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Apple Patents Wireless Charging
GabriellaKat writes "Via El Reg: 'Apple is trying to patent wireless charging, claiming its magnetic resonance tech is new and that it can do it better than anyone else. This would be cool if its assertions were true. Apple's application, numbered 20120303980, makes much of its ability to charge a device over the air at a distance of up to a meter, rather than requiring close proximity. The Alliance For Wireless Power, which also touts long-range juicing, will no doubt be comparing Apple's designs to its own blueprints.'"
"Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal"
Great. With a bit of luck my new pending patent "Wheel" is on the way to be approved.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The fact that there are wireless standards doesn't mean no-one can come up with a new way of doing this, and subsequently patenting it. Also they do not patent "wireless charging" which, in itself, would be hard to patent - they patent a method of wireless charging using some magnetic coupling trick. And they claim they have a new way of doing this, and as such it may very well be innovative and patentable.
But well, like the summary and your outright uninformed comment the rest of the discussion here will be "patent troll hurr hurr". The first few comments that I see here are already like that, predicably.
I skimmed through the patent text, can't tell what is new and what is old. That part would require quite some deeper study, and requires understanding of the whole field. Sensationalism like from El Reg and copied by Slashdot is simply stupid. If you have read and understand the patent, and there is nothing in it that was not invented yet at the application date, please come back and let me know exactly why the patent is faulty. Please also send the same comments to the patent office, so this application may be rejected.
Great. With a bit of luck my new pending patent "Wheel" is on the way to be approved.
Apple has the patent, it's called the continuous rounded unicorner.
Tesla's main secret with most of his work was harmonic resonance. The Tesla coil is a resonant coil, and his studies were clear that resonance would increase the distance that wireless transmissions could occur. One of his experiments used this very concept, and caused some damage to a power plant in Colorado Springs...resonating and amplifying the electricity collected from the earth moving through it's own atmosphere and discharging it into the ground in such quantities that it burned out a dynamo at the local power plant... http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_colspr.html
There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that can count, and those that can't.
Have you ever filed a patent? Each individual claim MUST be novel (unique) and not be obvious.
In this case, they slapped two aspects together in one claim, which I suppose does make that claim unique (combination of tuned energy coupling, and reverse comms channel by RF load). But is it non-obvious? Marconi himself observed that variations in the receiver could be observed at the transmitter, To any person versed in the field, this would qualify the combination of the two as 'obvious' and hence invalid.
And yes, I have filed patents (but only in semiconductor physics), and I have built RF powered bidirectional comms devices. And I also 'discovered' that tuning the coils improved energy transfer. And I also detuned the receiver to communicate back to the transmitter. But did I file a patent on it? NO. Why not? Because there was nothing novel in what I did. (And believe me - the university's IP people would have definitely required that I file, if even one person at the department thought it was in any way patentable.
The problem is that Apple is a patent troll [...]
No, Apple is a patent bully. They make products, or intend to make products, that utilise their patents. They also make that vast majority of their money on actual products, not litigation. Neither of these things is consistent with a patent troll.
One little, two little, three little endians, four little, five little six little endians, seven little, eight little, nine little endians, 0x0A little endian bytes.
FTFY
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
"Music, movies, TV, and podcast subscriptions. All tied up in Apple's little ecosystem. A very pretty noose to keep people chained to its hardware.
Imagine, just for a moment, that your Sony DVD player would only play Sony Movies' films. When you decided to buy a new DVD player from Samsung, none of those media files would work on your new kit without some serious fiddling.
That's the walled garden that so many companies are now trying to drag us into. And I think it stinks.
On a mobile phone network in the UK, you can use any phone you want. Hardware and services are totally divorced. It promotes competition because customers know that if they have a poor experience with HTC, they can move to Nokia and everything will carry on working just as it did before.
But, if all of your contacts, entertainment services, and backups are chained into HTC - well, then you're just shit out of luck if you want to move.
I want to see a complete separation of church and state here. Hardware should be separate from software. Software should be separate from services.
I want to watch Nokia movies on my Samsung hardware running Google's Android, and then back them up to DropBox.
That's how it works - more or less - in the PC space. I don't understand why it doesn't in the tablet and smartphone space? Why would I buy a tablet that only worked with content from one provider? Whether that's Amazon, Microsoft or Apple - it's setting up a nasty little monopoly which will drive up prices and drive down quality.
I know, I know. The mantra of "It Just Works". I'm mildly sick of having to configure my tablet to talk to my NAS, and then get the TV to talk to both of them. That situation isn't just due to my equipment all coming from different manufacturers - it's mostly due to those manufacturers not implementing open standards.
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2012/11/i-dont-want-to-be-part-of-your-fucking-ecosystem/
- U.S. Patent 0,685,954 - Method of Utilizing Effects Transmitted through Natural Media - 1899 August 1
- U.S. Patent 0,685,953 - Apparatus for Utilizing Effects Transmitted from a Distance to a Receiving Device through Natural Media - 1899 June 24
and so on and so forth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nikola_Tesla_patents)
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I'm sure there are lots of patents on wheels. With a little bit of thought, you could probably come up with a lot of ways to make wheels perform better in certain situations, such as having more strength for less mass. Just a quick search yielded a bicycle wheel patented in 2002. But that's OK, with me, because its' a specific way of arranging the spokes, more precisely, with spokes from each side meeting at the same place on the rim. Anybody else is free to use the old method of arranging the spokes. That's also why I'm fine with this Apple wireless charging patent. It describes a specific method of charging devices wirelessly. None of the old methods infringe because they don't use the same method. Anything you, or I can come up with that improves on their method is also not in violation of the patent. Sure Apple has some stupid patents, but this isn't one of them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It seems to me that the actual claims and subsequent description are on (1) a method to wirelessly charge devices, with one device serving as secondary power source source for another device if needed, and with devices up to a meter away from the primary and secondary power sources; (2) a method that improves the efficiency of charging high capacity batteries as a bonus from the circuit needed to do (1); and (3) using (1) and (2) to charge a mouse and keyboard (explicit in the claims). Evidently, (1) and (2) could also be used to charge phones and tablets in an office environment too.
At any rate, I merely scanned the patent, but contrary to what TFS and TFA suggest, Apple didn't patent wireless charging, or even long range wireless charging. What Apple patented is cooperative and efficient wireless charging of a network of devices; in particular of peripherals located on a desk. I presume that plenty of researchers are working on the same kind of stuff, but assuming it hadn't been done yet, nobody can argue with a straight face that this patent is without merits.
Fucking apologist. Don't you get it? I wouldn't touch an iPad with a fucking barge pole. I don't want to be part of your fucking ecosystem.
By the same token, you are also an apologist. However, unlike the poster you berate, who came off as pragmatic, you sound like a petulant child.
Let's say you wanted to use Bluetooth to talk to an iPod or an iPad. You'd think you could just buy a Bluetooth module from, say, Roving Networks - say, the RN-42, and then connect it to your PIC/Arduino and start sending Hello World, right?
WRONG!
Apple has not only extended Bluetooth to require a special iAP authentication chip, but they have a special licensing program called MFi.
Okay, you say, so maybe this is like USB, you pay a few grand and get a VID and then go about your business.
WRONG!
The requirements surrounding MFi are ridiculous. For example, Apple will run a credit check on your company. If you are not a high-volume manufacturing company, then you're stuck with only the development license, and you will have to outsource your manufacturing. A development license is required even if you want to design an in-house app. Hobbyists need not apply - you cannot even get the development license if you want to design something for personal use. Oh, and you need to sign an NDA before they will tell you the royalty rates.
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