other providers using QuickTime or similar encodings for non-Apple provided media?
  - brudgers 4y ago
    It’s not Quicktime. All the streaming services normalize music on loudness. That’s why you aren’t constantly adjusting the volume of your speakers/headphones to compensate for the way each song was originally mixed and mastered. Apple/iTunes got there first.

rendaw 4y ago

The author replied in mastodon: > "Nobody else does it because Apple patented it" - except non-Apple phones do do it. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't invent this, even if they got a patent. Apple have a lot of BS patents. Other comments here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064

kkielhofner 4y ago
In that discussion the author references that Apple only starting implementing this circa 2014/2016 - which happens to line up perfectly with when the patent was working it's way through the USPTO and granted. Generally speaking you can get early confidence on whether or not the patent is likely to be granted. Lexis Nexus and others actually offer specialized services to IP firms where they have the background and historical performance (office actions, grant rates, etc) of the random patent reviewer human at the USPTO that was assigned to review your application. This data, in conjunction with any early "office actions" sent by your reviewer, can give you a really good idea of whether or not the patent will be issued pretty early on in the process.

hn92726819 4y ago

I don't know much about patents. Can you explain why this patent is avoided by other manufacturers, but other apple patents seem to be happily copied? For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others

kkielhofner 4y ago
It's a classic risk vs reward calculation. Basically "does this impact/benefit the user experience and therefore marketability and potential sales enough to justify potentially 'going to the mat' in court if they call us out on it". Where "going to the mat" is absurdly expensive patent litigation up to and including building an outdoor ice skating rink[0] (in TEXAS) to potentially influence jurors in Marshall, TX (a 22k person town which happens to be home of the Federal Eastern District of Texas - a court known to be very friendly to patent infringement suits, AKA a "rocket docket"[1]). Not only is the litigation and associated stunts like ice skating rinks expensive, if you lose there can be significant damages - like in the Apple vs Samsung case where Samsung lost and was ordered to pay over $1B in damages. Then you get to decide if you want to keep paying legal fees to appeal, etc. It's called the Apple/Samsung patent war because this stretched on for at least seven years - likely to the tune of 10s of millions or even 100s of millions of dollars in legal expenses. Then, when/if you lose, you're usually ordered to also pay the legal expenses of the other party. Apple vs Samsung was largely over key UI/UX components that are more or less standards for what users expect from a modern device. Samsung had to essentially calculate "do we try to work around these patents (and maybe get sued anyway) or offer a product in the marketplace that is markedly sub-standard vs a competitor product". Somewhat paradoxically, at the "startup scale" when I've dealt with patent prosecution (filing patents - terminology is kind of backwards) I've been specifically instructed by IP counsel not to do in-depth patent searches for existing/competing patents. If it can be proven you knowingly infringed on a patent the damages increase significantly because it can then be considered "willful infringement". Good IP counsel often offers a service that (essentially) puts up a little bit of a firewall between the "inventor" and this issue - the firm does searches you're not privy to and usually channels some information to you while not disclosing specifics of the patent. This communication has the benefit of being protected by attorney-client privilege which is almost impossible to pierce. For something like this I doubt many consumers are making a purchasing decision solely on what laptop speakers sound like. Most people don't really care, sure, it's a "nice to have" for your laptop speakers to sound better but from a sales and revenue standpoint the difference is likely minuscule. [0] - https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-the-only-outdoor-skating-rink-in-texas https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-south-korea-s-samsung-built-t... [1] - https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/patently-unfair/ https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/patently-unfair/

sbaiddn 4y ago

Power engineers have been doing this for decades (a century?); estimating the temperature of a transformer or motor from a simple ODE to see if the relays need to trip. The parameters are derived from the electrical parameters of the transformer. Aside from applying it to speakers, whats novel?

kkielhofner 4y ago
I'm not arguing the merits of this patent (see my other comments). I'm attempting to provide some background on how this messed up system "functions". That said, this process is not "estimating" anything. It's taking high resolution direct measurements[0] of driver temperature with awareness of the frequency and amplitude of the audio signal (also factoring in crossover frequency) and doing a bunch of stuff (this is well outside my area of expertise) to essentially overpower the individual driver(s) well past their intended electrical and physical specifications. If I ever ended up on a jury for this (I wouldn't - I would get dismissed after one question in voir dire) even I would have a tough time associating (and recognizing as prior art) what you described with this process. [0] - I've since been corrected on this - it is an estimation (of sorts).
- zamadatix 4y ago
  The "bunch of stuff" is precisely the part where estimation comes in. There is no direct temperature sensor to measure from, the only thing available is the voltage levels on the speaker. As the patent says it's a 2 level estimate: estimate of impedance from voltages -> estimate of temperature from modelling the speaker's physical parametrs as a function of the driving signal and impedance estimate. With patents it's not the general idea that's being patented. The patent itself cites many earlier patents which operate around the same general idea just with slightly different implementations on how the control process is fed and how it reacts.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    Appreciate the clarification - like I said this is well outside my area of expertise and my eyes glazed over pretty quickly in reading but at this point we're borderline in semantics. Exactly. In this case it's a "process". Generally speaking my take is there's almost never entirely new process (or design or anything else) in any "invention" - humans have been at this for hundreds of years and there's almost nothing that's entirely new. I don't think I've ever seen a filing without tons of references.

kergonath 4y ago

> Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”. It is not exclusive. I cannot believe that there is only one way of doing something like this. They just need to care enough to put some R&D money into this.

kkielhofner 4y ago
Sure, but as I've noted elsewhere if it goes to court it ends up in the hands of a jury. Let's just say that 12 random jurors off the street aren't exactly the HN crowd. In fact, I doubt a single HN user would ever make it on a jury for anything technical unless they lied or deliberately mislead counsel during juror questioning. "Juror number 7, what is your occupation?" "I'm a software developer..." "We move to dismiss this juror". In this case it could probably be argued for cause due to prejudice which means they can do it all day. A big part of the calculus here is banking on that.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, why would they not want to select someone who's a subject-matter expert? Is it regulatory capture or is there a more innocent reason?
  - shagie 4y ago
    People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings. ... Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish. Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't responding to an officer who was a native Spanish speaker claiming that he couldn't understand that dialect. Note that this wasn't relevant to the case - it was trying to explain why the defendant wasn't responding to the officer. The question of Spanish didn't come up in jury deliberations. After the case, I noted that while I didn't speak Spanish, I did understand French and could read ancient latin and greek... and took linguistics... and my mother was fluent in Spanish and understood several dialects (and used that fluency in a professional capacity) including Puerto Rican (where she had lived for several years). The differences between the PR Spanish and Mexican Spanish are things like the word for the fruit "orange" is a "china" ( http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartilla-Fonetica-Puerto-Rico-China1.png http://speakinglatino.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Cartil... )... but we're getting to things like is it a water fountain? or drinking fountain? No - it's a bubbler ( https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you_call_that_thing_you_drink_water_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9010e8/what_do_you... ). This got a scowl from the public defender because I had beyond common knowledge that that line of questions of the officer about if he spoke PR Spanish was trying to catch him in something that he could come back to later (which he didn't). If the case had been decided on that he didn't understand the instructions of a different dialect (rather than he couldn't stand up, slurred his speech and had a strong oder of malt on his breath (note this was another bit that the public defender tried to bring into question as the officer said he smelled of alcohol which doesn't have a smell itself) my understanding of linguistics and language may have been grounds for disqualification and a mistrial. --- Subject matter expert evidence should be presented - not something that someone has more than a layman's understanding of being brought into the jury room (as that could also be wrong).

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

That’s not a patent. That’s a published version of a patent application. The patent has actually been granted thought. It’s here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9131302B2/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US9131302B2/

kkielhofner 4y ago
It was the first result when I put together the right search terms to find it and shows granted. Good enough for me. If you can find any differences in the claims or figures I'd be interested.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  I’m not gonna go through and compare the wording, but the difference is that one set is enforceable and the other isn’t.

golergka 4y ago

TBH, this is exactly the kind of innovation that patents are intended for.