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Apple Patents 'Chameleon' Computer Case
Dave B writes "The Register
has been fishing at the patent office again and found that Apple has a new patent for "a computing device [which] includes a housing having an illuminable portion. The computing device also includes a light device disposed inside the housing. The light device is configured to illuminate the illuminable portion".
While this gives us the exciting prospect of an iMac that is all five fruit flavors at once surely the original iMac with its glowing power button, or indeed a-thousand-and-one other electronic gizmos represent prior art?" Update a couple of users noticed this Slashdot Story from 2002 which looks familiar.
A "glowing power button" does not a "housing having an illuminable portion" make. That is a status indicator. A button, a light serving a unique and specific purpose is not prior art.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The funny thing is that this actually IS news. But only because it is Apple. I for one am dying to see what the new iMac will look like. Even people who never plan to buy an Apple product are, at the very least, interested. However, if DELL had filed this patented then no one would really care. That says something about the importance of good design in the computer industry.
patents protect a specific implementation. you can't patent the idea of putting a light in a box, you patent how you do it.
What about a case that changes colour with system load - "oops, the server has gone a funny lava-red color - we'd better leave the room!"
Dave
Peecee world/user response:
...
1) Ridicule
2) Ripoff
OS X
iMac
iPod
You mean, changeable colors on your case, like a Wurlitzer Jukebox from 1934?
Our next major economic dowfall will be Intellectual Property related. The US consumer base will become fed up with exclusives, restrictions and pay-per-exhibit models of content & products. We will see people forming newsworthy general boycotts of things. Only then will legislation begin to really take notice of consumer fancy.
Well, considering that Mac sales are up 14%, I hardly call that a 'slide', but I'll give you that one because I'm just feeling nice. In any case:
This is unlikely to be the killer feature of the new iMac - it's not as if Apple's released a massive press release about it - but is another example of how Apple value new and innovative design. Consider the previous two designs of the iMac - the first, the all-in-one CRT model, sold well because of its case. Never mind the specs inside (which weren't top of the range, admittedly, but were and still are sufficient), it sold like hot cakes because of the case.
Same with the 'new'-style flat-panel iMac - after the adverts started showing, all that people seemed to be talking about the next day was that strange, yet undeniably cool lamp-shaped device.
Apple's current range of machines is all very desirable, and I'm sure the new iMac (which WILL contain a G5 - high enough spec?) will be just as, if not more so. But even if it weren't, you could guarentee that people would buy it if it looked good.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I already have a housing with an illuminatable region which can display patterns of colours under software control, and it is not any fancy thing-geek harware either. I call it a *monitor*.
The only way this patent differs is that the housing contains the computing device. A bit like an iMac in fact.
Plus I'm sure there are some case modders out there who have red, green and blue (and UV!) lights in their case controlled by software.
Apple is a design leader, and there's a portion of the PC hardware industry that watches Apple designs and makes knock-offs on the PC side.
The question with patents is always: if this patent were not granted, would companies still have the incentive to innovate in this area with the same intensity? To the extent that this patent is original and non-obvious, I think the answer here is that the patent is justified. Apple has proven that they can innovate in this area, and they should be rewarded for this.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Guess one can never get enough of "waah! but what if someone had patented sex!" kind of fallacies on /. Was starting to get withdrawal syndromes after through a whole weekend without reading one ;)
But OK, let's play that game. Let's talk about paintings:
1. They'd more likely have to patent a device or method to make those paintings. So someone might have got a patent on something new like flinging colours at the canvas, but then someone else might just as well get the same result (or close enough) by using the old methods (using a brush). For which plenty of prior art existed.
(Just as this patent doesn't prevent you from having a lit case by other means than what Apple patented. You can still have your old cathodes or LED fans.)
2. For that matter, it might have stimulated someone to try more new stuff. So we might have 3-4 times more styles in the same period. Which is the whole purpose of patents: to stimulate researching _and_ publishing your research.
(And you could say the same about the situation at hand. We've had _years_ of noone even trying something more original than yet another LED fan or cathode behind acrylic window. By now every kiddie has one of those. So if it takes patents to get out of that loop and have a more original case, seems to me like a benefit of patents.)
3. Patents are not for ever. Copyrights amd trademarks do get extended. Patents expire no matter what.
I.e., if you talk about a 100 years interval, you may notice how the 20 years covered by a patent is only a fifth of it. I.e., combined with the previous point, we'd probably have a helluva lot more art choices after 100 years.
4. Patents encourage publishing your results, as opposed to keeping everything super-secret. Art is a bad example there. But there are a ton of technological processes that one could have kept secret. Or which _are_ being kept secret. Patents encourage companies to share this information with the rest of the world instead.
5. Patents get licensed all the time. I'm sure that if someone absolutely needed to do something impressionistic before the patent expired, they could have negotiated a license.
(And in this case, if IBM or MS absolutely needed to do their own lit cases, I'm sure they can persuade Apple.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nobody sees where this is going, do you?
In the late 90's a company named "Color Kinetics" was granted a patent on making arbitrary colors by mixing R, G, and B sources. Since then they've gone around driving other companies out of the business.
Isn't one of the disqualifiers for a patent being awarded when an idea is too obvious?
I think patents should REALLY be re-examined for some of this. (I am sure people agree on that point) The invention of the wheel is a great and patentable idea. I don't think it's great and patentable to put a wheel on anything to make it mobile!
Making a scheme of colored lights to create an effect or mood is patentable. But putting lights on a case should not be. It's just taking existing stuff and using it. It's not a new technology. It's the application of existing technology. I don't think that should be patentable.
Yes, I realize what I am saying qould probably disqualigy about 80% of all the most recent patents. Damnit! It should! Software patents most of all should be disqualified for that reason. There just aren't all that many pentable software ideas out there.
Of COURSE these are just my opinions and I wish I could be a patent decision-making guy. But just like other things (like the katie.com thing) voicing opinions on Slashdot can make a difference. People *ARE* reading.
Patent issues aside, I like the sound of this feature. Xserves are already pretty nice for 'admin by eye', but this sort of design takes that to a new level.
I've got new mail. How do I know? The Mac's pulsating yellow. Device 3 on that RAID's getting sick - it's turned a nasty shade of puce. We need to tweak our load-balancing: that server's green, but that one's red.
Shit. They've all gone red. Start blocking links from slashdot.
How the hell did you get from "Apple patents illuminated case" to "Apple's marketing and engineering strategy revolves entirely around illuminated cases"? One of Apple's engineers had a good idea and they want to be able to use it in future products without having it immediately ripped off like so many other things in the past.
Also, Apple isn't going to give up on the desktop anytime soon. The iPod may beat it in growth and units sold, but computers still provide far more revenue in absolute terms.
last time I checked, my VW GTi is a computing device and has tons of internal LEDs illuminating portions of it's shell (red and blue LED dashboard, green turn signals)
I guess VW just trumped the patent with prior art, and probably 3-4 other car makers
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Well, "a device that makes you loads of money" is a pretty obvious idea too, the actual implementation is the kicker. And if case modders had done it, they would have boasted about it, and there would be dozens of imitations.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
There is a difference between applying for a patent and being awarded a patent. (Even though it doesn't always look that way any more)
Yeah, because the iMac has always had the best hardware available in it.
Did I mention that many of the statistical people that monitor such things have said it (the iMac) is the best selling computer of all time? Perhaps style matters more than how many billion times per second it can process a NOP while you are reading Slashdot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The idea of a mood ring isn't too far off from the actual implementation. Heat sensitive liquid crystals would react to your body heat and change color (and sometimes pattern in some rings). They'd say various colors equated to different moods e.g. green = normal body temp = calm, yellow = hot = stressed, red = very hot = horny.
There are many ways color could be put to use.
In a computer lab situation, all students are taking a quiz. The color reflects the student's "questions per second" rate of progress through the quiz. Blue = Quick Pace, Green = Average Pace, Red = Slow Pace. (or any sort of gradients between these). Blue might be indicative of a really sharp student or one who's cheating. Red might indicate a dumb student or one held up by technical problem.
Again in a school lab, but where the students are given free research time to roam the web. The case may show green for sites on an approved "white list", some form of amber on an off-site list based on a computed content rating, a red color for black listed sites or ones with highly offensive content rating.
A boot up progress bar? As the machine starts up the colors fill the neutral body color from grey to blue from bottom to top and the whole case seems like it's being filled with water as it indicates where it is in the boot process. (Aqua?)
A mode (initiated from the server) that would turn all the machines cases to indicate 802.11 signal strength for a period of 10 seconds. Allowing you to adjust the base station's antenna or position to give good signal strength to everyone in the room.
An accessibility feature for deaf users (or an option for computers in mute) to strobe to the would-be sound strength being generated by the computer with color indicative of volume. While you won't be able to make out the content of what's being said, you could distinguish between a system beep when played over the sound of your game of risk. All without interfering with the real screen's content area.
Any other thoughts?
Now everyone can have a laptop that outwardly reflects the level of threat from terrorists - possibly deterring future attacks!
Slashdot Rule #2:
Never step back and use common sense.
Microsoft is a company that uses its monopoly to bully around competition and stifle competition. They've given us buggy software, a shitty OS, and bloatware.
Apple is a bit of an underdog that has brought us OS X, the iPod, the iTMS, etc.
Although Apple has done some things in the past that are pretty ruthless, they still don't compare to the shit that MS has done, and will do again.
So yes, in comparison to the Goliath that is MS, Apple is a good company that produces innovative and sleek products. If Apple's recent trackrecord is any indication, announcements like this GENERALLY mean that there's something cool on the way, not "well, this patent is going to be used to fuck the user or competition."
Moreover, this isn't a silly software patent. It's hardware. It's a physical thing, a real invention. It's actual lights inside the case.
Actually, this *is* a silly patent. It's simply lights being controlled by someone clicking an button and reading a pref file, and changing the colour of the lights based on the contents therein. Sure, it hasn't been done before, but why is this patent worthy? Should there be a patent for *every piece of hardware ever created*, and for *every possible action that can be performed on that hardware*? Hardly.
Remember kids, not *everything* needs to be patented. Gee whiz, that sure is nifty, but why do we have to slap 20+ years of protection (read: prohibition) on it?
If Apple released a G5 iMac that had this feature and an upgradable video card and one PCI slot I would buy it in a heartbeat.
While Apples all in ones have made them a bundle of cash they need to look forward and offer at least some upgrade potential to the machines. At least an upgrade to the video card and one PCI slot for expansion. Even with the cool color changing feature I would not buy another Mac that could not have the video card updated and at least one PCI slot.
Along the way, someone at Apple came up with this. They patented it, because it was their original idea. The patent application was recorded and posted on Slashdot, because some reader was interested.
So explain to me again your theory about desperation?
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OK, here you go: ABXZone
He doesn't explain how he did it but there's various pictures and a screenshot at the end of the thread of the software integrated into MBM.
That is COMPLETELY different than the patent. RTFA. He has software programmable external lighting. Red and Blue. Apple has patented internal Red, Green, and Blue lighting coupled with some sort translucent material that will change the color of the case.