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Wozniak On the Samsung Patent Verdict
dgharmon writes "'I hate it,' Wozniak told Bloomberg in Shanghai today, referring to the patent battle. He thinks the ruling will be overruled. Samsung will of course appeal, and this case will go back and forth for months still, but Wozniak just wishes everyone could get along. 'I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies,' he said."
That would be amazing.
Apple STARTED this patent war. If they hadn't started aggressively going after the other major Smartphone makers, everyone would still be rolling along quietly.
"...and, you know, world peace would be great. Somebody should do that."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I suspect that nearly everyone except the lawyers and leadership wish we could get along. When the patent system was envisioned a long time ago, progress didn't happen nearly as quickly, consumerism wasn't so rampant (you didn't buy a new ANYTHING every two years except maybe a toothbrush), and the manufacturing cycle was MUCH longer than it is today.
I consider the lawyers of these tech companies (Apple, Samsung, Oracle, etc) to be exploiting 'bugs' in the patent system, and I suspect that most others do as well. The patent system needs a hotfix, and there's no political pressure to do so.
Everyone has been copying from everyone else in this industry for decades, including Apple itself. Now that they're the king of the hill, they want to change the rules. Too bad for them, this kind of crap means that every other player will now proceed to nuke them with everything at their disposal - and rightly so. /me is eagerly waiting for a lawsuit over LTE in iPhone 5 from Samsung...
Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.
Er, its not the "decision of California".
First, because its not "of California", as it is in a U.S. federal court that happens to be located in California.
But mostly because its not even (yet, and quite possibly ever) even a decision in that court. Its the jury verdict which is still the subject of several post-verdict motions before the court finally (not considering appeals) decides on a judgement in the case.
"For anything non-trivial, it is simply illegal to develop software." Companies are getting away with patenting things that are trivial and obvious, for almost any piece of software, you're tripping over dozens of patents. If we were to enforce the letter of the law, developing software is illegal.
God spoke to me
It is truly sad that a voice of reason like Woz is so rare in "business" anymore.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs 1994
Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.
I hate Apple with a passion but you're just wrong. The F700 came out just slightly after the iPhone. Obviously they both had to be in development around the same time but Apple was in fact first.
The myth posted above has be debunked many times, just use a little Google-fu and you will see.
If you think the patents were for a rectangle with rounded corners then you know very little about it.
The original iPhone was announced on Jan 2007.
The Samsung F700 was announced on Feb 2007 (a month after Steve Job's demonstration) during the 3GSM World Congress, and released on November 2007.
The Samsung F700 may have had rounded corners, but it was substantially thicker and had a sliding keyboard. The UI running on their Croix OS did not resemble the iPhone at all. When the F700 was announced it was immediately compared to the newly announced iPhone by the press.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Nope, Samsung filed a patent on the design of the F700 shortly before the iPhone was announced. It wasn't released until Nov. 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700
Shows how much you know.
If it were just Samsung getting a little sloppy about Apple's design patents, you'd have a point. But the motivation for this war is the belief that Android itself is one big ripoff of iOS and needs to die. If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.
You say there are alternatives? These are a few small time platforms that manage to stay outside Apple's claimed IP They will always be too nonstandard to attract significant user or developer mindshare.
I don't know why this is modded up to 5 when it's verifiably false. Their demos were a month or so apart, with F700 coming a bit later, and LG Prada with similar design came out a few months before them both. If anything, it just shows that market was coming to this already.
Anyways, I find Apple fanboys' claims about "blatant copying" rather silly, considering courts have mostly denied Apple's claims about copying (up to telling Apple to apologize in UK's case) and most surviving claims are utility patents related, though even those didn't fare as well as Apple hoped.
So yeah, it seems "infringing on a software patent" == "blatantly copying" in their lingo.
"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I knew Woz about 25-30 years ago when I worked as a systems engineering consultant in the Silicon Valley. He always impressed me as an engineer who was more focused on creating wild and new stuff, vs. Jobs who wanted to rule the world... :-) Well, Jobs ruled the world for awhile, but the Woz is still kicking ass and taking names!
One Steve made a name for himself by opening up computers. His idea that a desktop computer should be a big open platform that anybody can plug into dominates computer design to this very day, and had a lot to do with the explosive growth of computing.
The other Steve wanted to close up smartphones. Come to think of it, he took a control-freak attitude toward every product he ever launched. Ironic, really.
Must we go though this every time?
The F700 was announced in Feburary 2007 at Mobile World Congress, after the iPhone was announced in January at MacWorld. It also relied on a slide-out keyboard, so in usage they are not very similar at all. And the appearance of the UI is very different, it doesn't have the design features which were the subject of this lawsuit.
Show's how little you know
You need to consider each patent separately. The UI with four icons has nothing to do with the patent on the physical design. Nor does the four icon layout have anything to do with the slide to unlock patent.
I have no opinion on the design patent question beyond it just seems silly to my non-designer mind. As an actual software developer I do take issue with the software patents and as a member of the human race I take issue with the concept of "owning" ideas in general.
But what really gets me is the litigation apologists who selectively treat these patents as either severable or not depending on the direction the wind is blowing in order to rationalize the desertification the intellectual commons.
Having the big companies exchanging patents just means the big players divide up the monopoly between them whilst suing the start ups out of existence.
I prefer this version
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
While there are clearly other "iPhone-like" phones released before the iPhone, the Samsung F700 wasn't it. All that Wikipedia notes is that Samsung was ISSUED a design patent for the phone before Steve Jobs made his iPhone product announcement.
The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700) cites a Businessweek article (http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/16106-apple-s-war-on-android) that points to a convergence in the evolution of cellphone designs.
"Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with 'virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims' to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was 'naturally evolving' in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is 'obvious' to an 'ordinary observer' at the time of its invention, it doesn't deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play."
I'm not sure but perhaps Apple's only real innovation is in being the first (?) to eliminate the hardware keyboard completely. If I'm not mistaken all the previous "iPhone-like" designs had some sort of hidden/slide-out keyboard. Who knows, maybe Apples does have a patent for crippling hardware to make it look and feel "cool".
Please go and read the USPTO design patent D504889 (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=D504,889.PN.&OS=PN/D504,889&RS=PN/D504,889) and then come back to us. That particular patent is **exactly** a rectangle with rounded corners.
There may have been other patents in play, but that one is essentially what people complain about when the discuss this issue.
I, for one, despise design patents. The whole point of patents were to be novel (ie, new), non-obvious (to those versed in the art), and **useful** - that's the three-prong test for a valid invention. Design patents are only allowed on non-functional (hence non-useful) stuff and have therefore mangled the entire inventive process.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - PICASSO
See, you can't even attribute the quote right.
And that's why you don't understand what it means. It doesn't mean LITERALLY steal. It means you find something you love, and understand it totally... then you re-make it into something that is like it was but is wholly yours.
It's a hard concept to explain without more understanding of art and creativity... this book will help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If they were "exact copies" why are verdicts from all over the world centered on software patents like slide to unlock and multitouch gestures, not design patents? Why's Apple suing Samsung for Galaxy SIII when it was widely claimed to be "phone designed by lawyers" as to avoid infringements?
Sorry, but "Apple only has a bone with Samsung because they make exact copies" don't really work, considering those verdicts, SIII lawsuit and preceding lawsuits with other major Android manufacturers.
So Samsung's buddy Google warned Samsung to put some different clothes on, and that makes what Apple did OK. Gotcha.
Get it right.
It's Apple //e.
The ][ was for the Apple ][ and ][+.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Woz always seems to be sensible, realistic and honest. Make you wonder how S. Wozniak got mixed up with the likes of S. Jobs in the first place.
-Lod
I love Steve Woz. He is a really cool guy and is really the original brains behind Apple. Apple may have skyrocketed into fame because of Steve Jobs' marketing but its Woz that made Apple who they are today. The man is a old fashioned hacker, which is something that is missing from today's computer hardware and software companies. The computer enthusiasts have been replaced by the greedy business men in the computer world and its really sad.
Apple's '677 patent is exactly about a rectangle with rounded corners.
Read it yourself:
http://www.google.com/patents/USD618677
Fight mega corp! Buy from big corp!
Nokia and Microsoft license agreements with Apple seem pretty fair: Apple agrees to license their patents if their competitors agree not to clone their devices or interfaces. Nokia has used the rubberbanding patent and others, and are not at issue as long as their designs are reasonably different from Apple's. The goal is clear: make your device immediately identifiable. The patent decision itself is a proxy for this much broader issue.
Now... Android. Should it be allowed to live if it was just an unispired copy of iOS? (No, I don't think it was.) The answer at this point is yes... although I can see where Apple would think they have some rights to be paid for every Android device sold, much like MS has. Hopefully that will help offset some of Apple's own licensing costs for FRAND patents.
Woz is so cool. If only he were Apple's CEO, we wouldn't be having all these lawsuits, and we'd probably have some REAL innovation from Apple (not catching up to making a 4" screen and including LTE). C'mon, smartphone makers, where's that long-lasting battery power (perhaps with a solar panel on the back to boot)? Where's that built-in holographic projector (a la R2-D2)? Think how useful that would be in the corporate world! (Not to mention gaming!)
Yeah, he stole that quote from Picasso
Apple and their fan base are the biggest bunch of crybabies I've ever witnessed.
Woz, on the other hand, continues to gain respect. A good man.
"The best lube is your own spit" - Jenna Jameson
It takes much longer than a month to develop a phone. The CeBit 2006 video in that article shows a preproduction F700 with substantially the same hardware as the final version.
Woz says:
I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies
Then what why would we need patents, except for preventing newcomers to enter the market? Again, this is something that hinder innovation. Once you realize patent prevent innovation in a given field, why not stand against them
Sure, but then you can make many pies. Billions and billions of pies.
That may actually suggest that Apple and Samsung both copied a third party.
Which implies prior art that should in fact have completely prevented the patents in question from being issued in the first place.
The whole thing about federal courts giving the USPTO higher deference on patent validity when the USPTO itself rubber stamps everything and lets the courts sort it out.
So what if Samsung copied. Yes, if they did, it would be illegal, but that just means they should suffer a reasonable penalty.
Do you really think the amount Samsung had to pay Apple was reasonable?
First you have to prove that Samsung's copying of Apple products benefited Samsung. Sure you can point to Samsung's sales, but if you interview people who bought their products, none would tell you it was because of the iphone similarity.
I bought my galaxy S DESPITE the similarity, not because of it. I was happy enough with the phone that I was prepared to suffer the embarrassment of owning a phone that looked like an iphone (but clearly bigger).
Do you really think all those samsung phone owners were happy every time someone asked "is that an iphone?".
Personally I don't know and don't care if Samsung copied Apple. In my view there is no way that is worth 1 billion dollars. That is basically saying that Samsung contributed nothing to their own phone, or that people only bought it because of (Apple's) design. It isn't just wrong, it is ridiculous.
Do you think Apple is being honest about all this?
They are trying to include the Galaxy S3 now - a phone that looks nothing like any iphone ever made. And yet they are trying to make similar 'copying' claims about it.
IMO the original galaxy S1 and maybe the galaxy tab 10.1 are the only devices Apple actually has any shred of a valid claim against. But they are clearly not suing samsung for the reasons they state.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
People who think you just need to get out of tech.
Go be a lawyer somewhere. Or go into marketing.
Apple lost the desktop war because they refused to play and collaborate with others. They wanted the whole deal for themselves.
A lot of us grudgingly use Windows on the desktop, but at least we have a huge variety of choices of hardware to run on it. If Apple had won we'd all still be using beige Macs.
If Apple Can Copy Braun Then Why Can't Samsung Copy Apple?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Even more than that, Samsung had filed for design patents on the f700 before the iPhone was demoed.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Nice slippery comment there, "I hate but". Really who gives a crap. Reality is Apple had a fad product it knew it, it knew it was eventually doomed to collapse as all fad products are and is attempting to fend off that collapse as long as possible, via the laws courts and basically damn the consequences (the retaliation will not end once the delay is over, break a cease fire and the rest go in for the kill). As for those schmucks who have invested heavily in Apple's wildly inflated share price, two words, 'KA-BOOM'.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If Jobs wanted to go Thermonuclear they should expect mutually assured desctruction
You mean like Apple's lawyers?
You don't get ahead by sharing everything you make and helping out the competition.
Yes, you do.
Open Source has proven this to be the case, even winning over the historical corporate bastion of conservatism that is IBM. I had two machines on my desk. One Windows, one Linux. Both made the company money by different means.
It's the old question of "getting more of the pie" versus "growing the pie"--the difference being, in software, you can grow the pie exponentially and at a trivial incremental cost. When the domain of technological possibility is grown like that, there's more room for profitable activities for everyone involved.
And... no, Apple lost because the Lisa and Macintosh were absurdly high-priced for their capabilities. IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing. Windows just eliminated Apple's sole claim to advantage, and had the clearly better OS until... well, Apple stuck to tradition and stole the BSD OS. That they don't -like- sharing doesn't alter that they'd have no OS for their desktop/laptop systems without people who did like sharing, before they slapped an "Apple" label on others' work.
As the final argument on how this history proceeded, we can look at what happened when IBM tried to "pull an Apple" with the PS/2 and proprietary interfaces--an unmitigated disaster in the market. It's working for the time being for Apple as history repeats itself, but I expect it won't be long until Android reverses the perceptions again--it's just important to understand that there are alternatives to rapacious business, and spending your money exclusively on that just harms progress and technology for everyone, regardless of immediate perceptions. Though, granted, Apple is all about immediate perceptions...
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
A true man of reason that I hope both these companies listen to.
He is about as down to earth and realistic of a man in person as any average tech savvy geek and even though many of us dislike Apple, this man should have all our respect.
It doesn't matter. The Jury's ruling will be found invalid for misconduct.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're right, at least according to Apple, it's not a patent on a rectangle with rounded corners, it's a patent on ANY rectangle.
When the judge in one of the cases asked Apple what Samsungs devices should look like to not infringe, they submitted a drawing of a triangular device with a circular screen.
Apple was losing money because of the mac cloners when Steve Jobs returned.
What an utter load of crap. When Apple finally stopped the macintosh cloning they designed and sold an inexpensive mac, the classic. All that did was convert them from a niche player with high margins into a niche player with low margins. Thats when they turned unprofitable, but they had to try because the stakes were so high.
Yeah, you could choose intel and get performance and quality or go with a crapshoot of various chipsets and AMD processors. BFD. In reality, you had very little choice. They all ran windows and had crapware on them unless if you built your own but most people did not do that.
The choice wasnt in the processor or the chipset. The choice was in the peripherals, and what a dumb fuck you are if you thought dos and later win3 machines were shipped with crapware. You seem to be about 10 years too ignorant. Crapware didnt exist until the internet took off, and then it didnt exist until windows had a network stack. Apple was niche long before those happened, because of the clones... in the ms-dos era.
Listen pal, I "work" for a living as a software developer on the windows platform.
That doesnt change the fact that you are too young to have experienced the downfall of Apple. Apple went from market leader to niche in the 1980's, not the late 1990's like you seem to imagine.
"His name was James Damore."
Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.
I hate Apple with a passion but you're just wrong. The F700 came out just slightly after the iPhone. Obviously they both had to be in development around the same time but Apple was in fact first.
The myth posted above has be debunked many times, just use a little Google-fu and you will see.
Indeed, the F700 was publicly shown just a few weeks after the iPhone's first appearance. However, Samsung had filed for a Korean design patent on the F700 several weeks before the iPhone was revealed. It exactly matched the F700 (BTW, there were rounded corners on the rectangle). The whole "who did it first" issue is stupid, and describing it as "copying our innovation" is utter lunacy, when basic design principles lead to just a few possibilities, all of which were released by somebody.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Samsung wanted to submit evidence they had ripped off Sony instead who had done the shape before. For that matter, the XDA (MS Phone years ago) seemed to me to be the grand daddy device that looked very much the same.
Oh well, doubt the appeal court will have such an obviously Apple fangirl for a judge. So Apple will loose and all will be well again. But it would be nice if the asian tech giants told apple for its next device. Nope, sorry, we don't have any items in stock at the moment. Go shop somewhere else. Oh there isn't? Well, go complain to the US tech companies that outsources all tech then.
Would be nice. Won't happen but it would be nice.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No the iPhone was first shown and demoed on Jan 2007, the F700 was first shown and demoed at Cebit 2006 (which is in March).
If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.
Or we'll actually see some innovation. I have an Android phone, and the UI sucks. From playing with an iPhone, it seems most of the bad ideas were ones copied from iOS. I played very briefly with a Windows phone and it was at least different, although I didn't use it for long enough to tell if it was actually better. It was owned by someone leaving MSR, who was looking forward to replacing it, so he apparently didn't think so, but if enough people are trying new ideas then eventually one will end up with something better. My favourite tablet UI so far has been WebOS, but it was mismanaged into oblivion. I don't know how well it scaled down to a phone, because the lack of decent SIP support is a deal breaker for me in a mobile phone.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't know why this is modded up to 5 when it's verifiably false. Their demos were a month or so apart, with F700 coming a bit later, and LG Prada with similar design came out a few months before them both.
Because many moderators just mod-up anything that fits their narrative. That happens on both sides of this stupid issue.
"My god, it's full of pies!"
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Even before they were king of the hill people were copying Apple.
Though I'm not exactly sure I want everyone copying off each other. I mean, do you really want a bland world where every PC is the same because "it's the best" or phone or whatever? Sure there might be a few people to innovate, but really, the world would get pretty bland.
Some recent examples include well, laptops having 1366x768 screens when just a few years ago everyone had a variety of resolutions. These days, with all the ultrabook stuff (copying Apple), we're seeing laptops all over the place sporting screens of higher resolutions again. But only because Intel started paying companies to duplicate the Macbook Air (3 years after it's first release).
Or how today all the high-end smartphones are all slates with onscreen keyboards - what happened to sliders with built in keyboards?
Or how Android has a "home screen" where you can stick apps and widgets (which was probably written by Google to get around the iPhone patents)?
Sometimes avoiding patents leads to real innovation - see how Google deftly works around a bunch of Apple patents in Android.
The problem is companies are lazy - if someone will do the R&D for them, they will let them do it, then copy (see China). Then sell it on the market a few months later for half the price. (Copying is the best business strategy - less risk of a flop (you clone only products that show promise), very little R&D (only enough to be able to reverse the original), etc).
As for the LTE lawsuits from Samsung - don't be so confident. Apple has 443-odd LTE patents in their arsenal (purchase of Nortel), plus a freely licensable one on nano-SIM. It'll be a large battle of FRAND patents that basically ends up as a big lovefest in the end - and if Samsung's lawyers are as incompetent as they were during the first trial (sorry, missing deadlines is never an excuse, nor is not tracking time spent during time-allocation), it could end as a very nasty smackdown for Samsung. If they are halfway competent, they'd argue that Samsung's patents (which have to be licensed by Apple directly, or paid for indirectly, through Qualcomm) are more valuable per phone than Apple's patents are.
And Apple is NOT king of the hill. Android is, as is Samsung. Samsung has shipped more Android phones than Apple and has greater marketshare (they're the #1 phone seller). The only area where Apple is king is profits. iOS marketshare is 1/2 that of Android, too.
We can have software patents and have them be reasonable with one simple little rule.
Look at the CODE. We have design patents for a reason. If the code is significantly different (e.g. written in ASM vs C or Java) it is a unique implementation. If it's written in the same language, see how much it differs to achieve the same effect. A given language may only have one way to do things, so that part can't be given as part of the patent. Just like one can patent different designs of things like LED lights (even if they use the same components and number of each component, positioning for effect/etc is patentable as a design patent) and other items.
the courts are totally forgetting about design patents here. They could be ruling in a way that works both ways, and it is within their power; they are just too stupid to realize this and do so for the benefit of the country and competition.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They are tools for the rich to keep new players from entering the field, and ones that are brave enough to do it anyway are easily crushed. Those sorts of patents are not tools FOR the people. They are tools AGAINST the people and in favor of the tyrannical wealthy elite whose corporations run our government.
The patent system is broken and has already collapsed upon itself. Time to simply burn it or pretend it no longer exists. I find it humorous to think I can be sued for auto-updating in my apps.
They are not tools to give folks a few year edge anymore to bring stuff to market. They are tools to wage war, crush competitors, suck them dry of money and attempt to destroy their employees' livelihoods (at least the enlisted scum that don't own shares).
The entire system was meant to be FOR US... you know. The people. The inventor. The little guy. So we could bring something to market without being crushed by some charismatic douchebag with more money than brains. Now whoever wants to cut a check to the USPTO gets to patent just about anything they want, valid or not. It's up to you to raise the millions to fight the claim if they are BS patents.
This system is utterly and completely broken and useless and only serves as a way to ensure all innovation ceases to happen in the United States.
Their is almost no new technology developed in the US. None. Nada. Zip. Your processors come from overseas. Your RAM comes from overseas. Your GPU comes from overseas. The only thing we pump out is useless imaginary property and legal hassle. And software. And we're sucking at that as well as of late because you can barely write simple programming constructs without fear of being sued.
Yeah. We're in decline. You may not see it yet. It may not hit you for a while but the US is up the creek without a paddle and this copyright and patent BS as of late is a major cause. It *WILL* have destructive results and basically result in a new dark ages if left unchecked for too long.
If you think the patents were for a rectangle with rounded corners then you know very little about it.
Rounded corners are interesting.
I suspect rounded corners are mandated by safety regulation
that limit sharp corners or just design practices. Further objects intended for
pockets need "eased" corners to not damage the garment.
And I suspect there is a design guideline for the cover glass
that advised the customer to ease the corners. There might
even be a specified radius. Without eased corners the glass
cover would be too fragile when used in this intended way.
Of interest the new Apple store under construction in Palo Alto, CA
had two 1800# glass windows replaced because the glass shattered
as a result of installation errors. One was apparently a worker's tool
smacking the surface and the other was impacted by the install of
a roof pane of glass. Glass is interesting stuff but the nature of
if mandates a number of design decision. i.e. the corners were not
an artful design decision but rather OBVIOUS and well known in the
industry design methodology for MANY reasons. Drop tests need not
be a factor or consideration. Paper note books and note pads have
eased corners too.
Even earthquake folk know this, architectural glass need not be large:
http://www.earthquakespectra.org/doi/abs/10.1193/1.2164875?journalCode=eqsa
Abstract
The concept of employing architectural glass panels with modified corner geometries and edge finish conditions to improve their resistance to earthquake damage has been developed recently. To accomplish this, material is removed at glass panel corners (e.g., by rounding the glass corners) and glass edges are finished in the modified corner regions to minimize protrusions and edge surface roughness. The concept is applicable to a wide variety of architectural glass types and glazing frame types. Full-scale dynamic racking tests have shown that corner radius and glass edge finish conditions near the reshaped corner regions have significant influences on glass cracking and glass fallout drift resistances of monolithic architectural glass panels used in curtain walls.
Received: December 1, 2003; Accepted: March 31, 2005
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.