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Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

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Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things were the subject of this patent suit.

The original statement that I was replying to was: The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.

This assertion is valid only if you think that products "evolve" in the absence of demand-side market pressure.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) rewar…

I reminded by that quote for The Social Network. “If you invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”.

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.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#204
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean what people did when buying normal cellphones before touch screen phones? And so what? Sounds to me like Apple came along with iPhone and said to themselves "now we must change how the game works, and prevent others from making similar phones as they do now, so let's put a patent on rounded corners and go thermo-nuclear on anyone who dares "copy"."

Fast follow wasn't this blatant in the mobile space until the iPhone; there weren't any companies rushing out a near-exact replica of the Moto Q to profit off those sweet enterprise sales. Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'"…

I think you're struggling to come to grips with the fact that it's only natural that if someone makes something that works because it's obvious, then others will also make variations of that thing. That's what manufacturers are doing, from Samsung to LG to Sony, they all have touch screen mobile phones with icons and similar features.

It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone who gets close to "rounded corners". Like if Ford sued anyone else for putting 4 wheels on a vehicle body. The Samsung phone is not a "clone", by any stretch. People saying this have swallowed the Apple rhetoric.

And lastly, the technology in the iPhone was only possible because of electronics and software that was in part developed not by Apple, but by others. Apple should give it a rest, enjoy their riches. And, they should NOT build an Apple store at Fed Square in Melbourne Australia, we don't want it.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool story bro, but most grandmothers don't know or care about technology gadgets and get confused easily. She would not have known or cared about "rounded corners". It's flawed logic to say it's a widespread problem that people "accidentally buy a Samsung" because a salesperson lied to your grandmother. That's an edge case that means nothing.

This would have been a great comment without the "Cool story bro". The salesperson could have convinced the grandmother to buy a "Sinclair iPhone by Timex", assuming it was packaged into something roughly phone-shaped. The problem here isn't the appearance of the product.

I don't write to satisfy comment "greatness". Downvote if you don't like my post, the editorial review isn't needed.

I will happily point the finger at any tech giant when it does wrong, but Samsung didn't do anything to warrant years of court battles and accusations. It's tiring to hear people defend Apple's sideshow legal agenda.

The "touch screen phone" was inevitable, and was always going to be something with round-ish corners, flat, with icons. The shape is too fundamental to the ergonomics of such a device. There's too little room for difference in design, relative to the objective of making such a device comfortable to hold. I had the Nokia N9 for awhile, and the pointy/squared corners were not a great feature. They probably wanted to avoid rounded corners, which is a ridiculous situation where consumers lose out.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#207
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

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.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#208
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

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 determin…

> Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.

Exactly.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast follow wasn't this blatant in the mobile space until the iPhone; there weren't any companies rushing out a near-exact replica of the Moto Q to profit off those sweet enterprise sales. Look at this from Apple's perspective: they spent a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to create what was at the time a step change in mobile hardware, and then a bunch of other companies went "thanks for the 'inspiration'"…

I think you're struggling to come to grips with the fact that it's only natural that if someone makes something that works because it's obvious, then others will also make variations of that thing. That's what manufacturers are doing, from Samsung to LG to Sony, they all have touch screen mobile phones with icons and similar features. It's childish for Apple to expect to have it all for themselves, then sue anyone wh…

I'm not struggling to grasp anything; as a person who makes stuff, I'm just empathizing with the iPhone's creators. I think we tend to forget what an "oh shit" moment the iPhone reveal really was - it seems obvious now but it was not at all obvious back then.

I feel the same sense of empathy for the companies Apple occasionally steals stuff from, especially Palm. So much of modern iOS (and Android, but Google hired Matthias...) is cribbed from webOS that it makes me a bit sad.

Re: Apple Wins $539M from Samsung in Damages Retrial

#210
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palm Pilot, 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_1000 http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/8493/pilot-1000-retrospec...

Had one like that. Couldn't make any calls with it.

You could make calls on the Palm Treo. It was released in 2004, three years before the iPhone. It had a touch screen (resistive) and a web browser. It was a pretty great phone for its time.
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