Posted on 05/05/2015 10:19:15 PM PDT by Swordmaker
The patent -- which ensures the design for the Apple Watch cannot be copied by a competitor -- was filed in August of last year, just weeks ahead of its unveiling.
The Apple Watch's design is now officially protected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The USPTO on Tuesday issued a design patent on the Apple Watch look and feel. The design patent filing provides precious little information, but includes several sketches showing the device from all angles, including from the top, side and underneath the face where the sensor and charging apparatus sit.
Getting a design patent is an important step in protecting an invention. Apple's newly delivered patent means other companies cannot copy the design of its wearable. It doesn't, however, prevent other companies from delivering products that are similar, but not identical in design.
Interestingly, the design patent was filed with the USPTO in August 2014, just weeks before Apple unveiled its smartwatch at an event in September. Likely in an effort to hide its plans, Apple named its patent simply "Electronic device."
The Apple Watch, which requires an iPhone 5 or later to run basic apps and receive notifications, is Apple's first foray into the wearables space, and a pricey one at that. It tops out at $17,000 for the 18-karat gold edition, with more modestly priced options like the Apple Watch Sport, which starts at $349.
The smartwatch market had been ticking quietly for several years, with occasional flutters on rumors of an impending watch from Apple. The Apple Watch went on sale last month, and analysts have contended that it is the spark that the market has been waiting for.
Competitors include a range of new or updated smartwatches from companies including Sony, Samsung, Huawei, Motorola, LG and Pebble. The Apple Watch's health-tracking capabilities also mean that consumers will be weighing it against fitness bands from the likes of Fitbit and Microsoft.
Unlike with iPhone launches, Apple has not yet disclosed initial sales figures. The smartwatch has been back-ordered since presales started April 10, and many would-be buyers won't receive their Apple Watches until June or even July. It's unclear how much of the delay is due to the strength of the demand and how much is because of supply shortages and manufacturing issues.
Apple Watch's design has been generally viewed positively, with CNET's Reviews team saying it's "the most ambitious, well-constructed smartwatch ever seen." Like most smartwatches, the Apple Watch comes with a rectangular touchscreen and is offered in three flavors -- a low-cost Sport model, the standard model, and a gold-plated Edition version. Since the basic design and form factor are identical across the product line, the design patent covers all versions.
According to the design patent documentation, Apple's intellectual property is good for 14 years.
Apple declined to comment on the patent.
Apple Patent on Touch Typing, Multitouch Upheld; Allows Ban on Most Androids
Thanks for the support. I had about come to the same conclusion. No amount of evidence presented sways him from his basic argument and he keeps misrepresenting what I say. . . claiming that I claim that Apple invented X, when I have claimed that Apple invented X+Y, including Z. He will come back later and prove that Apple did not invent X, something i never asserted, claim victory, do a victory lap, and assert that I an a "pathetic insect" worthy of his superior pity.
His is a pathetic approach to discussion or debate but a step above most anti-Apple hating trolls.
Not one word, Diogenes. . .
Yes. Odd isn't it? At least from your perspective. My guess is that the author considered Apples achievements more as improvements/variations on a theme rather than groundbreaking developments... which is how I see them.
Apple does good work, but they didn't invent the wheel.
I follow the same methodology I have always followed. I look through the threads until I see something of interest, I then look through that thread until I see an interesting message. I thought FredZarguna's message was particularly funny, and I commented on it.
Next thing I know, you are trying to talk me out of something which seems very evident to me, and I think others; That the tablet computer didn't spring fully formed, out of the brow of Apple-o. (Yes, I know it's Zeus, but I thought a terrible pun was appropriate. :) )
Whether they won a lawsuit or not, it appears to me that Apple taking credit for the idea of a tablet computer is like the rooster taking credit for the sunrise. I wonder if the Kubrick estate is getting royalties?
You are the one who comes into Apple threads and tries to educate us with your ignorant opinion when you don't know what you are talking about.
Given the number of examples where you said Apple invented this or that, and then I looked it up and found out it wasn't true, I would say the Pot is calling the Kettle black. :)
Actually it's not. Look at the title of the article, which is the focus of the article. . . It IS big screen touch surfaces. And Apple has many ground breaking patents, innovations, and developments to its name. YOUR blindness won't allow you to see them.
I've never claimed they have. You've chosen to interpret what Apple has correctly claimed, the spin put on it by anti-Apple critics, and your own bias to claim they have claimed they have invented what they have not claimed.
That article you posted is not at all flattering to Apple. It confirms a lot of the things i've said as well.
Apple is beginning to look like a rent seeking patent troll, and relying on it's popularity here in the US to sway subjective juror's opinions even though the objective truth appears very different.
But if that invalidation ruling was a bit of a mixed bag for Apple's crusade to exclude top Android phonemakers' product from the market, the latest ruling from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on a key touch patent is a flat-out win for Apple, and a surprise win at that.After an earlier pre-examination found the patent entirely invalid on the grounds of prior art, on Sept. 4 the USPTO issued a reexamination certificate that found that all the claims of Apple's U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949 to be valid.
Makes it seem as if there is some hanky panky going on with the patent examinations. It smells.
And a San Fransisco Jury? OMG. Samsung lost when the case was filed in that Venue. They should have demanded a change in Venue.
Yes, obviously large LCD screens with capacitance sense multi-touch screens are completely different technology than are the small ones.
And Apple has many ground breaking patents, innovations, and developments to its name.
I'm sure they do. Probably some of them are even valid by what I consider objective standards, but what I see would look more appropriate as a copyright rather than a patent.
I have not gotten deep into the methodology of multi-touch capacitance screens, but I would wager the bulk of it's functionality comes from interpretive software, not hardware.
Actually it is not. It is how does the hardware interpret what is a justified touch and not just an inadvertent touch. When and where is the actual touch point of a large surface of a finger tip intended to touch on a highly reactive highly sensitive high definition capacitance touch grid, so the accuracy does not keep jumping around. It is a system between hardware and software. . . and is patentable. How does the hardware distinguish the correct signal from a multitude of inputs over false signals? How far did the touch have to move before it was a scroll, and not a random micromotion? And which direction? How does it find the intended target point? These were not trivial issues on a multi-touch capacitance screen.
I read the patent when it was first issued, something I frequently do, and it is ~50 pages long and full of hardware diagrams showing how such circuitry makes either/or and exclusion decisions to prevent false signals. It was quite a piece of engineering and innovation. The single-touch systems were child's play in comparison because they did not have to take a second set of coordinates and secondary motions into consideration. . . now add in third and fourth touches and sensing those and their positions and motions.
Sorry, you are just plain wrong because you don't understand what you are talking about.
Diogenes, a copyright would be entirely inappropriate for this. A copyright has a life of 75 years beyond the death of the creator. Do you REALLY want to copyright on this stuff? A Patent has a limited 20 year exclusivity with an option to renew for 17. . . and then it is public domain. I think that for some inventions 20 is too long these days. . . and too short for others such as prescription drugs.
I outlined what my recommendations for patent reform were in another thread. Basically I recommended a shorter exclusivity on some tech inventions with mandatory licensing on a Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRaND) rate system after a the period of exclusivity, I'd even extend the renewals perpetually so long as the originator or his assignees were still using the patent and licensing it under FRAND rates so that his heirs could benefit. The key is the FRAND system. I would set declining FRAND rates for a number of years and then a fixed rate from then on.
A pre-examination is the start of the case. . . which Apple won. Again you do not understand. All a pre-examination requires is that someone, even an anonymous someone, can claim I have evidence that there are pre-existing technologies that date from before the claimed patent application that would invalidate this patent. They merely have to CLAIM they exist. That claim is then opened for a full re-examination by the Patent Office.
Those claims of prior art were the very things YOU point to and it turned out the anonymous complainant was Samsung, a known multiple patent infringer (it's their stock in trade see the lawsuits they've had filed against them by Pioneer, Dyson, RCA, and a host of other Consumer Electronics and Appliance companies for ripping off their patents and designs), desperately trying to de-rail the lawsuit in California. The patent office found that "prior art" not vaild for these claims—to the surprise of the ignorant pundits who thought, like you, it was, because they had not bothered to READ THE DAMN PATENT CLAIMS in question.
Apple prevailed on all 19 issues that were raised by Samsung. All 19. The pundits were surprised because they simply did not understand what it was that Apple had invented. . . just as YOU don't.
And a San Fransisco Jury? OMG. Samsung lost when the case was filed in that Venue. They should have demanded a change in Venue.
Samsung lost to a very technically minded jury, not in San Francisco, but a Federal Court in Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, not San Francisco County.
The Foreman of that jury had been a previous employee of Microsoft. Another member of the jury was a current management employee of Google. More than half of the jury had degrees in tech fields. More than half the jurors were Android phone users. The jurors knew what they were doing. The Judge in the case, Lucy Koh is a Korean-American who kept making rulings against Apple and for Samsung (and after the trial verdict, knocked $300 million off the Jury's award of more than $1.2 Billion to Apple!). . . and still Samsung, a South Korean company tech company, lost. SHEESH!
Diogenes, You are going to have to change your Freepname. You are not looking for honesty; YOU are looking for Dis-honesty in everything. . . and you see dishonesty in everything. . . especially in everything Apple is associated with. You assume that everything Apple does or claims is dishonest or nefarious. Why is that? I think you project what YOU would do if you were in their position. Sad.
And all of that would appear to be a function of the software, not the hardware.
Sorry, you are just plain wrong because you don't understand what you are talking about.
You seem quite insistent on this. :)
The single-touch systems were child's play in comparison because they did not have to take a second set of coordinates and secondary motions into consideration. . . now add in third and fourth touches and sensing those and their positions and motions.
You are familiar with this phenomena in computer science known as "multi-tasking"? * Again, processing multiple simultaneous inputs is done with software. Once you get the process down for doing it once, you make it a subroutine, and you call the same subroutine for the other inputs.
I am pretty sure the hardware just registers contacts, and it is the software which plots the individual movement over time, and thereby renders them into the various control functions.
.
* In actuality computers are really not multi-tasking, i.e. doing multiple functions simultaneously. They generally are processing functions sequentially, but at such a high rate of speed as to create the appearance of concurrence.
And this is supposed to be reassuring that the jury would not subjectively favor Apple?
You assume that everything Apple does or claims is dishonest or nefarious.
No, I don't. I just think that in this case they exaggerate their claims because it makes them money and increases their prestige. It may be good business, but it is not good ethics, which does incline me to believe it is indeed a legacy of Steve Jobs.
This sort of behavior would appear to have his fingerprints all over it.
Actually, there are two ways to accomplish multi-tasking. If you had come out of the Amiga environment, you would know this. There is software cooperative multi-tasking where the software has to be programed to hand-off the task to the next, and hardware pre-emptive multitasking where the hardware enforces the multitasking. You see, you really do not know what you are talking about.
And all of that would appear to be a function of the software, not the hardware.
And I told you, I read the patent and it is in the design of the overall system. . . and patentable. I am insistent about it because I do know what I am talking about and it is obvious you do not.
And again you prove my thesis that you see dishonesty in everything you look at.
You are aware that Diogenes was the Father of Cynicism? Yes, I see dishonesty everywhere, and I am seldom pleasantly surprised.
I keep getting amused at you saying this. I was constructing component level hardware of my own design when I was 15, as well as doing machine code programing for it. I was studying boolean algebra when I was 10, as well as the various logic gates necessary for building digital systems of all types.
I have worked on a hardware/software level with quite an array of different processors. I have personally constructed (wire wrap, solder, perfboard, factory produced circuit boards, etc.) hundred of different computer control systems for various companies/agencies, for which they pay me quite well, and I am still so doing at present.
I can build and program custom devices. Can you do that?
I can grab a new processor, and in a couple of days, I can be making it execute my code. I know computers on the component level. I can build one out of resistors, diodes, and transistors. Can you do that?
I understand about bus sharing in multi-processor environments (Which I suppose is what you are referring to regarding "Hardware Multitasking.") I know about Proms, Eproms, Sram, Dram, Refresh, fan-out, TTL, DTL, Bi-Directional Bus Drivers, Octal Ports, Flip Flops, Shift Registers, Latches, Encoders, Decoders, A to D and D to A conversion (indeed I can build such converters) Stacks, Pops, Peeks, calls, Interrupts, Posts, Nands, Nots, Nors, Exclusive Ors, shift registers, 2s complement arithmetic, division by shifting, BCD, Matrix scan, LED, LCD, CRTs, Multiplexing (both frequency and time division) Electroluminescence, Pixies, Nixies, Hall effect devices, Fets, BJTs, LSIs, PALs, UJTs, Zeners, Saturatable reactors, Magnetic core memory, Triacs, Diacs, Varactors, Inductors, Capacitors, Resistors, Crystal Controlled Oscillators, serial data transfer methods, line drivers, USB, MPEG, bit maps, texture maps, mip maps, Direct X, C++, Basic, ASCII, Bits, Bytes, Nibbles, Dwords, Chars, Integers, Arrays, Look up Tables, Subroutines, Interrupt routines, DMA, FIFO, LIFO, GIGO, High byte, Low byte, Big-endian Little-endian, and so on.
I do a lot of work with RF data transfer and Control, and I know pretty much how virtually everything electronic works.
Now I have little doubt that California is full of people who have better expertise than me in these fields, but I very much doubt that you are one of them.
Dude, this post impresses me less than all your other FUD related posts regarding Apple and its products. And those other posts have shown you to be clearly jealous of Apple and its products and, for some strange reason, motivated to conduct (very unsuccessful) jihad against Apple products and their reputation.
You can throw out all the buzzwords you want, but it’s clear you NEVER posed a thread to Bill Gates, Steve Job or Michael Dell. Your credibility is NIL.
Where do you get this "clearly jealous of Apple and its products?" I've said several times that Apple makes the best products and for example, that their competition didn't catch up to what Macs could do until nearly the year 2000, and that was using a processor about a hundred times faster with about a hundred times the ram needed in a Mac, and even then the Windows machine was still a Rube Goldberg patchwork mess.
I have no issue with Apples engineering, it's quite good. My issue is with their politics, and their "chic" status among the sycophantic "in" crowd.
You can throw out all the buzzwords you want, but it’s clear you NEVER posed a thread to Bill Gates, Steve Job or Michael Dell.
No I didn't. They made their piles of money before my time. Let me take what I know to 1970 and I would clean their clock.
But how about you? Do you know anything about computers? Do you know how they work? Can *YOU* build microprocessor circuitry? Can you program in machine code or assembly? Can you wire up support chips and interfaces? Do you sell products of your own design?
Your credibility is NIL.
Nah, actually it's pretty good, but known mostly to the companies and other entities that pay me to build stuff for them. For online wannabes who just talk? I don't really care.
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