Apple Patents Tablet Mac (with Photos)

jkheit writes "I wrote a quick news item over at the Mac Observer that might be of interest. Apple patents a tablet Mac. The new photos confirm that this device is a touch-screen Apple tablet. You can see it here."

Comments

Wait!

[RatBastard]

My iBook isn't going to happy when she sees that come home with me. :(

Its nice...

[Upaut]

It looks, should they make it, to be smaller and lighter than a "current" tablet PC. Kinda like an oversized PDA. Like a Newton and a Powerbook got freeky in the back room...

Its so pure, I think I'm going to cry...

Seriously though, I am hoping to see something like this in the near future. Hopefully it will be 'announced' in the next Macworld Boston. Inkwell is such a nice pice of software, it would be great to see it being used in a tablet.

Correction. Illustrations not photos.

[jkheit]

Sorry about the misleading title. (A case of fingers before brain) There are illustrations from the patent, not photos. (Perhaps this can be corrected). Anyway, my apologies on that.

Don't Get Too Excited

[Cr0w T. Trollbot]

Apple patents a lot of things which never see the light of day. It may be that their tablet implamentation has a few unique features they want to patent, but they have no real intention of bringing a TabletMac to market anytime soon. Of course, that could change if they think market conditions warrent...

Though the pictures don't indicate this, I wonder if they could also be filling in a few final functional gaps to turn the iPod into a full-blown PDA? Tantalizing as that might be, it's probably unlikely as well, seeing as how they're making bigger margins on the iPod Photo than PDA manufacturers are making on their product...

Crow T. Trollbot

Re:Patent?

[TheHonestTruth]

It's a DESIGN patent, not a utility patent. They only have ruights to someone using that design specifically. Design patents are very easy to, pardon the pun, design around. You just have to make some ornamental change. IANADesign Patent Lawyer, so I don't know the legal standard for getting around a design patent, but from what I understand, they are more used in the clothing, accessory, and toy markets to prevent counterfeitting where looks are as improtant as function.

-truth

Re:Photos???? Comment + mirror

[Ty]

Ummm the mp3 market used to be a niche market. Who has about an 80% market share now?

They are, check Tiger, it has built in functions

[nickroethemeier]

I noticed that in Apple Quartz Composer, there is mention of a TABLET pen location. I tried this with my Wacom Graphire, and no luck. At this point, I figured that apple must be making new drivers for existing tablets. Well, I guess it's an APPLE BRAND TABLET PC!!! Whoohoo!.

Re:Patent?

[Aqua OS X]

"Like no one has ever thought of making a tablet before? There has to be more to this if it is true."

Ya, but this is exactly what people said when Apple made the iPod.
Apple likes to swoop on good ideas that have been poorly implemented in the past. MP3 players, jukebox software, online music stores, video chat, etc etc. None of this stuff was new, but Apple found a way to make it more accessible and desirable.

it will work this time

[fermion]

Apple has some experience in this. The newton was the tablet PC that technology would allow. It was a full powered computer, with expandability and full network connections. I remember transfering files over my ethernet. I did not have to connect my Newton to my computer, only my network.

What killed the Newton was syncronization. All the stuff I wrote on the newton was difficult to transfer to the Mac. All my contacts on the Mac was difficult to reliably syncronize to the newton. Don't tell me how to do it. I have used a newton from the day it came out until they day they kiled it. I have all the tools, cards, utilities, whatever. I still ahve 2000 sitting in it's leather case in my house.

So, as soon as palm V came out, small, sync, everything, I was all over it. It was could not be a writing machine, but I could live with that. My Newton became more trouble than it was worth.

But Apple now has sync, at least for what can fit on the .Mac drive. It does not sync macs, and I have found nothing that will do so quickly over 802.11b, but you can do calendars, contacts, mail, and good number of documents, which is has made my life so much easier.

So, this tablet PC, which will have bluetooth and airport, can do what the newton never could. Be an effective remote terminal. You can carry it around for an hour or a day, and, within a few minutes, all relevent changes can be transfered. You can take it to the coffee house, sync to .Mac, and by the time you get back home, your big machine can be updated.

Am I sorely afraid I will buy this thing. Yes. I don't really know what I would use it for, which is the rub. If it is like an iTablet, consumer priced, it would be fun to have. If it was PowerTablet, the investment would be difficult.

Patent RSS Feeds

[stikij]

• Apple - RSS
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• Google - (RSS)
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• IBM - (RSS)

Courtesy of PatentMojo.com

Prior art?

[Locke2005]

Doesn't this violate the Etch-a-Sketch design patent?

Using Tiger

[CypherXero]

Tiger (10.4) has a built-in feature that allows you to rotate the screen.

Go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled "Rotate". Select it and you will see your screen rotate.

Re:Using Tiger

[ljaguar]

it screws up the subpixel rendering though. because subpixel rendering (LCD anti-aliasing) depends on horizontal layout of red/green/blue pixels. he anti-aliasing of the font expects the red/green/blue pixel to be aligned in a certain way so draws the font in a certain way. This works fine when it's really aligned that way as expected. But if the screen is rotated 90 degrees, the algorithm screws up.

I tried it. Other people are freaking out because they can't figure out how to revert the screen... You just restart the system preference panel and do it again. I did it and got it back fine.

But like I said, the subpixel rendering problem is there.

Don't jump to any conclusions

[As Seen On TV]

All I have to say about this is: 20030076303.

Re:Don't jump to any conclusions

[NickV]

Yea... I see what you're saying. It seems WAAAAY to obvious (and un-Apple like) to just give something that big away in a patent without obfuscating it to hell and back (and a picture of a guy using a tablet is pretty much the opposite of obfusication.)

That patent you refer to was clearly for the iPod clickwheel, but by phrasing all the language and diagrams as a "mouse" with a "rotary dial" you guys totally hid the real nature of the patent until it was released. Mind you, after the iPod mini's release it was pretty obvious that the patent applied to that item.

So what you're saying is the patent is for something unrelated to a tablet... something that , once it comes out, will obviously fit that patent.

You know what I think it is (based on your hints and other things I've read.) A remote for the Airport Express Video (the one with an integrated hardware h.263 encoder and digital video outputs for a TV) that gives you a mini iTunes-y type interface to select tv shows/episodes you bought.

Yea... that sounds like it! It'd be very cool! (and surprising for a company run by a man who I've read hates the TV.)

Um, no.

[MadMacSkillz]

Words per minute I can type: about 80 Words per minute I can handwrite: about 15 Why do I need a tablet again?

Re:Um, no.

[LionKimbro]

If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.

When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.

Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.

But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.

So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.

Re:Photos???? Comment + mirror

[JHromadka]

This is obviously the PowerBook G5. Not shown is the processor, which will be incorporated into the power supply. :)

Re:Patent?

[themoodykid]

I heard there was some guy who wrote a top ten list of his favourite activities on a pair of tablets. That's gotta be prior art!

Re:Aren't tablets expensive enough?

[MBCook]

Well, tablets don't sell to well from what I've heard. If they really took off (and Apple knows how to make break-away products) the cost wouldn't be so bad. Tablets already sell at a premium (IIRC), so the "Apple Tax" may be the same so the costs would be about equal.

Also, while Apple only has like 4% of the PC market, they have a MUCH bigger chunk of the laptop market.

But let's face it. If Apple wants to release a niche product at a premium, the are free too. If it stays niche, then no problem. If the market explodes, it would get cheaper (economies of scale and all that).

Re:Patent?

[mesach]

With the speed of the patent office being what it is, maybe this is a patent for the Newton, finally being granted.

Re:Here is what I think

[totoanihilation]

If Apple turned the 12" PB or iBook into a table, that would rock.

They already have. They call it a 17" PowerBook.

Re:Photos???? Comment + mirror

[dave1212]

no, the mp3 player market faltered for a while before Apple picked up the slack.

The tablet market has faltered for a while too, let's see what comes of it.

Re:They are, check Tiger, it has built in function

[drdink]

From Quartz Composer:

Tablet This patch returns the current state of the tablet pointing device. The pen position is expressed in units in the Quartz Composer coordinates system. The pen tilt on the X and Y axes is normalized to the [-1.0,1.0] range and the pen pressure is normalized to the [0,1] range. Note that this patch does not read the tablet state directly but is dependent on the proper information being passed to the composition. This information may not always be available, depending on the environment in which Quartz Composer is running.

From the ADC Reference Library:

A tablet with a stylus is an input device that generates more accurate and detailed data than does a mouse. It enables a user to draw, write, or make selections on a touch-sensitive surface (the tablet); an application can then capture and process those movements, reflecting them in its user interface. The tablet is generally a USB device connected to a computer system and the stylus is a wireless transducer. The stylus actually can be any pointing device, such as a pen, an airbrush, or even a puck. In addition to the stylus location at any given moment, tablet devices can report many other pieces of data, such as the tilt of a pen, the rotation of a puck, and the pressure applied to the stylus. Pressure is particularly important because, with just this small piece of data, a user can tell an application to vary the thickness of a line being drawn, or its opacity, or its color. Some stylus devices also have buttons that can furnish an application with additional information. Mac OS X supports tablet devices from several manufacturers. Some of these tablets can respond to multiple pointing devices on their surfaces at the same time.

Now, the output parameters that the Tablet patch provides in Quartz Composer are:

• X
• Y
• Tilt X
• Tilt Y
• Pressure
• Tip Button
• Lower Button
• Upper Button

Also worth noting from the ADC Library documentation (for Cocoa) above:

Important: Tablet events are available in Mac OS X v10.4 and later versions of the operating system.

On a similar note, Quartz Composer showed up in Mac OS X 10.4 as well. Note the pictures in the ADC document as well. They depict a tablet connected to an iMac or Apple display. It seems to me that none of this is talking about a tablet PC. If it is, they sure went through a great deal to hide it.

Re:billions?

[cosmic_0x526179]

In Steve Jobs' dreams perhaps. There were almost 700 million cell phones sold last year and an estimated 800-900 million this year.

The grandparent post is more correct than you give it credit for. A cellphone is used for how many minutes per hour on average... maybe 5 ? An average iPod owner probably exceeds 30 mins per hour average usage. So, if you multiply the number of iPods sold by the visibility factor the iPod is becoming ubiquitous.

Re:Photos???? Comment + mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops! Research please!

Apple Computer is a huge computer manufacturer. In fact, they are the 5th biggest in terms of recent US sales figures, and sales are increasing more rapidly than any other manufacturer. [Source: IDC, 4Q2004 report]

So even though Apple only holds 3.8% of the market:

1. Dell @ 17% of market
2. HP, @ 16% of market
3. IBM, @ 5% of market
4. Gateway, @ 4% of market
5. Apple @ 3.8% of market

And there you have it. They may be small compared to Microsoft's 95% OS penetration, but they are large in terms of being a product manufacturer, neatly falling in the "2nd tier by volume" along with IBM and Gateway.

Re:Patent?

[dr.badass]

That is why we have trademarks.

No, actually, it isn't. A trademark is entirely different. For example, a trademark prevents someone from putting your logo on their product, whether it looks like your product or not. A design patent prevents someone from copying the design of your product, no matter what logo they put on it.

It is a dangerous precedent for design elements to be patentable.

Except it isn't a precedent at all -- design patents aren't a recent thing. They were incorporated into patent law in 1842. It seems like they are among the least dangerous parts of current patent law.

Re:The touchscreen is different from tablets

[HishamMuhammad]

How much longer do you think we'll all be pressing a seperate button for every single letter in every word we want to express? I say rot in hell qwerty - apple give me a blue tooth headset and some new software.

I assume you're not a programmer, huh?

"Uh... if, open parentheses, current address... I mean, all run together with a lower-case c and upper-case a... equals equals null, all uppercase... close parentheses..."