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Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#291

Post by [deleted] »

behnamoh wrote: post #247
areoform wrote: post #245

a plurality of emitters configured to emit light, each of the emitters comprising at least two light emitting diodes (LEDs); four photodiodes arranged within the user-worn device and configured to receive light after at least a portion of the light has been attenuated by tissue of the user; a protrusion comprising a convex surface including separate openings extending through the protrusion and lined with opaque mate…

the same way that Apple's "rounded corners for smartphones" was a patent.

[deleted]

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#292

Post by hedora »

behnamoh wrote: post #247
areoform wrote: post #245

a plurality of emitters configured to emit light, each of the emitters comprising at least two light emitting diodes (LEDs); four photodiodes arranged within the user-worn device and configured to receive light after at least a portion of the light has been attenuated by tissue of the user; a protrusion comprising a convex surface including separate openings extending through the protrusion and lined with opaque mate…

the same way that Apple's "rounded corners for smartphones" was a patent.

Though that was a design patent, they also got a normal patent for the pythagorean formula (they didn’t invent pinch zoom, so they patented computing the distance between two fingers from two x,y coordinates).

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#293

Post by jl2718 »

This seems like a problematic patent based on two of the doctrines, both of which the courts have largely abandoned. Firstly, it’s patently obvious. The pulse ox technology in a transmissive mode is very old, and so is HRM in a reflective mode, and the only difference is in the subtleties of the engineering, none of which is reflected in the patent nor the claims. The second reason, relatedly, is the requirement for “replicability by a person of ordinary skill”. The patent reveals nothing that would enable someone to do that, and certainly doesn’t add anything to the ability of a skilled person to do so. The whole thing is just an idea, not an original one, and ideas are not supposed to be patentable.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#294

Post by Retric »

hedora wrote: post #292
behnamoh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the same way that Apple's "rounded corners for smartphones" was a patent.

Though that was a design patent, they also got a normal patent for the pythagorean formula (they didn’t invent pinch zoom, so they patented computing the distance between two fingers from two x,y coordinates).

FYI: Apple’s pinch to zoom lets you rotate and drag not just zoom.

This kind of subtle differences matter quite a bit from a UI perspective. You could have a punch to zoom system where a pinching motion always resulted in fixed changes to zoom levels. You could describe both implementations as “pint to zoom” but one is a lot more user friendly than the other.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#295

Post by rtpg »

theamk wrote: post #234
bdowling wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some parts of them seem to definitely be a prior art The standard is to consider ALL of the elements together in the specific configuration. If this were not the case, then any invention that incorporated any conventional element (e.g., a lever) would be invalid.

It cannot be that simple, can it? Otherwise changing a single element (say "concave surface" to "sine-shaped surface", or "strap" to "clamp") would invalidate the patent.

I think the point is that the patent mentions all the characteristics that are essential to the underlying tech working, and that changing those would likely make the mechanism not work.

But also, judges and courts and all of this stuff exists because at the end of the day human beings look at the facts on the ground. There isn't some sort of magical turing machine that decides on exactitude here.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#296

Post by zmmmmm »

nmjohn wrote: post #286
zmmmmm wrote: post #271

Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess. Apple has been busy patenting obvious VR/AR features and I have no doubt we will see them attempting to aggressively exercise these in future years to shut down alternatives to Vision Pro in the future.

> I have no doubt we will see them attempting to aggressively exercise these in future years to shut down alternatives to Vision Pro in the future. Do you have examples where apple has aggressively used patents offensively like this?

the classic quote from Jobs comes to mind:

> "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this"

And they did (try), although by proxy through Samsung.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#297

Post by jojobas »

pembrook wrote: post #276
jojobas wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.

In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply. Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents. Virtually everything humans create or “disc…

>Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability.

Even though it's inevitable that someone will invest a lot of time to get us better TFT displays in form of IPS, it's very much favorable that he can reap some reward for it.

It's a bit of a gamble and is therefore supplanted by the trade secret and research grant systems, still it's a useful incentive to do cool stuff.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#298

Post by phendrenad2 »

I wonder if it's sometimes advantageous to lose a patent case. Maybe an unscrupulous company (not Apple) could intentionally lose a patent case, to help widen the moat between them and any would-be clones, because they can afford to pay the patent troll and clones cannot.
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