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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 b

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.

astrange 4y ago
It's well outside your area of expertise which is why you started with a "well actually" post claiming the article is obviously false?
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  Common, his post generated an interesting discussion (and netted me 10 points).
sbaiddn 4y ago
"there's almost never entirely new process" I agree, but in this case the only innovation I see is applying a known solution to protect large inductor coils (transformers, motors) to protect smaller, inductor coils (speaker drivers). Apple can patent their actual model all they want (for example by adding the driven air as a cooling term), but the idea, generally, of building a model to estimate the temperature is prior art.
zamadatix 4y ago
I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?
- freejazz 4y ago
  If its really this obvious, it should be trivial to get this patent knocked out.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  See my other comments about patents in practice. They don't matter until you end up in front of a jury (or settle with a troll, which is a different case). A jury comprised of 12 random people off the street, specifically selected by counsel to be as ignorant as possible on the subject matter at hand (easier to influence). My original point - this isn't enough of a distinguishing feature to drive sales and revenue for any manufacturer to risk that. Ok, you sold 1% more laptops because you have good speakers. Then Apple sues you and potentially wins damages on a larger percentage of ALL of your sales of that "infringing" product. Not worth it, not even close. Not even worth it to try to circumvent and still risk getting sued.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Patents do matter, you can get a patent knocked out at several phases in litigation prior to actually arriving at a trial. That's not even assuming the defendant goes and gets a stay to IPR the patent.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few just care about crappy laptop speaker sound enough to write a driver modeling each device and speaker combination for a significantly wider variety of shipping hardware. But I suppose it's impossible to know without asking every manufacturer.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      We're saying the same thing. They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.

astrange 4y ago

It's well outside your area of expertise which is why you started with a "well actually" post claiming the article is obviously false?

sbaiddn 4y ago
Common, his post generated an interesting discussion (and netted me 10 points).

sbaiddn 4y ago

"there's almost never entirely new process" I agree, but in this case the only innovation I see is applying a known solution to protect large inductor coils (transformers, motors) to protect smaller, inductor coils (speaker drivers). Apple can patent their actual model all they want (for example by adding the driven air as a cooling term), but the idea, generally, of building a model to estimate the temperature is prior art.

zamadatix 4y ago

I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?

freejazz 4y ago
If its really this obvious, it should be trivial to get this patent knocked out.
kkielhofner 4y ago
See my other comments about patents in practice. They don't matter until you end up in front of a jury (or settle with a troll, which is a different case). A jury comprised of 12 random people off the street, specifically selected by counsel to be as ignorant as possible on the subject matter at hand (easier to influence). My original point - this isn't enough of a distinguishing feature to drive sales and revenue for any manufacturer to risk that. Ok, you sold 1% more laptops because you have good speakers. Then Apple sues you and potentially wins damages on a larger percentage of ALL of your sales of that "infringing" product. Not worth it, not even close. Not even worth it to try to circumvent and still risk getting sued.
- freejazz 4y ago
  Patents do matter, you can get a patent knocked out at several phases in litigation prior to actually arriving at a trial. That's not even assuming the defendant goes and gets a stay to IPR the patent.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few just care about crappy laptop speaker sound enough to write a driver modeling each device and speaker combination for a significantly wider variety of shipping hardware. But I suppose it's impossible to know without asking every manufacturer.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    We're saying the same thing. They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.