A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

Such device concepts have existed for decades in sci-fi. In the 90s, if you were thinking to the future of wireless PDAs, they always end in all glass touch screen devices.

Apple wins in execution, although one I believe is based on a flawed philosophical understanding. They won the mass market, like McDonalds did for fast food but they didn't invent anything nor does it make it good for you, developers or society. A lot of different things happened, coming together at the right time for Apple to exploit this market.

If any corporation put as much critical thought into product design as Steve Jobs and Apple did, I think they'd have the same result. To me, it's not about some innate genius or technology prophet, it's about thinking, being critical of everything and getting people to work their hardest at one single goal.

This is the best response to the current "it wasn't really innovative" fad -- going back and quoting the reviews of the time, especially from detractors and skeptics. None were saying the iPhone was just more of the same inside a shiny marketing package.

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0]

> "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel.

Seriously?

> "We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

Except the purpose of damages is to compensate the patent holder, not to punish the infringer.

And let's not forget that they responded to 700 questions in 2 days. If they worked for 16 hours/day, that's 32×60/700 = 2.7 minutes/question. I find it difficult to believe that a group of highly educated patent lawyers, let alone a group of laymen, most of whom didn't even know what a patent was a month ago, could have come to an equitable decision on all the questions so quickly.

The way I see it, Samsung clearly copied many aspects of their phones from the iPhone. That was obviously unethical, but whether it was illegal is much more difficult to determine, particularly when Apple itself copied many aspects of the iPhone from past innovations.

I don't like to think of Apple as a pure innovator - I think of them more as an assembler. When they see a market in which all the hardware pieces are available and waiting to be put together, they do that in such a way that the final product appeals to the end-user, particularly through the design of appropriate software. For example, they entered the PMP market when hard drives and batteries were cheap/portable enough to make the iPod a reality. They entered the phone market when capacitive touchscreens were cheap/large enough - their real innovation was on the software side. I don't agree with software patents, but unfortunately that's the current state of things in the US.

At the same time, there's little doubt that there was bias towards the "home team" as well, especially when the jurors live so close to Silicon Valley.

I was honestly shocked that Samsung didn't overwhelmingly beat Apple in South Korea[1], although the WSJ suggests there was definitely a bias[2]. Samsung's chairman, Lee Kun-hee, has been found guilty in the past of tax evasion, bribing politicians, prosecutors, and judges, and then pardoned for it by the South Korean government. Not surprising when you consider that Samsung generates 20% of South Korea's GDP.

0: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390&#3...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/23/3264434/apple-samsung-kore...

2: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044423050457761...

PDA's usually had a few extra buttons because navigation using a stylus was always a bits awkward. If you ever tried scolling a web page using a stylus and scrollbars in Windows Mobile you'd understand why every PDA had a D-pad and a separate home button - it was a neccessity because of the stylus.

Apple was simply the first on the market with a touch-driven display, which let them drop the extra navigation buttons. It's not like nobody ever thought of having less buttons.

In any case, the invention of removing buttons should not be a patentable idea. The sheer absurdity of all, of Apple's patents is an abomination and makes the US law system look like a carnival.

Few buttons, PDA.

Tablet with news, Knight Ridder tablet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEtPQDQNcI

Icons finger sized in a grid. Well given we already had desktops, and given it's a handheld device, then it's insanely obvious to have fewer icons in a grid at finger size. Low resolution screen compared to our desktops, hey maybe we should have fullscreen as the default.

Pinch to zoom, multiple sci-fi movies.

Slide to unlock. Phones already had something called "unlock', and physical bolt locks already slide... So we make a visualisation of what amounts to a sliding latch when when have the touch screen, pure genius, nobody besides Apple could have thought of that, right?

"Trade Dress" to stop competitors should also be entirely illegal unless there is no branding or logo on the phone, or the name is too similar or in some insanely small font. If it has "Samsung" written on it it's insane to argue that anyone would confuse these things. What if these rules applied to TVs, cars or bottles of perfume? Perhaps technically they do, but people have had such things for so long they don't think about them in that way. It's farcical that anything clearly identified as a different product on the box can be subject to such rules.

Apple products are like a good classy restaurant or hotel chain. They take ingredients everyone has and put a lot of work into fit and finish, they make the customer feel special for a slightly higher price. And they have a dress code that permits only a certain crowd in there (app store approvals vs. more free entrance policy of other application stores, and by the way apt-get and various frontends to it pre-date the app store). All due respect to them for doing a good job, but Steve Jobs' entitlement complex knew no bounds and there is no moral or logical merit to their claims only a slice of legal merit on the back of stupid laws.