The cynic in me, believes that Apple pulling them now is a marketing ploy ahead of Christmas. Waiting until actually needing to pull them would have not really impacted sales, but this way they get to generate demand right before the big giving day.
Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
341–350 of 510 posts
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Didn't the Microsoft surface table project that predated apple multitouch already show rotation?
The original Surface was unveiled a few months (May 30, 2007) after the iPhone (January 9, 2007). Not sure who implemented the idea first in the lab, but probably neither of them.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#343Earlier 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…
> with zero knowledge of the space...
While I don't think we should give courts and government-like agencies no scrutiny, I think I'm probably going to put greater weight on the ITC's decision than a random person on the internet who admits they have zero knowledge of the technology in question.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#344a 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…
It's worth to read the detailed case. Masimo is not a small company coming out of nowhere to capitalize from Apple, they're a decades-old medical equipment company. The case outlines how Apple met with them in 2013 to discuss collaboration. After that meeting, Apple apparently hired away several key-members of Masimo with knowledge about their non-invasive biometric monitoring tech, including their "Chief Medical Off…
Or maybe they are obvious, just that you don't start a product with all possible optimizations. You get the initial version out, then you iterate.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s so wild that a patent owner is allowed to refuse to sell a license to use the patented technology.
If I offer you $100 for an iPhone, should you be forced to sell to me at that price?
I don’t understand what relevance your question has, but of course not?
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that was the case Apple would have overturned this patent on the basis of prior art. I'm inclined to trust ITC on this one more than a random dude from the internet, even though he is not a toad.
Or, the system itself has become just stupid
Maybe so, but just because darling-child Apple is the one on the wrong end of a lawsuit, it doesn't mean there's no merit.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I wish Apple didn't do the rotate thing though. I never ever want to rotate the map, and I do it by mistake a lot. It's infuriating and useless.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The main problem is not that patents exist.
Especially in the distant past, there have been many patents that were really valuable and their inventors deserved to be rewarded.
The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily. Most patents contain in their claims only things that any competent professional could discover independently after a few hours of thinking about how to solve a problem.
Other claims are for methods that have been known for a long time, but they were not applied for various reasons, e.g. of cost or efficiency, to the applications described in the patent. Then some unrelated technological progress happened, which may not be mentioned at all in the patent, which suddenly enabled the extension of the application domain of the old method, and then someone quickly filed a patent for the new combination of old methods.
Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem, even if most of them are not practical at present and the inventor would not be able to demonstrate any functional implementation, but they are inserted in the patent claims for the case that someone will discover in the future a suitable technology, when it will become possible to claim that it infringes the patent.
Many patents are just reformulations of much older patents, from decades ago, perhaps filed in other countries, but they use such an obfuscated language that it is difficult to determine that in fact the different patents claim the same things.
I have read many patents, but the most recent they are, the less likely it is to find in them anything that I consider innovative or that would justify in any way to consider the patent as valid.
Nevertheless, few individuals or companies would be able to bear the expenses and risks of trying to invalidate patents, so there are many examples when inferior technologies have been used for decades in order to circumvent bogus patents.
Moreover, the days when most patent owners used the patents as a direct source of revenue are long in the past. Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices. Most use the patents only as a means to prevent competition.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Litigation_involving_Apple_Inc > March 2010 Apple vs HTC: Apple's suit alleged 20 separate patent infringements relating to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. Steve Jobs exclaimed "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it" The ITC rejected all but one of Apple's claims > July 2008 Apple Inc. vs Psysta…
So the most recent one involving patents is at least 12 years old, the one with Corelium is about copyright of their OS and not patents. So you proved the point that since Jobs tome, they have not use their patents offensively.
Way to move the goalposts.
I personally don't care when it happens. Big companies that use patents offensively against smaller competitors suck, full stop.
And in Apple's case, every other company is smaller, by definition.
Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but on the other hand as someone with a pretty recent Apple Watch on my wrist I am very happy whenever Apple suffers a loss and loses money.
Apple products are so much better than the competition that even their haters buy them.
Garmin watches are still substantially better, imo.