It appears that the majority of people commenting haven't even read the article...
If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
71–80 of 138 posts
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#72Bell Labs and Xerox Parc. I wonder what percentage of the contemporary computing experience wasn't invented in either of those places.
The problem is, Apple made the unfinished parc products usable, and invented drag and drop. Here from page 4 of an article: http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...
What's that, Apple-Guy? A website billing itself as "Apple iPhone, iPad 2, iPod News, Celebrity Mac Users, and More" claims that Apple did all the real, important work? Wow!
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#73Ars is getting worse.
As is Hacker News apparently. It's a trollbait article that say nothing of merit or value. Frankly I'd've said the same were it a story about Android being a rip off of iOS. You 'haters' of whatever denomination are just ridiculous and it's about time you all grow the fuck up.
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#74The iPhone isn't even the first thing called an iPhone with a touchscreen that makes telephone calls and connects to the internet.
From 1997:
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.telecom/msg/f62a1ff...)
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM). Apple's innovation was the capaci…
> Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626383
http://files.myopera.com/Yorch/blog/p800.jpg
Palm smartphones were the minority (in terms of total number of models).
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#76> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. This article is heartily missing the point. Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing. Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and id…
Just to add to the list of previous art: The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.) Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.
Odd to see this comment get downvoted. Apple fanboism attempting to reassert the reality distortion field?
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#77The article goes a great length to mention other companies' and persons' accomplishments in the field, all the while completely ignoring Apple's research on it since the 80s.
They get to the point themselves:
Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts.
And then Android just imitated that precise sum of parts (full touchscreen, swipe gestures, on-screen keyboard, apps, desktop-class browser, accelerometer, great graphics...). Android looked nothing like it is today before the iPhone OS.
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#78> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. This article is heartily missing the point. Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing. Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and id…
> Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM). Apple's innovation was the capaci…
"Smartphones" of 10 years ago (or PDAs) only resembled anything like an iPhone if you consider that a MacBook resembles an 80's terminal.
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#79I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary. I think the real meat of the argument is "iPhone synthesized all those individual pieces into something coherent and incredible.". It's kind of like how the Macintosh and Lisa took the ideas from PARC, perfected them, and turned them i…
I think it's a bit "pushing it" by saying the iPhone was a "big" technological revolution for having synthesized a few technologies together. Deep down, every invention is to some level, an evolution over existing inventions. As many great inventors said throughout history "I can only see this far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants". But sometimes, to better see the whole picture, we need to take a step b…
Decent products matter.
Re: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, do we really want to support synthesis of other people's work as something that can be protected legally? Especially when most development nowadays is clicking cogs together anyways? This doesn't seem like a meme we should seek to perpetuate.
If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology…
So... imagine if the first company to synthesize a laptop got the eternal monopoly? Or the first company to synthesize a flatscreen?