No, take it from a long-time Palm user: Palm failed because it was an obsolete and buggy p.o.s. That's why the Android founders left Palm and... founded Android.
On the contrary: Palm had invested heavily in development a completely new operating system, WebOS. They even produced a phone, the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre, which had novel features and a design that was not imitative of the iPhone, was well-reviewed, as was WebOS, and at introduction was widely considered the most promising alternative to the iPhone. Palm initially offered the phone through Sprint, where it had record (well, for Sprint, that is) sales. Verizon announced plans to offer the next version of the Palm phone, and placed a large order. But then came the deluge of Android i-clones, and the Palm phone no longer looked competitive against all of the low-priced iPhone look-alikes. Verizon refused delivery of their order, and Palm ran out of money. The company ended up being purchased by HP, primarily for the value of their highly regarded WebOS, but then HP underwent a change in management, and the new CEO wasn't interested in pursuing WebOS products. It now looks like WebOS will become an open-source project.
Are you saying you decide whether it is a patent or a copyright by a perceived, but who-knows-how-much, benefit?
No, I'm saying that the shorter duration of exclusivity of patents is more in line with what would would benefit the public good than copyright or trademark law. Perhaps a new category could be created for design, but if it has to be shoe-horned into the existing system for protection of intellectual property, patents are the best fit from the standpoint of encouraging innovation in design.
I think that what ultimately killed Palm (and Blackberry) was all of the iPhone knock-offs running Android. Palm, like Apple, made a large investment in developing its own operating system, design, and user interface. Palm could have competed with Apple's limited, and somewhat pricey, product line, but they were up against a deluge of iPhone clones, which were cheap because their manufacturers did not have to invest in a new design. The imitators could just take Apple's design, already successfully market-tested by Apple, and add a feature or two. Weak legal protection of Apple's design is what made it impossible for even moderately large companies like Palm and Blackberry to compete in the phone or tablet market--only a behemoth like Microsoft, which can afford to take years of losses to establish a product in the marketplace, has a prayer of stopping the phone and tablet market from being dominated by minor variations on Apple's designs (which are quite nice, but do not necessarily meet everybody's needs).
It's probably better (from the standpoint of public benefit) for this kind of design to be a patent than for it to be a copyright (or worse, a trademark). Patents have a shorter period before they pass into the public domain. It's good to have a period of protection for a useful design, because that makes it economically feasible for a company to take risks and make large investments in new designs, without worrying that somebody else will immediately appropriate it for their own products and (because they don't have to make large investments in developing and initially marketing the design) undersell the original company. On the other hand, it is good for the design to eventually pass into the public domain (and the 20 years of a US patent is not really all that long), so that the original developer cannot rest on its laurels, but has to continue to innovate.
Claiming that people thought there was a small market for these phones is bullshit. There were tons of touch screen phones and PDAs since the mid-90's and they were selling briskly. Apple massively ripped off design elements and features from Sony, Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia, plus some third party apps, in the design of the iPhone. Lots of Apple employees had phones and devices from these manufacturers.
Apple entered the market as it was growing briskly, and they had a well-engineered product, in no small part because all these other companies had already done the hard work. Even Apple's icon designs were hardly original.
And yet none of the companies that had experimented with touch screen phones had had particularly great success with them. Seems like Apple must have added something to produce the iPhone's runaway success, much faster than the growth of the market.
As for early reactions to the iPhone, here are some typical comments, which are fairly representative of what I heard from industry leaders at the time:
”[iPhone] just doesn’t matter anymore. There are now alternatives to the iPhone, which has been introduced everywhere else in the world. It’s no longer a novelty.” – Eamon Hoey, Hoey and Associates, April 30, 2008
“We are not at all worried. We think we’ve got the one mobile platform you’ll use for the rest of your life. [Apple] are not going to catch up.” – Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft Mobile Communications Group Product Manager, April 01, 2008
“Microsoft, with Windows Mobile/ActiveSync, Nokia with Intellisync, and Motorola with Good Technology have all fared poorly in the enterprise. We have no reason to expect otherwise from Apple.” – Peter Misek, Canaccord Adams analyst, March 07, 2008
”[Apple should sell 7.9 million iPhones in 2008] Apple’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year is optimistic.” – Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research analyst, February 22, 2008
“What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.” – Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, May 21, 2007
Motorola’s then-Chairman and then-CEO Ed Zander said his company was ready for competition from Apple’s iPhone, due out the following month. “How do you deal with that?” Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference. Zander quickly retorted, “How do they deal with us?” – Ed Zander, May 10, 2007
“The iPhone is going to be nothing more than a temporary novelty that will eventually wear off.” – Gundeep Hora, CoolTechZone Editor-in-Chief, April 02, 2007
“Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” – John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, March 28, 2007
”Even if [the iPhone] is opened up to third parties, it is difficult to see how the installed base of iPhones can reach the level where it becomes a truly attractive service platform for operator and developer investment.” – Tony Cripps, Ovum Service Manager for Mobile User Experience, March 14, 2007
”I’m more convinced than ever that, after an initial frenzy of publicity and sales to early adopters, iPhone sales will be unspectacular iPhone may well become Apple’s next Newton.” – David Haskin, Computerworld, February 26, 200
But what distinguishes a standards essential patent is that patent holders enter voluntarily into an agreement in which they accept and obligation to license their patent and a limitation to modest ("fair and reasonable") licensing fees in return for a guaranteed market for their patent.
While Apple has had some successes in court, it is clear that trying to protect the overall design of their products has been an uphill battle. But Apple is still doing just fine in spite of the deluge of Apple-clone devices--Apple continues to have the dominant products in their categories, and their products continue to be highly enough valued by consumers to earn Apple large profit margins. So there's no need to pity Apple.
I'd say the real victims of the Apple-clone deluge are companies like Palm and Blackberry. Both have their own unique product designs, developed independently rather than as copies of Apple's products. But Palm is dead and Blackberry is dying. And what has killed them has not been competition from Apple, but rather competition from the hordes of Apple-imitators. Both were companies with unique products and a strong sense of design. If they only had had to compete with Apple, they probably would have done reasonably well, differentiating themselves on the basis of design and price from Apple's limit product line. But they didn't only have to compete with Apple, they had to compete with the Apple knock-offs, which were sold as Apple-plus devices, offering a resemblance of Apple's style, and adding in some extra feature, like a larger screen--and at rock-bottom prices, because unlike Apple, Palm, and Blackberry, the knock-off manufacturers were taking little risk--most of the features of their phones had already been market-tested, by Apple.
The consumer is the victim too. Apple's phones and tablets are very nice, but not everybody wants an Apple or Apple look-alike phone or tablet. Unfortunately other choices are being squeezed out of the marketplace by the Apple clones. Palm is defunct, Blackberry on its last legs. The only real alternative to Apple-based design is emerging from Microsoft. Microsoft has never exactly been noted for brilliant design, but at least they have the financial resources to risk introducing a novel design into a market overloaded with Apple clones.
If anything, the history of the iPhone and the iPad shows a need for stronger legal protection of design.
Apple is actually just trying to protect some kind of style that cannot be rigorously defined.
Actually, in order to file such a patent, Apple was required to rigorously define the specific features that constitute its style, with respect to general appearance, interface icons, and even packaging. Apple's complaint is not based upon mere chance overlap of features; indeed, they show that Samsung had already developed their own style of touch phone and tablet design which had few points of overlap with Apple's designs--and that Samsung abandoned it in order to imitate the look and feel of Apple's products.
Did you consider that "There will be at most a small market for a phone of this design." is exactly the thing to stop development in this direction, meaning that this design could have been considered and thrown away?
Apple was bold enough to try and succeed, that's good on them, but you immediately infer "No one ever thought of it!"
No, I infer that nobody else had the courage or vision to make the investment and take the risk to enter the market with a phone of that design. And I believe that it would be a good thing if the patent system rewarded companies with courage and vision to take risks that ultimately advance design and benefit consumers.
And "No one have thought of that design for a touchscreen device! See, here's Samsung design before iPhone! It's totally unlike iPhone! (Except it is just like minified version of Galaxy S, minus color icons)"
And even Apple agrees that the pre-iPhone Samsung touch phone is different enough from an iPhone that it does not infringe Apple's design patents. Yet Samsung did not continue to make phones like that--instead, once they saw they iPhone, they switched to designs that imitate Apple's design in numerous ways, right down to the design of the icons, and even the packaging. Perhaps you don't think those details are important, but clearly Apple does...and apparently, Samsung does too.
Of course, you can make a toaster instead of a phone, and you don't have to use any phone standards essential patents. Or you can make another type of phone and you don't need to use GSM standards essential patents. But if you are making a phone that you hope to sell to a cell phone provider or to their customers to be used on their GSM network then it needs to be compatible with GSM standards, which means that it has to implement GSM standards-essential patents.
Even if you imagine that it's remotely plausible that everybody was poised to take the "obvious" (by today's 20/20 hindsight) next step in phone design (down to the design and arrangement of the icons), but that Apple by it's superior (but nonetheless somehow non-patent worthy) engineering (compared to experienced phone designers like Samsung and HTC) was somehow able to beat everybody to market, the evidence from court filings shows that it is not true. Here is Google's original concept design for an android phone. Here is Samsung's design for a touch-based phone before the saw the iPhone. Moreover, if you read the reviews and comments from other phone manufacturers at the time of iPhone announcement, nobody was saying, "Apple managed to be the first to market with the kind of phone we are all working on." Rather, the nearly-universal wisdom was, "There will be at most a small market for a phone of this design."
As I pointed out, a design patent is not simply on a single feature, such as an overall shape, but on multiple features of a particular type of product. So pointing to a completely different product, with a different function, that happens to look superficially similar is missing the point by a very wide margin.
The point of a standard is that everybody is compelled to follow it. There are many ways that a cell phone could work, but a particular approach (which might or might not be the best) was chosen. A company that voluntarily submits its invention as part of a standard is guaranteed that they will receive royalties from everybody in the industry, and they are protected from the possibility of their invention being supplanted by an improved design from another company.
So, for example, if slide-to-unlock were a FRAND feature of cell phones, cell phone manufacturers would be required to use that method, and to pay Apple royalties. Even if another company came up with a better method--biometric identification, maybe--they would not be able to compete with Apple because their method would not meet the specifications for the standard.
Apple has chosen to keep its design patents private. They run the risk that another company might come up with a superior design and take the market away from them, although fortunately for Apple, most of their competitors have so little design sense that they cannot conceive of any alternative but to copy Apple--and the flood of cheap not-quite iPhones from manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, sold at low prices because those manufacturers did not have to do extensive user testing to discover the right design elements, and ran little risk of flopping in the marketplace (because Apple has already taken the risk and proved that there was a market for similar devices) makes it effectively impossible for another company to develop a truly original design (Palm probably came close--they had an original design, and might well have competed with Apple, but they could not compete with the flood of cheap of iPhone knock-offs running Android). It is not Apple's patents that are stifling genuine innovation--rather, it is the absence of effective legal protection of Apple's designs.
Interface standards are not about "great technology", they are about convention and usability. There's little that's ever been innovative about how steering wheels look or work, where the hand brake goes in a car, how you turn on a TV or a light, etc.; many of those are just arbitrary choices. But there is a huge benefit to having these items standardized so that consumers can easily move from one car to another. The same is even more true for user interfaces: user interfaces benefit tremendously from standardization. Apple's user interface elements aren't "great" or innovative, they simply set the standard because Apple is first
But for the most part, Apple was not first. Almost every Apple feature can be found on some earlier failed product or other. What Apple was the first to do was to find the particular combination of features that resulted in a product with a novel "look and feel" that appealed to a huge number of consumers.
A design patent does not claim ownership of the individual elements of the design, but rather rights over the specific combination of those multiple elements. So it is more accurate to say that Apple has claimed rights over devices that resemble an iPad in multiple ways, overall shape and proportions being only one of those.
It is quite clear that Apple created something. It is instructive to look at tablet design before and after iPad. Prior to the iPad, the overwhelming industry opinion was that pad devices were niche products with no large consumer market, and that consumers far preferred netbooks. That opinion was not without basis. Multiple attempts by multiple companies to develop a pad device had failed.
The iPhone similarly challenged conventional wisdom and completely transformed cell phone design. Yet now, multiple manufacturers are simply insisting that it is impossible to think of a phone design that would appeal to consumers that did not look pretty much like Apple's design. Of course, before the iPhone, they thought exactly the same thing about Blackberry's design.
Apple's history of transforming consumer electronics extends back to their introduction of window-based GUIs for consumer computers. Any one device could be luck, but Apple has done it repeatedly. No single feature of any of those devices--the Mac, the Macbook Air, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, can be reasonably said to be responsible for their success; rather, it is the particular combination. So the objections to Apple's design patents are much like insisting that a famous chef should not be renowned for his signature dish because he didn't invent beef, or garlic, or pepper.
Does patent or copyright law protect Apple's particular brand of creativity, which has repeatedly transformed the user experience of consumer electronics? Perhaps the law offers no real protection for this kind of creativity; I don't know. But there is certainly a reasonable argument that the law should encourage companies like Apple that genuinely innovate in the area of design, and that are willing to take huge financial risks in introducing designs that challenge the conventional wisdom.
The falling sky proponents love to pretend that it's all a done deal yet the entire model fails to adequately account for previous warm periods, nor the fact that CO2 is merely plant food. (photosynthesis, how does it work?)
In fact, modern climate theory quite well account for climate over the period for which we have reliable information on both global temperature and drivers of climate such as solar radiation and CO2, including the impact of "natural experiments" such as volcanic eruptions. Estimating climate further back in the past is fraught with numerous uncertainties, and depends upon the use of indirect "proxies" such as measurement of tree rings, which are subject to a variety of artifacts. However, a curious characteristic of many self-styled "skeptics" of global warming is that they become amazingly credulous regarding any claim that can be interpreted as a challenge to global warming theory. So the same people who insist that the evidence for global warming from CO2 is weak will then enthusiastically accept third party accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe as ironclad evidence of an unexplained period of global warming during medieval times.
One thing that is in my own opinion nearly certain -- we may or may not be on a track to catastrophic warming, but I very strongly doubt that we're on a fast track or an irreversible track.
It certainly is not irreversible in geological time, but given the slow relaxation of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is likely to persist for a period of time that is long in the scale of human lifetimes. Of course, there is the potential for intentional climate engineering (as opposed to the climate-engineering-by-neglect that we are currently engaged in)--but every such proposal I've seen so far seems to involve doing things that are as hard/slow to reverse (i.e. if they "go wrong") as increasing CO2.
There is a fair bit of evidence that the climate is actually remarkably stable against more than a degree or two of additional warming
I'm not sure what you consider to be a "fair bit of evidence." Certainly global temperature has been more than a degree or two warmer in the distant past, so any such stability mechanism must be of recent vintage, geologically speaking. And there is no statistical evidence that any such mechanism is currently limiting temperature increase. Once one corrects for known sources of short term fluctuation, global warming seems to be continuing unabated. So any such temperature limiting mechanism must have a very sharp threshold if it is going to save us from the temperature increase projected as a consequence of continued CO2 pollution. Sharp thresholds are somewhat hard to come by in nature, and generally require some sort of strong feedback. What specific physical mechanism do you have in mind, and what is the "fair bit of evidence" for it?
IF there was a warmer period around Roman times then, yes, it seems rather unlikely that its origin could have been antropogenic, so there might be additional mechanisms in place we don't know about. And sure, say the current warm period is *entirely* antropogenic. What is there to be afraid of? By your own admission, you DO NOT KNOW what was the first warming mechanism, so you DO NOT KNOW if it was a once-in-a-geological-lifetime event or if it is periodic; however, you're ready to transform that IGNORANCE into a reason for FEAR.
It is a standard principle of risk management that the greater the uncertainty regarding the magnitude of a potential loss, the more you should be prepared to invest to insure against it. That's not fear, that is rational assessment of risk.
current data is compatible with AGW, but similarly warm/warmer periods have NOT had catastrophic consequences for life on Earth or for human (pre-industrial) civilization, so current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are definitely safe.
And here we have a prime example of the amazing credulity of the climate "skeptic." Based upon no more evidence than indirect and somewhat contradictory "proxies" like tree-ring measurements and third-party accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe, you are willing to conclude that there was a warm period, not merely in Europe, but globally. And not merely as warm as it is today, but actually as warm ("or warmer"!!) as it is projected to become as a consequence of CO2 induced warming.
And you further are willing to believe that this was "safe" for the pre-industrial civilization, even though it is highly doubtful that there would be a historical record if there were the kind of extreme weather events that are predicted as a consequence of global warming and that we lately seem to be observing--events like the extreme heat and windstorm in the midwest USA this year, or the drought in the southwest USA last year, or the heat and wildfires in Russia the year before that. And on top of that you are also ready to believe that if your supposed medieval global warming was "not catastrophic" for a pre-industrial society, without huge populations living in coastal regions and largely fed by the agricultural output of a few highly productive areas of the globe that (at least until recently) have enjoyed highly favorable climate, then it won't be a problem for us, either.
Yes. I have both, but I'll always go to the PS3 first if I have a choice. I recently had to go to the Xbox to access HBO Go, and as usual found myself swearing at the horrible interface. Most of the menu items on the upper level XBox menu are things that Microsoft is trying to sell you. Things like preferences and access to services like Netflix or your own media on other devices are buried. And instead of being organized in a nice, clean hierarchical menu like on the PS3, things are in panels in blocks (all with flashy pictures) with little logic to the arrangement, bringing back ugly memories of Microsoft's early versions of Windows that stuck documents in panes (back before they gave up on their own design and decided to imitate the Mac).
Actually, I think the "3D" menu on the PS3 has the most usable interface that I've seen on any TV box (except maybe a TiVo)--even better than Apple TV (which is not bad). And the XBox 360 is about the worst.
The XBox Live interface has gotten worse with each revision. Usability is terrible, with the features that the user is really interested in buried under a ton of ads. The PS3 interface is enormously superior, and at least all of the ads are segregated out of the way.
But both of their online stores are really lousy even in terms of selling things--far inferior to Apple's iTunes (which is no great shakes itself).
...and we'll go back to doing exactly the same thing we were doing before, selling our products that are EPEAT compliant to organizations that require that certification, and selling non-compliant products without it--with the understanding that EPEAT will work with us to develop a policy that certifies all of our devices based upon our recycling program, instead of how they are constructed.
Nothing has actually changed except that Apple will go back to identifying products that are EPEAT compliant as such, which lets Apple sell those products to organizations that require that certification. The retina MBP is not one of these; Apple hasn't said anything about modifying its construction, and doubtless doesn't intend to. As a high end laptop sold more to individuals to organizations, its sales are not all that dependent upon EPEAT certification anyway. EPEAT has has indicated willingness to consider input from Apple regarding updates to its certification policy, and I expect that Apple will push for a provision to grant certification to products for which the manufacturer has a credible environmentally friendly recycling program, without nitpicking the details of how the device is constructed.
Most of the predictions of temperature change due to CO2 have been far, far off (The Earth should be far warmer if the models were right). Making expensive decisions on the basis of utterly failed prediction models is stupidity itself.
In fact this is not true, as you would have seen if you'd read the article I cited.
This is an excellent illustration of how global warming "skeptics" differ from actual skeptics. A true skeptic would look skeptically at the record of predictions of both sides of the debate. They would note that climate scientists predicted the timing of the temperature increase, the approximate magnitude, the rise in the oceans, the loss of arctic ice, and even numerous details about the pattern of warming, such as that warming would be greater at night than day (whereas the reverse would be the case if a change in solar radiance were responsible), and that surface warming would be accompanied by cooling at high altitudes. In contrast, industry funded professional doubters of science insisted after every new temperature record that the warming was merely a temporary weather fluctuation, that the trend was beginning to turn down, that arctic ice was on its way to recovery. Even now, when the warming trend has become so clear that no rational person can deny it, the same people consider to insist that the warming has some other cause (what? they don't know, but whatever it is, it must be "natural"). As the weather consequences predicted by the scientists begin to emerge (more frequent extreme weather events, and particularly more heat related events, more strong storms, more frequent flooding), they continue to insist that it is only coincidence.
But the climate science "skeptic" says, "Yes, the very earliest global climate models predicted global warming, but they were a bit off on the magnitude of the warming, so therefore climate science is all wrong, and we don't have to worry about mitigating CO2 pollution."
And then one looks at a temperature graph for the last 300 Mya and realizes it's FUCKING COLD on Earth right now, in an interglacial of the coldest ice age in a quarter billion years.
I suppose that might be comfortable if we were not a species that has evolved and spread across the globe in the last 2 or 3 million years, and is biologically and socially adapted to what we regard as temperate temperatures.
It's getting warmer because it's supposed to, and may eventually reach the average temp that's 8-10C warmer than now.
Global temperature is not magic--if it changes, there needs to be a physical mechanism. At the moment, there is only one such mechanism that is changing--CO2 released by human activities--and most of us are fervently hoping that the temperature increase from that source is not going to reach 8-10 C.
Of course, "eventually" the sun is expected expand and engulf the earth, and it will certainly get warmer then. But don't worry; that's only natural warming--it's "supposed to" happen.
Eugenics was "reviewed and endorsed" last century, by leading scientists and accepted by many governments. Consensus doesn't make it right, just "right for the time".
"Eugenics" is a broad term that has historically been used to describe many kinds of things, ranging from the sort of genetic counseling that we still do today, to abuses like forced sterilization, to actual genocide, so you'll have to be clearer about what aspects of eugenics you are talking about. I'd be surprised if the abusive, pseudoscientific versions of eugenics ever enjoyed the kind of overwhelming scientific acceptance that modern climate science does, but perhaps you can show me evidence that I am mistaken.
But with reference to your broader point, it's certainly conceivable that an overwhelming consensus of scientists with relevant expertise could be mistaken (even though I'm not aware of any actual examples). But as the saying goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." In other words, when an overwhelming majority of the experts are warning of an imminent danger, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to bet our future on the vague hope that the experts could wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary: Palm had invested heavily in development a completely new operating system, WebOS. They even produced a phone, the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre, which had novel features and a design that was not imitative of the iPhone, was well-reviewed, as was WebOS, and at introduction was widely considered the most promising alternative to the iPhone. Palm initially offered the phone through Sprint, where it had record (well, for Sprint, that is) sales. Verizon announced plans to offer the next version of the Palm phone, and placed a large order. But then came the deluge of Android i-clones, and the Palm phone no longer looked competitive against all of the low-priced iPhone look-alikes. Verizon refused delivery of their order, and Palm ran out of money. The company ended up being purchased by HP, primarily for the value of their highly regarded WebOS, but then HP underwent a change in management, and the new CEO wasn't interested in pursuing WebOS products. It now looks like WebOS will become an open-source project.
No, I'm saying that the shorter duration of exclusivity of patents is more in line with what would would benefit the public good than copyright or trademark law. Perhaps a new category could be created for design, but if it has to be shoe-horned into the existing system for protection of intellectual property, patents are the best fit from the standpoint of encouraging innovation in design.
I think that what ultimately killed Palm (and Blackberry) was all of the iPhone knock-offs running Android. Palm, like Apple, made a large investment in developing its own operating system, design, and user interface. Palm could have competed with Apple's limited, and somewhat pricey, product line, but they were up against a deluge of iPhone clones, which were cheap because their manufacturers did not have to invest in a new design. The imitators could just take Apple's design, already successfully market-tested by Apple, and add a feature or two. Weak legal protection of Apple's design is what made it impossible for even moderately large companies like Palm and Blackberry to compete in the phone or tablet market--only a behemoth like Microsoft, which can afford to take years of losses to establish a product in the marketplace, has a prayer of stopping the phone and tablet market from being dominated by minor variations on Apple's designs (which are quite nice, but do not necessarily meet everybody's needs).
It's probably better (from the standpoint of public benefit) for this kind of design to be a patent than for it to be a copyright (or worse, a trademark). Patents have a shorter period before they pass into the public domain. It's good to have a period of protection for a useful design, because that makes it economically feasible for a company to take risks and make large investments in new designs, without worrying that somebody else will immediately appropriate it for their own products and (because they don't have to make large investments in developing and initially marketing the design) undersell the original company. On the other hand, it is good for the design to eventually pass into the public domain (and the 20 years of a US patent is not really all that long), so that the original developer cannot rest on its laurels, but has to continue to innovate.
And yet none of the companies that had experimented with touch screen phones had had particularly great success with them. Seems like Apple must have added something to produce the iPhone's runaway success, much faster than the growth of the market.
As for early reactions to the iPhone, here are some typical comments, which are fairly representative of what I heard from industry leaders at the time:
”[iPhone] just doesn’t matter anymore. There are now alternatives to the iPhone, which has been introduced everywhere else in the world. It’s no longer a novelty.” – Eamon Hoey, Hoey and Associates, April 30, 2008
“We are not at all worried. We think we’ve got the one mobile platform you’ll use for the rest of your life. [Apple] are not going to catch up.” – Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft Mobile Communications Group Product Manager, April 01, 2008
“Microsoft, with Windows Mobile/ActiveSync, Nokia with Intellisync, and Motorola with Good Technology have all fared poorly in the enterprise. We have no reason to expect otherwise from Apple.” – Peter Misek, Canaccord Adams analyst, March 07, 2008
”[Apple should sell 7.9 million iPhones in 2008] Apple’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year is optimistic.” – Toni Sacconaghi, Bernstein Research analyst, February 22, 2008
“What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.” – Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, May 21, 2007
Motorola’s then-Chairman and then-CEO Ed Zander said his company was ready for competition from Apple’s iPhone, due out the following month. “How do you deal with that?” Zander was asked at the Software 2007 conference. Zander quickly retorted, “How do they deal with us?” – Ed Zander, May 10, 2007
“The iPhone is going to be nothing more than a temporary novelty that will eventually wear off.” – Gundeep Hora, CoolTechZone Editor-in-Chief, April 02, 2007
“Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” – John C. Dvorak, Bloated Gas Bag, March 28, 2007
”Even if [the iPhone] is opened up to third parties, it is difficult to see how the installed base of iPhones can reach the level where it becomes a truly attractive service platform for operator and developer investment.” – Tony Cripps, Ovum Service Manager for Mobile User Experience, March 14, 2007
”I’m more convinced than ever that, after an initial frenzy of publicity and sales to early adopters, iPhone sales will be unspectacular iPhone may well become Apple’s next Newton.” – David Haskin, Computerworld, February 26, 200
But what distinguishes a standards essential patent is that patent holders enter voluntarily into an agreement in which they accept and obligation to license their patent and a limitation to modest ("fair and reasonable") licensing fees in return for a guaranteed market for their patent.
While Apple has had some successes in court, it is clear that trying to protect the overall design of their products has been an uphill battle. But Apple is still doing just fine in spite of the deluge of Apple-clone devices--Apple continues to have the dominant products in their categories, and their products continue to be highly enough valued by consumers to earn Apple large profit margins. So there's no need to pity Apple.
I'd say the real victims of the Apple-clone deluge are companies like Palm and Blackberry. Both have their own unique product designs, developed independently rather than as copies of Apple's products. But Palm is dead and Blackberry is dying. And what has killed them has not been competition from Apple, but rather competition from the hordes of Apple-imitators. Both were companies with unique products and a strong sense of design. If they only had had to compete with Apple, they probably would have done reasonably well, differentiating themselves on the basis of design and price from Apple's limit product line. But they didn't only have to compete with Apple, they had to compete with the Apple knock-offs, which were sold as Apple-plus devices, offering a resemblance of Apple's style, and adding in some extra feature, like a larger screen--and at rock-bottom prices, because unlike Apple, Palm, and Blackberry, the knock-off manufacturers were taking little risk--most of the features of their phones had already been market-tested, by Apple.
The consumer is the victim too. Apple's phones and tablets are very nice, but not everybody wants an Apple or Apple look-alike phone or tablet. Unfortunately other choices are being squeezed out of the marketplace by the Apple clones. Palm is defunct, Blackberry on its last legs. The only real alternative to Apple-based design is emerging from Microsoft. Microsoft has never exactly been noted for brilliant design, but at least they have the financial resources to risk introducing a novel design into a market overloaded with Apple clones.
If anything, the history of the iPhone and the iPad shows a need for stronger legal protection of design.
Actually, in order to file such a patent, Apple was required to rigorously define the specific features that constitute its style, with respect to general appearance, interface icons, and even packaging. Apple's complaint is not based upon mere chance overlap of features; indeed, they show that Samsung had already developed their own style of touch phone and tablet design which had few points of overlap with Apple's designs--and that Samsung abandoned it in order to imitate the look and feel of Apple's products.
No, I infer that nobody else had the courage or vision to make the investment and take the risk to enter the market with a phone of that design. And I believe that it would be a good thing if the patent system rewarded companies with courage and vision to take risks that ultimately advance design and benefit consumers.
And even Apple agrees that the pre-iPhone Samsung touch phone is different enough from an iPhone that it does not infringe Apple's design patents. Yet Samsung did not continue to make phones like that--instead, once they saw they iPhone, they switched to designs that imitate Apple's design in numerous ways, right down to the design of the icons, and even the packaging. Perhaps you don't think those details are important, but clearly Apple does...and apparently, Samsung does too.
Of course, you can make a toaster instead of a phone, and you don't have to use any phone standards essential patents. Or you can make another type of phone and you don't need to use GSM standards essential patents. But if you are making a phone that you hope to sell to a cell phone provider or to their customers to be used on their GSM network then it needs to be compatible with GSM standards, which means that it has to implement GSM standards-essential patents.
Even if you imagine that it's remotely plausible that everybody was poised to take the "obvious" (by today's 20/20 hindsight) next step in phone design (down to the design and arrangement of the icons), but that Apple by it's superior (but nonetheless somehow non-patent worthy) engineering (compared to experienced phone designers like Samsung and HTC) was somehow able to beat everybody to market, the evidence from court filings shows that it is not true. Here is Google's original concept design for an android phone. Here is Samsung's design for a touch-based phone before the saw the iPhone. Moreover, if you read the reviews and comments from other phone manufacturers at the time of iPhone announcement, nobody was saying, "Apple managed to be the first to market with the kind of phone we are all working on." Rather, the nearly-universal wisdom was, "There will be at most a small market for a phone of this design."
As I pointed out, a design patent is not simply on a single feature, such as an overall shape, but on multiple features of a particular type of product. So pointing to a completely different product, with a different function, that happens to look superficially similar is missing the point by a very wide margin.
As noted previously, Apple's design patent covered not merely the form factor of the product, but on the combination of its features, including the arrangement and design of the icons, and even the style of the package that it comes in.
The point of a standard is that everybody is compelled to follow it. There are many ways that a cell phone could work, but a particular approach (which might or might not be the best) was chosen. A company that voluntarily submits its invention as part of a standard is guaranteed that they will receive royalties from everybody in the industry, and they are protected from the possibility of their invention being supplanted by an improved design from another company.
So, for example, if slide-to-unlock were a FRAND feature of cell phones, cell phone manufacturers would be required to use that method, and to pay Apple royalties. Even if another company came up with a better method--biometric identification, maybe--they would not be able to compete with Apple because their method would not meet the specifications for the standard.
Apple has chosen to keep its design patents private. They run the risk that another company might come up with a superior design and take the market away from them, although fortunately for Apple, most of their competitors have so little design sense that they cannot conceive of any alternative but to copy Apple--and the flood of cheap not-quite iPhones from manufacturers like Samsung and HTC, sold at low prices because those manufacturers did not have to do extensive user testing to discover the right design elements, and ran little risk of flopping in the marketplace (because Apple has already taken the risk and proved that there was a market for similar devices) makes it effectively impossible for another company to develop a truly original design (Palm probably came close--they had an original design, and might well have competed with Apple, but they could not compete with the flood of cheap of iPhone knock-offs running Android). It is not Apple's patents that are stifling genuine innovation--rather, it is the absence of effective legal protection of Apple's designs.
But for the most part, Apple was not first. Almost every Apple feature can be found on some earlier failed product or other. What Apple was the first to do was to find the particular combination of features that resulted in a product with a novel "look and feel" that appealed to a huge number of consumers.
A design patent does not claim ownership of the individual elements of the design, but rather rights over the specific combination of those multiple elements. So it is more accurate to say that Apple has claimed rights over devices that resemble an iPad in multiple ways, overall shape and proportions being only one of those.
It is quite clear that Apple created something. It is instructive to look at tablet design before and after iPad. Prior to the iPad, the overwhelming industry opinion was that pad devices were niche products with no large consumer market, and that consumers far preferred netbooks. That opinion was not without basis. Multiple attempts by multiple companies to develop a pad device had failed.
The iPhone similarly challenged conventional wisdom and completely transformed cell phone design. Yet now, multiple manufacturers are simply insisting that it is impossible to think of a phone design that would appeal to consumers that did not look pretty much like Apple's design. Of course, before the iPhone, they thought exactly the same thing about Blackberry's design.
Apple's history of transforming consumer electronics extends back to their introduction of window-based GUIs for consumer computers. Any one device could be luck, but Apple has done it repeatedly. No single feature of any of those devices--the Mac, the Macbook Air, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, can be reasonably said to be responsible for their success; rather, it is the particular combination. So the objections to Apple's design patents are much like insisting that a famous chef should not be renowned for his signature dish because he didn't invent beef, or garlic, or pepper.
Does patent or copyright law protect Apple's particular brand of creativity, which has repeatedly transformed the user experience of consumer electronics? Perhaps the law offers no real protection for this kind of creativity; I don't know. But there is certainly a reasonable argument that the law should encourage companies like Apple that genuinely innovate in the area of design, and that are willing to take huge financial risks in introducing designs that challenge the conventional wisdom.
In fact, modern climate theory quite well account for climate over the period for which we have reliable information on both global temperature and drivers of climate such as solar radiation and CO2, including the impact of "natural experiments" such as volcanic eruptions. Estimating climate further back in the past is fraught with numerous uncertainties, and depends upon the use of indirect "proxies" such as measurement of tree rings, which are subject to a variety of artifacts. However, a curious characteristic of many self-styled "skeptics" of global warming is that they become amazingly credulous regarding any claim that can be interpreted as a challenge to global warming theory. So the same people who insist that the evidence for global warming from CO2 is weak will then enthusiastically accept third party accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe as ironclad evidence of an unexplained period of global warming during medieval times.
It certainly is not irreversible in geological time, but given the slow relaxation of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, it is likely to persist for a period of time that is long in the scale of human lifetimes. Of course, there is the potential for intentional climate engineering (as opposed to the climate-engineering-by-neglect that we are currently engaged in)--but every such proposal I've seen so far seems to involve doing things that are as hard/slow to reverse (i.e. if they "go wrong") as increasing CO2.
I'm not sure what you consider to be a "fair bit of evidence." Certainly global temperature has been more than a degree or two warmer in the distant past, so any such stability mechanism must be of recent vintage, geologically speaking. And there is no statistical evidence that any such mechanism is currently limiting temperature increase. Once one corrects for known sources of short term fluctuation, global warming seems to be continuing unabated. So any such temperature limiting mechanism must have a very sharp threshold if it is going to save us from the temperature increase projected as a consequence of continued CO2 pollution. Sharp thresholds are somewhat hard to come by in nature, and generally require some sort of strong feedback. What specific physical mechanism do you have in mind, and what is the "fair bit of evidence" for it?
It is a standard principle of risk management that the greater the uncertainty regarding the magnitude of a potential loss, the more you should be prepared to invest to insure against it. That's not fear, that is rational assessment of risk.
And here we have a prime example of the amazing credulity of the climate "skeptic." Based upon no more evidence than indirect and somewhat contradictory "proxies" like tree-ring measurements and third-party accounts of agricultural practices in northern Europe, you are willing to conclude that there was a warm period, not merely in Europe, but globally. And not merely as warm as it is today, but actually as warm ("or warmer"!!) as it is projected to become as a consequence of CO2 induced warming.
And you further are willing to believe that this was "safe" for the pre-industrial civilization, even though it is highly doubtful that there would be a historical record if there were the kind of extreme weather events that are predicted as a consequence of global warming and that we lately seem to be observing--events like the extreme heat and windstorm in the midwest USA this year, or the drought in the southwest USA last year, or the heat and wildfires in Russia the year before that. And on top of that you are also ready to believe that if your supposed medieval global warming was "not catastrophic" for a pre-industrial society, without huge populations living in coastal regions and largely fed by the agricultural output of a few highly productive areas of the globe that (at least until recently) have enjoyed highly favorable climate, then it won't be a problem for us, either.
Yes. I have both, but I'll always go to the PS3 first if I have a choice. I recently had to go to the Xbox to access HBO Go, and as usual found myself swearing at the horrible interface. Most of the menu items on the upper level XBox menu are things that Microsoft is trying to sell you. Things like preferences and access to services like Netflix or your own media on other devices are buried. And instead of being organized in a nice, clean hierarchical menu like on the PS3, things are in panels in blocks (all with flashy pictures) with little logic to the arrangement, bringing back ugly memories of Microsoft's early versions of Windows that stuck documents in panes (back before they gave up on their own design and decided to imitate the Mac).
Actually, I think the "3D" menu on the PS3 has the most usable interface that I've seen on any TV box (except maybe a TiVo)--even better than Apple TV (which is not bad). And the XBox 360 is about the worst.
The XBox Live interface has gotten worse with each revision. Usability is terrible, with the features that the user is really interested in buried under a ton of ads. The PS3 interface is enormously superior, and at least all of the ads are segregated out of the way.
But both of their online stores are really lousy even in terms of selling things--far inferior to Apple's iTunes (which is no great shakes itself).
...and we'll go back to doing exactly the same thing we were doing before, selling our products that are EPEAT compliant to organizations that require that certification, and selling non-compliant products without it--with the understanding that EPEAT will work with us to develop a policy that certifies all of our devices based upon our recycling program, instead of how they are constructed.
Nothing has actually changed except that Apple will go back to identifying products that are EPEAT compliant as such, which lets Apple sell those products to organizations that require that certification. The retina MBP is not one of these; Apple hasn't said anything about modifying its construction, and doubtless doesn't intend to. As a high end laptop sold more to individuals to organizations, its sales are not all that dependent upon EPEAT certification anyway. EPEAT has has indicated willingness to consider input from Apple regarding updates to its certification policy, and I expect that Apple will push for a provision to grant certification to products for which the manufacturer has a credible environmentally friendly recycling program, without nitpicking the details of how the device is constructed.
In fact this is not true, as you would have seen if you'd read the article I cited.
This is an excellent illustration of how global warming "skeptics" differ from actual skeptics. A true skeptic would look skeptically at the record of predictions of both sides of the debate. They would note that climate scientists predicted the timing of the temperature increase, the approximate magnitude, the rise in the oceans, the loss of arctic ice, and even numerous details about the pattern of warming, such as that warming would be greater at night than day (whereas the reverse would be the case if a change in solar radiance were responsible), and that surface warming would be accompanied by cooling at high altitudes. In contrast, industry funded professional doubters of science insisted after every new temperature record that the warming was merely a temporary weather fluctuation, that the trend was beginning to turn down, that arctic ice was on its way to recovery. Even now, when the warming trend has become so clear that no rational person can deny it, the same people consider to insist that the warming has some other cause (what? they don't know, but whatever it is, it must be "natural"). As the weather consequences predicted by the scientists begin to emerge (more frequent extreme weather events, and particularly more heat related events, more strong storms, more frequent flooding), they continue to insist that it is only coincidence.
But the climate science "skeptic" says, "Yes, the very earliest global climate models predicted global warming, but they were a bit off on the magnitude of the warming, so therefore climate science is all wrong, and we don't have to worry about mitigating CO2 pollution."
I suppose that might be comfortable if we were not a species that has evolved and spread across the globe in the last 2 or 3 million years, and is biologically and socially adapted to what we regard as temperate temperatures.
Global temperature is not magic--if it changes, there needs to be a physical mechanism. At the moment, there is only one such mechanism that is changing--CO2 released by human activities--and most of us are fervently hoping that the temperature increase from that source is not going to reach 8-10 C.
Of course, "eventually" the sun is expected expand and engulf the earth, and it will certainly get warmer then. But don't worry; that's only natural warming--it's "supposed to" happen.
"Eugenics" is a broad term that has historically been used to describe many kinds of things, ranging from the sort of genetic counseling that we still do today, to abuses like forced sterilization, to actual genocide, so you'll have to be clearer about what aspects of eugenics you are talking about. I'd be surprised if the abusive, pseudoscientific versions of eugenics ever enjoyed the kind of overwhelming scientific acceptance that modern climate science does, but perhaps you can show me evidence that I am mistaken.
But with reference to your broader point, it's certainly conceivable that an overwhelming consensus of scientists with relevant expertise could be mistaken (even though I'm not aware of any actual examples). But as the saying goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." In other words, when an overwhelming majority of the experts are warning of an imminent danger, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to bet our future on the vague hope that the experts could wrong.