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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.
So do you suppose that these internal lights will actually be lasers like the ones found in laser pointers? how else would you be able to make the lights turn into dots or stripes?
No. See here.
Now, I'm not sure how a so-called "interactive illumination" is much different than LEDs you see on the mondo-cool multiprocessor boxes, but the patent does describe something a bit different than the run-of-the-mill case mod.
The article says the case would be illuminated by R, G and B colored lights, so it could be any color of the spectrum. Very cool! Prior art? Not quite so sure.
I think it is more along the lines of "I'm feeling red today."
Click, click click... "Ahh, red illuminated case."
Blue? Click, click.
I like the idea.
http://www.fsckin.com/
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
The backlit keys on my aluminum Powerbook seem to fit this description.
And it's a damn good idea. I wonder how programmable this is? Maybe the next xscreensaver will have options for controlling the case lights...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Apple have some serious problems if a glowing case is a killer feature. I heard that their desktop PC market is starting to slide, and that really the smart thing to do would be to concentrate on consumer electronics, ie. iPod, but this is *ridiculous*
No matter how good the case looks, if the machine isn't up to spec, who will buy it? This whole thing just smacks of desperation.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
I must admit, the idea is cool... but I'm not sure if it constitutes a non-obvious idea and I'm sure the case modders must've done this already.
:)
It would be kinda cool for your windows machine to turn red when you get a virus or have the computer go blue when you get new email though.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Is it like this?
Surely there is a computer inside that controls that case!
)9TSS
Isn't a color CRT a prior art thing? It has RGB illumation devices and a illuminating surface and can be controlled by sofware..
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Funny, that's the first thing I thought of: how in the coming months we'll see new cheap/plastic PC cases with a glowing base. Then Apple will fire out the lawsuits against the manufactures, but eventually this will be the 'new look' just like the translucent colored plastic of the orginal iMac is reflected in my translucent blue paper shreader.
Give Apple props for putting out well designed (technically and asthetically) consumer devices. Now if they could just give me a low power g5 powerbook, while insisting that the Airport extreme chipset makers open source the drivers so we can get proper G support under Mac hardware in Linux. Until then, my G3 iBook is still tops!
CGB#$
free ipod and free gmail!
Obviousness of the patent is striking. I was in seventh grade I made (however, not invented) my first (and last) color music device, which, arguably is more complex than this hack, which implementation can be put into Reader's Excercises Section of 'Programming Serial Ports: 101'.
Hey, I already have a cool blue light tube in my modcase, I would suggest ThinkGeek start selling green and red ones:) Free advice guys, no strings attached (no responsibility for marketability either.)
I wonder if this means that Apple will implement the same glowing keys feature that is present in the 15" and 17" Powerbooks on their desktop models. That's a great feature for allowing the use of a computer in the dark. In this case, the whole computer can light up when the lights go down. Great for getting that "computer tan".
You're thinking in terms of software patents. You can have a hundred hardware patents that do similar things as long as the mechanical stuff is different.
So toyota can still make a new 4 cylinder engine and patent it, even though there are dozens of patented 4 cylinder engines.
Too bad they aren't as liberal with software.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Well, yeah. Water goes in, steam comes out, it's the submarine. That's obvious.
But how do you prevent the hot steam from raising the ambient temperature of the sub and killing everybody inside?
Through innovative cooling techniques that are not immediately obvious, that take a lot of thought, testing and research.
This is why patents are for SPECIFIC implementations. If Apple had just tried to patent coloured lights on cases, they'd have had no enforceable patent there. So they patented coloured lights, a system to get the light to the outside of the case, creating patterns, and software to control all this. Anybody who thinks a green neon tube is prior art for alternating coloured tiger stripes down the side of a case has a pretty imaginative definition of "non obvious."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
And as mentioned, this is a published application not an issued patent. I love that the Reg uses "finally" in describing the "granting" of the patent. A typical prosecution time is a couple years, not a couple months. Having a patent granted in 7 months would kick ass. But again, this is just an application.
And for those crying "prior art!" note that the application claims priority back to 2001. I dunno what case modders were doing three years ago, or if the glowing orb thing on thinkgeek was around, but it makes your prior art case harder (though still not that weak of course).
-truth
PS if everything is so obvious, why haven't you patented it? People here are like Nostradamus fans: everything is obvious (predictions are accurate) after the fact.
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Dell simply doesn't do very attractive things that stand out and make people go "ooooooh!"
Apple does, or at the very least does this much more frequently than Dell does.
Apple has the cool factor and are becoming very well known for making very cool/sleek hardware, so seeing a patent like this and what Apple could do with this is interesting. Hearing about it from Dell, who aren't known for any sort of cool factor in comparison to Apple, is not nearly as exciting.
I imagine a debate about how PC gaming lusers are the only target market for something so stupid would then ensue.
Right, the only difference there being that, oh, the lights I think you're referring to don't really serve any major purpose, but because this is Apple and the patent talks about software interaction, the lighting scheme would probably be more useful or used in some more intuitive manner (posters have already talked about having it change colors for CPU usage, iTunes plug-ins, etc). Working with Apple hardware and software for long enough tells me they'll do all of that plus have more useful ideas for it than most of us could think of. That's why it's cool.
Your comment is quite depressing. Like Apple, don't deify it.
Although the parent poster wasn't deifying Apple, I see nothing wrong about being excited by a potentially interesting technology coming from a company whose trackrecord has been outstanding in recent years in terms of innovation and practicality.
Just my opinion, anyhow.
Except the machine will be running Max OSX, and you'll never see the "Blue Screen of Death."
I wonder how programmable this is?
:)
Personally, I hope it's accessible via Applescript, and/or via a CLI command. There are a number of things I would like to use with this with involving AS: new IM? flash yellow! someone mentioned me in IRC? flash green! Somone's accessing my webserver? blue!
I'm excited
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Do hobbyists who don't share their work still count for prior art, though? /me INAL
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I wouldn't say that it is "compleatly obvious." Sure I've seen LED-illuminated cases, but cases that change color? and if you have, was it before 2002 (when the patent was filed for)?
If this simply involves project a few colours onto parts of the case, it might have short-term appeal.
But if it could project an image onto the case, it would be much more interesting! It could even project the screen contents onto the back of the case (Note to self: careful where you view that monkey porn!)
Either way.. it could potentially be useful. If you were a lab admin with a lot of Macs, you could have each set up to glow red when infected with a virus, blue if the network connection goes down etc.
about some of your ideas: the test question rate and web browsing ones have some privacy implications, and the boot up progress bar wouldn't work, because the controlling software wouldn't have loaded yet (similar to how the software brightness and volume buttons don't work until the OS loads)
My idea for this is to have it be a generalized system monitor; i.e. monitor everything (cpu load, network usage, number of programs, number of iChat buddies online, unread mail, etc) in different areas of the case. They could all blend in together, and look sort of like light reflecting off of water (or rather, an oil slick since it would be colorful)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz