All together it's unlikely Samsung would infringe on all of them without blatant and willful imitation.
Maybe if the list was full of arbitrary stuff that had nothing to do with the function of the product and was only used to brand it, but that isn't the case. Making the front of it black is fashionable; people like it. It isn't because people think it's an iPad, it's because black is the new black. Having symmetrical borders is completely functional: The thing has got a touch screen and you have got to be able to pick it up without inadvertently pressing anything, and the width necessary to do that is the same on each side. Arranging icons in a grid is a standard technique used so often that it's part of the library. The navigation buttons are likewise completely standard.
Someone who had never seen an iPad might not come up with exactly the same thing, but it's also completely plausible that they would. The real problem is that Apple is trying to claim something they have no right to claim: They're trying to get a perpetual patent on an obvious combination of functional elements by shoehorning it into trade dress. They aren't supposed to do that.
I can see the problem from Apple's perspective: The way trade dress works is that you have some fanciful addition to your product that has no function other than to identify it to customers. But Apple makes simple, minimalistic products. Their attractiveness is in their simplicity -- but you can't really claim a right to the absence of something uniquely identifying. So this is their attempt to get around that, but they're doing something they're not really allowed to do: You aren't supposed to trademark the parts of something that are functional.
Why should a cross-license be required? Samsung gets paid a fair and reasonable (that's the first two letters!) amount for their patent.
The whole problem is that "fair and reasonable" are undefined terms. The actual amounts paid tend to be rather modest, but only because the companies agree to a cross-license the value of which allows for a substantial discount on royalties. Apple seems to want to get the discount without the cross-license.
More than that, the advantage of cross-licensing is that it allows freedom to operate without fear of litigation. If everybody cross-licenses with everybody else then each company can design the best product their engineers can manage without establishing a giant bureaucracy of lawyers who have to look over everyone's shoulder and tell them that they can't do this or that. It is a workaround against the prevalence of over-broad patents that prevents each company from having to go to court and spend millions of dollars invalidating each of them. Naturally, someone with an overabundance of questionable patents will be inclined to disfavor cross-licensing, but in my book that makes it a feature rather than a bug.
You say that as though the other items are any different. It's black? It has a screen and the borders are symmetrical? Really?
They're complaining that Samsung is making devices that so closely mimic Apple's that the two are difficult to tell apart (something even Samsung's lawyers have trouble doing, apparently), for all the reasons listed.
Except the question isn't whether Samsung's lawyers can tell them apart from across the courtroom when they aren't shown the trademark on it (you know, the thing that actually identifies it to the customer). The question is, when a customer goes to the store looking to spend hundreds of dollars on a device, whether they'll be confused into buying the Samsung device thinking it's an Apple device notwithstanding that it doesn't have the Apple logo on it anywhere and it says Samsung in big letters on both sides.
If you don't want that then don't jam patented techniques into standards.
What you just said is that if you invent something brilliant, you should either not patent it so that people can use it or you should patent it so that no one (not even you) can use it because the standards that everyone must follow in order to sell phones that actually make phone calls don't include it. Do you see how it might be nice to have a middle ground, where you can put it in the standard and then demand a cross-license from your competitors, so that anyone who actually invented something significant can make whatever they want, but still exclude the cheap crap from people who have never invented anything?
The purpose is to identify the source of the product, not to prohibit functionally or aesthetically similar products. People know that the bottle in the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle is going to get them Coca-Cola, it allows them to save time because they're buying a $1 item and they're not about to spend a lot of time inspecting it first.
Now tell me how a green picture of a telephone handset on the button to initiate a phone call allows people considering buying a phone to identify it as an Apple device. That isn't a trademark, it's practically an industry standard -- it identifies the action, not the vendor.
On top of that, it's a $600 device. People do research. Any idiot can tell them apart because one has the Apple logo and the other says Samsung. I mean sure, if you cover up the thing that identifies the product, it's harder to identify the product. But WTF? That doesn't mean anybody is confused.
They're claiming that stuff as trademarks? Wow, that's even worse than rounded rectangles.
The purpose of a trademark is designation of origin. It isn't supposed to be a user interface patent, or a method to lock in users by preventing competitors from creating a product that customers familiar with the trademark holder's product will have an easier time learning to use.
The "lifetime meter" would have to be able to discover those and charge accordingly at a swap.
The trouble is that the reward for committing fraud is too great. You think odometer fraud is bad, what happens when some who runs an independent service station realizes that if they figure out how to crack the "lifetime meter" they can do six an hour at $2000 a pop and the money comes out of their competitors' pockets?
Well, on brazilian portuguese "wasting" (jogar fora) and "spending" (gastar) is not the same thing.
But in English sometimes they are. To waste something is to use it up, usually with the implication that you didn't get the fully benefit from it. Waste as a noun also means the remainder of a thing after it has been wasted, which is why it is also a synonym for trash.
Moreover, other than the negative connotation to 'waste', it means pretty much the same thing as 'spend' -- except that 'spend' is usually only applied to some things, primarily currency or time. If you say 'spend paper' then everybody will know what you mean, but it isn't common usage.
I know that. The problem is that sometimes the language doesn't support it. You can create a construction that preserves the symmetry by changing the meaning or vice versa, but sometimes you can't do both.
However, Siri's grasp of context is, hypothetically speaking at least, and important step for translation.
I think this is the key point here, especially when you consider it from the other way around: If you have a translator, you have something that inherently needs to understand the meaning of language so that it can translate it properly.
So let's say you do something in the nature of defining a new language as a series of functions. "Call Bob" means "telephone_connect(Bob)" etc. Now you can translate from English (or whatever other language the user speaks -- or types) into some kind of 'action language' that the device can execute directly. The ability of the translator to detect context and change the meaning (and therefore the action) is a big feature -- the better a translator it is, the better it understands what you mean when you tell it to do something. You end up with a natural-to-machine-language translator, but in a way that could actually be usefully implemented -- because you take the code already written (like making a phone call) and make it available to the translator as part of the language being translated to.
You still end up with the unavoidable problems (e.g. confusing sound-alike words that both fit the context, or linguistic ambiguities like 'bob took a picture of alice on the patio'), but it makes a big step toward an interesting result.
Then you're complaining about it in the wrong direction. The translation from Portuguese to English is correct. Translating "wasting paper" to "jogar fora papel" is what is wrong, because it is a literal translation of an idiom.
What it (and you) get wrong is to translate "gastar árvores" as "spending trees" when it should probably be "killing trees" -- but unless "gastar árvores" is an idiom in Portuguese that seems understandable, because it is the literal translation. It just doesn't come across properly in English because "spending" is not generally something you do to a tree (or paper).
They're also short-lived, 5 years or so, but serve to protect the unique looks of devices. At least with design patents, the claims are important - if a design feature is shown but not claimed, it's a free for all.
This is a design patent. It says right on it: "Term: 14 years." And I don't see any claims.
Innovation is great. But there is an expression: Don't reinvent the wheel. You want the innovative thing to be not only different, but better. Change for the sake of change is a waste of effort.
So now I hear you say that people should make innovations for the better. But they do. They make incremental improvements -- because that's how it works. Once you have a wheel, well, you can prove by math that "round" is the best shape. You can make one that is a spherical rather than cylindrical, but unless that is somehow an improvement it's just change for the sake of change. The way you improve it is by making incremental changes -- you add ball bearings, you use tires, etc. But at the end of the day, it's still a wheel and it still works pretty much the same way it did 50 years ago or a thousand.
The idea that everyone should have to reinvent the wheel in order to enter a market is monopoly-sympathizing claptrap. You take what already works, you make it a little better, you get a short-lived advantage in the marketplace. If you want to keep your advantage, you need to keep making improvements. That is how progress is made.
Maybe Apple's design patents aren't fair, but repeating this rounded rectangle hyperbole isn't adding anything useful to the debate.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have filed a lawsuit arguing in significant part that they have a design patent on rounded rectangles? Or are you arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to criticize them for that? Or that people shouldn't criticize the legal system for allowing injunctions based on patents like that, which are of dubious validity, while denying them for almost certainly valid patents on actual technology?
This concept that 'your patents are FRAND so you can't get an injunction' is of a highly questionable nature in any event -- if there is no threat of an injunction then how do you get the infringer to negotiate rather than persistently low-balling?
Once you get used to it, you know that you can get what you want by saying "computer, make tea. Earl Grey. Hot." But getting to that point isn't intuitive for the new user who is doing it for the first time. You have to program it to your liking first, or at least learn enough about how the interface works to make good assumptions about what you'll get saying different things. Which is no better than having to search through and learn the menus in a traditional application, and is worse because you end up looking like an idiot to anyone around you who can tell you don't know how to use your device.
You can help yourself by using context, but only if the computer is programmed with context. If the programming comes (as it must) from third parties rather than The Mothership, you get varying levels of completeness and polish. And it still doesn't eliminate the problem, it just reduces it a little.
Given that you need to do the same stuffs in order to get limited liability, the little guy already has to do it regardless of the tax consequences. Unless he fancies losing his house as well as his business in the event that an employee screws ups and gets the company sued.
And that is how you lose the simplicity. You get a third party app for an alarm clock and a separate one for an alarm system and each want to do something different when you say "set alarm at eight AM." What happens when somebody installs both?
At some point you either have to have a globally unique namespace and not let apps use the same phrases as other apps, which results in awkward phrases being used because the good ones are taken. Or you have to deal with namespace collisions as they occur, which brings with it an inherent complexity.
How is that, in any way, fair to companies that have not incorporated in a way that would allow them to avoid tax?
Your question is kind of nonsense. The cost reincorporating as a different type of corporation is not zero, but it's in the neighborhood of a few hundred bucks.
I seems like that's what the GP was saying: Corporate tax means he has to pay and international companies don't. Since we can't tax companies that exist outside of our jurisdiction, the only way to make it fair is to tax the companies in our jurisdiction at the same rate.
You seem to be assuming that we can somehow tax foreign corporations without violating any treaties. Got anything to back that up?
Solution: Impose an import tariff equal to the gain from the tax loop hole, and do it in the same piece of legislation.
(1) That doesn't get you out of the 'campaign contributions' problem. You pass the bill, the company in your state that is now paying higher taxes gives money to your opponent, that money causes you and everyone who voted for the bill to lose the next election. Then the next Congress repeals it, probably using (2) as an explanation.
(2) You can't just impose arbitrary arbitrary import tariffs, they violate a whole list of treaties. Especially if the effect of the tariff is to tax the company on the profit it makes in foreign jurisdictions -- the other countries hate that, because that's "their" tax revenue. And they certainly don't want the company to move its operations back to the US.
On twitter every day there are people screaming about the U.S. "high corporate tax rate" and they always forget to mention that NOBODY pays that rate... to many ways around it.
That's the trouble. Some people do. The largest companies don't, because there is a trivial and pretty unavoidable way around it: They report their profits in another country with lower taxes. So e.g. Microsoft Ireland will own the copyright for Windows, then license Microsoft America as an authorized distributor, but on terms favorable to the Ireland company so that they're the ones who keep all the profits. Then Microsoft America makes no profit and there is nothing to tax -- you can't tax companies outside your jurisdiction.
The problem is that that only works for large, international companies. Smaller companies can't do it. Which is why people say to lower the tax rate -- it levels the playing field instead of putting smaller companies at a disadvantage.
Yes and no. Apple's modus operandi is to make the interface as intuitive as possible by making various trade offs against expressiveness, modularity, diversity, breadth, etc. You end up with something that is simple because the complexity has been made unavailable, or that, like the terminal in OS X, is hidden and the simplicity disappears if you find it.
You can do the same thing with voice and a lot of people will like it -- especially those who have not learned more expressive ways of interacting with computers. I'm just not sure you're going to see a simple voice interface for your thermostat integrated into your phone, because Apple doesn't make thermostats.
Slashdot Mirror
All together it's unlikely Samsung would infringe on all of them without blatant and willful imitation.
Maybe if the list was full of arbitrary stuff that had nothing to do with the function of the product and was only used to brand it, but that isn't the case. Making the front of it black is fashionable; people like it. It isn't because people think it's an iPad, it's because black is the new black. Having symmetrical borders is completely functional: The thing has got a touch screen and you have got to be able to pick it up without inadvertently pressing anything, and the width necessary to do that is the same on each side. Arranging icons in a grid is a standard technique used so often that it's part of the library. The navigation buttons are likewise completely standard.
Someone who had never seen an iPad might not come up with exactly the same thing, but it's also completely plausible that they would. The real problem is that Apple is trying to claim something they have no right to claim: They're trying to get a perpetual patent on an obvious combination of functional elements by shoehorning it into trade dress. They aren't supposed to do that.
I can see the problem from Apple's perspective: The way trade dress works is that you have some fanciful addition to your product that has no function other than to identify it to customers. But Apple makes simple, minimalistic products. Their attractiveness is in their simplicity -- but you can't really claim a right to the absence of something uniquely identifying. So this is their attempt to get around that, but they're doing something they're not really allowed to do: You aren't supposed to trademark the parts of something that are functional.
Why should a cross-license be required? Samsung gets paid a fair and reasonable (that's the first two letters!) amount for their patent.
The whole problem is that "fair and reasonable" are undefined terms. The actual amounts paid tend to be rather modest, but only because the companies agree to a cross-license the value of which allows for a substantial discount on royalties. Apple seems to want to get the discount without the cross-license.
More than that, the advantage of cross-licensing is that it allows freedom to operate without fear of litigation. If everybody cross-licenses with everybody else then each company can design the best product their engineers can manage without establishing a giant bureaucracy of lawyers who have to look over everyone's shoulder and tell them that they can't do this or that. It is a workaround against the prevalence of over-broad patents that prevents each company from having to go to court and spend millions of dollars invalidating each of them. Naturally, someone with an overabundance of questionable patents will be inclined to disfavor cross-licensing, but in my book that makes it a feature rather than a bug.
Yes, a rounded rectangle is in there as one item.
You say that as though the other items are any different. It's black? It has a screen and the borders are symmetrical? Really?
They're complaining that Samsung is making devices that so closely mimic Apple's that the two are difficult to tell apart (something even Samsung's lawyers have trouble doing, apparently), for all the reasons listed.
Except the question isn't whether Samsung's lawyers can tell them apart from across the courtroom when they aren't shown the trademark on it (you know, the thing that actually identifies it to the customer). The question is, when a customer goes to the store looking to spend hundreds of dollars on a device, whether they'll be confused into buying the Samsung device thinking it's an Apple device notwithstanding that it doesn't have the Apple logo on it anywhere and it says Samsung in big letters on both sides.
If you don't want that then don't jam patented techniques into standards.
What you just said is that if you invent something brilliant, you should either not patent it so that people can use it or you should patent it so that no one (not even you) can use it because the standards that everyone must follow in order to sell phones that actually make phone calls don't include it. Do you see how it might be nice to have a middle ground, where you can put it in the standard and then demand a cross-license from your competitors, so that anyone who actually invented something significant can make whatever they want, but still exclude the cheap crap from people who have never invented anything?
The purpose is mainly to prevent knock offs.
The purpose is to identify the source of the product, not to prohibit functionally or aesthetically similar products. People know that the bottle in the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle is going to get them Coca-Cola, it allows them to save time because they're buying a $1 item and they're not about to spend a lot of time inspecting it first.
Now tell me how a green picture of a telephone handset on the button to initiate a phone call allows people considering buying a phone to identify it as an Apple device. That isn't a trademark, it's practically an industry standard -- it identifies the action, not the vendor.
On top of that, it's a $600 device. People do research. Any idiot can tell them apart because one has the Apple logo and the other says Samsung. I mean sure, if you cover up the thing that identifies the product, it's harder to identify the product. But WTF? That doesn't mean anybody is confused.
You're assuming you can catch them. Look up the solve rate for these sort of things, it's enlightening.
Archos 9, the year before the first iPad.
If you want I can remake that web page you linked and put it where the iPad is and put the iPad at the bottom. Or are you finished trolling?
They're claiming that stuff as trademarks? Wow, that's even worse than rounded rectangles.
The purpose of a trademark is designation of origin. It isn't supposed to be a user interface patent, or a method to lock in users by preventing competitors from creating a product that customers familiar with the trademark holder's product will have an easier time learning to use.
The "lifetime meter" would have to be able to discover those and charge accordingly at a swap.
The trouble is that the reward for committing fraud is too great. You think odometer fraud is bad, what happens when some who runs an independent service station realizes that if they figure out how to crack the "lifetime meter" they can do six an hour at $2000 a pop and the money comes out of their competitors' pockets?
Well, on brazilian portuguese "wasting" (jogar fora) and "spending" (gastar) is not the same thing.
But in English sometimes they are. To waste something is to use it up, usually with the implication that you didn't get the fully benefit from it. Waste as a noun also means the remainder of a thing after it has been wasted, which is why it is also a synonym for trash.
Moreover, other than the negative connotation to 'waste', it means pretty much the same thing as 'spend' -- except that 'spend' is usually only applied to some things, primarily currency or time. If you say 'spend paper' then everybody will know what you mean, but it isn't common usage.
I know that. The problem is that sometimes the language doesn't support it. You can create a construction that preserves the symmetry by changing the meaning or vice versa, but sometimes you can't do both.
However, Siri's grasp of context is, hypothetically speaking at least, and important step for translation.
I think this is the key point here, especially when you consider it from the other way around: If you have a translator, you have something that inherently needs to understand the meaning of language so that it can translate it properly.
So let's say you do something in the nature of defining a new language as a series of functions. "Call Bob" means "telephone_connect(Bob)" etc. Now you can translate from English (or whatever other language the user speaks -- or types) into some kind of 'action language' that the device can execute directly. The ability of the translator to detect context and change the meaning (and therefore the action) is a big feature -- the better a translator it is, the better it understands what you mean when you tell it to do something. You end up with a natural-to-machine-language translator, but in a way that could actually be usefully implemented -- because you take the code already written (like making a phone call) and make it available to the translator as part of the language being translated to.
You still end up with the unavoidable problems (e.g. confusing sound-alike words that both fit the context, or linguistic ambiguities like 'bob took a picture of alice on the patio'), but it makes a big step toward an interesting result.
Then you're complaining about it in the wrong direction. The translation from Portuguese to English is correct. Translating "wasting paper" to "jogar fora papel" is what is wrong, because it is a literal translation of an idiom.
What it (and you) get wrong is to translate "gastar árvores" as "spending trees" when it should probably be "killing trees" -- but unless "gastar árvores" is an idiom in Portuguese that seems understandable, because it is the literal translation. It just doesn't come across properly in English because "spending" is not generally something you do to a tree (or paper).
If Samsung somehow managed to get a trademark for "Phone(TM)" or "Device(TM)" then you would probably be right.
They're also short-lived, 5 years or so, but serve to protect the unique looks of devices. At least with design patents, the claims are important - if a design feature is shown but not claimed, it's a free for all.
This is a design patent. It says right on it: "Term: 14 years." And I don't see any claims.
It's not so clear cut -- if the shape makes a big difference (40% fuel saving) then, if patents would be a sane system, no.
If it's functional then you're talking about a utility patent rather than a design patent, which is a completely different thing.
Innovation is great. But there is an expression: Don't reinvent the wheel. You want the innovative thing to be not only different, but better. Change for the sake of change is a waste of effort.
So now I hear you say that people should make innovations for the better. But they do. They make incremental improvements -- because that's how it works. Once you have a wheel, well, you can prove by math that "round" is the best shape. You can make one that is a spherical rather than cylindrical, but unless that is somehow an improvement it's just change for the sake of change. The way you improve it is by making incremental changes -- you add ball bearings, you use tires, etc. But at the end of the day, it's still a wheel and it still works pretty much the same way it did 50 years ago or a thousand.
The idea that everyone should have to reinvent the wheel in order to enter a market is monopoly-sympathizing claptrap. You take what already works, you make it a little better, you get a short-lived advantage in the marketplace. If you want to keep your advantage, you need to keep making improvements. That is how progress is made.
Maybe Apple's design patents aren't fair, but repeating this rounded rectangle hyperbole isn't adding anything useful to the debate.
Then maybe Apple shouldn't have filed a lawsuit arguing in significant part that they have a design patent on rounded rectangles? Or are you arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to criticize them for that? Or that people shouldn't criticize the legal system for allowing injunctions based on patents like that, which are of dubious validity, while denying them for almost certainly valid patents on actual technology?
This concept that 'your patents are FRAND so you can't get an injunction' is of a highly questionable nature in any event -- if there is no threat of an injunction then how do you get the infringer to negotiate rather than persistently low-balling?
Why not have Siri simply ask "Did you mean the alarm clock or the alarm system?"
That's the whole problem. It goes from "computer, tea" to:
you: "computer, tea" ...?" ..." ...?" ..."
computer: "Baseball, pipe
you: "cup"
computer: "A teacup is a small cup, with or without a handle, generally a small one that may be grasped with the thumb and one or two fingers.
you: "computer, tea"
computer: "I'm sorry, baseball, pipe fitting, drink, cup, alphabetic character,
you: "drink"
computer: "Black tea, green tea, white tea, lemon [etc.]?"
you: "Earl Grey."
computer: "Earl Grey is a tea blend with a distinctive flavour and aroma derived from the addition of oil extracted from the rind of the bergamot orange, a fragrant citrus fruit. The Earl Grey blend is named after 2nd Earl Grey, British Prime Minister in the 1830s and author of the Reform Bill of 1832
you: "computer, make Earl Grey tea"
computer: "Hot, warm, room temperature, cool, or iced?"
you: "Hot."
(etc.)
Once you get used to it, you know that you can get what you want by saying "computer, make tea. Earl Grey. Hot." But getting to that point isn't intuitive for the new user who is doing it for the first time. You have to program it to your liking first, or at least learn enough about how the interface works to make good assumptions about what you'll get saying different things. Which is no better than having to search through and learn the menus in a traditional application, and is worse because you end up looking like an idiot to anyone around you who can tell you don't know how to use your device.
You can help yourself by using context, but only if the computer is programmed with context. If the programming comes (as it must) from third parties rather than The Mothership, you get varying levels of completeness and polish. And it still doesn't eliminate the problem, it just reduces it a little.
Given that you need to do the same stuffs in order to get limited liability, the little guy already has to do it regardless of the tax consequences. Unless he fancies losing his house as well as his business in the event that an employee screws ups and gets the company sued.
And that is how you lose the simplicity. You get a third party app for an alarm clock and a separate one for an alarm system and each want to do something different when you say "set alarm at eight AM." What happens when somebody installs both?
At some point you either have to have a globally unique namespace and not let apps use the same phrases as other apps, which results in awkward phrases being used because the good ones are taken. Or you have to deal with namespace collisions as they occur, which brings with it an inherent complexity.
How is that, in any way, fair to companies that have not incorporated in a way that would allow them to avoid tax?
Your question is kind of nonsense. The cost reincorporating as a different type of corporation is not zero, but it's in the neighborhood of a few hundred bucks.
By "someone," did you by any chance mean Microsoft?
I seems like that's what the GP was saying: Corporate tax means he has to pay and international companies don't. Since we can't tax companies that exist outside of our jurisdiction, the only way to make it fair is to tax the companies in our jurisdiction at the same rate.
You seem to be assuming that we can somehow tax foreign corporations without violating any treaties. Got anything to back that up?
Solution: Impose an import tariff equal to the gain from the tax loop hole, and do it in the same piece of legislation.
(1) That doesn't get you out of the 'campaign contributions' problem. You pass the bill, the company in your state that is now paying higher taxes gives money to your opponent, that money causes you and everyone who voted for the bill to lose the next election. Then the next Congress repeals it, probably using (2) as an explanation.
(2) You can't just impose arbitrary arbitrary import tariffs, they violate a whole list of treaties. Especially if the effect of the tariff is to tax the company on the profit it makes in foreign jurisdictions -- the other countries hate that, because that's "their" tax revenue. And they certainly don't want the company to move its operations back to the US.
On twitter every day there are people screaming about the U.S. "high corporate tax rate" and they always forget to mention that NOBODY pays that rate... to many ways around it.
That's the trouble. Some people do. The largest companies don't, because there is a trivial and pretty unavoidable way around it: They report their profits in another country with lower taxes. So e.g. Microsoft Ireland will own the copyright for Windows, then license Microsoft America as an authorized distributor, but on terms favorable to the Ireland company so that they're the ones who keep all the profits. Then Microsoft America makes no profit and there is nothing to tax -- you can't tax companies outside your jurisdiction.
The problem is that that only works for large, international companies. Smaller companies can't do it. Which is why people say to lower the tax rate -- it levels the playing field instead of putting smaller companies at a disadvantage.
Yes and no. Apple's modus operandi is to make the interface as intuitive as possible by making various trade offs against expressiveness, modularity, diversity, breadth, etc. You end up with something that is simple because the complexity has been made unavailable, or that, like the terminal in OS X, is hidden and the simplicity disappears if you find it.
You can do the same thing with voice and a lot of people will like it -- especially those who have not learned more expressive ways of interacting with computers. I'm just not sure you're going to see a simple voice interface for your thermostat integrated into your phone, because Apple doesn't make thermostats.