You spin a unbalanced thing in a circle and it creates a vibration. Make it less unbalanced and you get a smoother vibration.
We've gone from completely dumb eccentric rotating mass vibration to trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking, or the Ice Cubes demo in in Nintendo's 1-2-Switch[0], both of which use linear resonant actuators. Those actuators are themselves a complex enough piece of technology to warrant a patent, and the techniques to simulate the feel or real physical objects using those actuators are pretty damn non-trivial as well.
As a general rule, I find that the patent system is problematic but, within the scope of the system as it exists today, these are perfectly reasonable things to patent.
Like my Mac's trackpad ? Can someone ELI5 how it works ? It's gotta be magic-adjacent cos when the machine locks up, the trackpad is deader than a doornail.
They've been doing this since 2015 or so. Prior Macs didn't click on the top 1/4 of the trackpad, because there was basically a "hinge" there and the glass would actually press on a physical button.
I wonder if there's a teardown that has really dug into it.
It's not really "high tech", it's just tuned well, with some high power for the size.
Because frankly, I played with and disassembled many speakers of various sizes too when I was young, and one thing I internalized then is that speakers are piss poor at shaking anything except their own membrane. You can't just make things vibrate with a small speaker glued to a random thing. That's why as a kid I was not surprised to discover vibrators are spinning some unbalanced weight around - obviously that would shake things (as experienced by anyone who saw a washing machine decide to take a walk).
As nobody else seems to care or is able to build the same, maybe it is worth a dollar or two. Though 5.7B is a bit much.
Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones and 4.5 billion iPhones, iPads, and iPods together.
$5.7B seems low if every one of those devices infringes.
If it’s iPhone 6s and later and all watches (for taptic input), that’s around 2 1/3 billion phones and 1/3 billion watches, so even just $2/device gets you into that range.
The community has to pick a lane. Either IP theft is good and promotes competition, or IP theft is bad and we have to apply the law equally.
One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.
Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.
There isn’t one mind. We are unique individuals with different opinions. Opinions of an individual can even be contradictory!
Tell me you’re not so thick
I'm no expert but they use completely different technologies. Apple's Taptic Engine is not just a motor spinning an off balance weight like massagers.
Apple's "liquid retina display" is just LG/Sharp/Etc IPS LCD - aka what they should be called, just like everyone does. None of this "magical Apple words" to make it sound like their own tech.
The aspect of "you are granted a monopoly on a technology for a period of time" is something that is especially bad.
We should have the same with software.
Instead of patents, the government could just pay scientists who make useful things. Sure it costs government money, but so do the lawsuits.
But most of science is funded by the government ... shouldn't the taxpayer get something in return?
Source is less important with LLMs now, but it's wasteful and destructive to the planet to have everyone need to use them to reverse engineer things for no reason.
An economy built around not making knowledge prolific is obviously a bad, inefficient idea, and in the end will be our downfall.
That would infringe upon my freedom as a creator of software. No thanks.
That said, we are talking about patents here, which are sometimes their own minefield of bullshit.
For example, Having to deal with a jury that may or may not be able to discern (Especially how a patent is written nowadays) versus an alternative but non-infringing design that accomplishes the same thing, and/or being able to properly discern similarly alternative 'prior art' from before the patent existed.
I don't know how guilty Apple is, or isn't, to be clear, but I remember how close to 25-ish years ago, a paintball company named Smart Parts managed to snatch up certain patents and then bully most of the industry into either paying them royalties or ceasing manufacture of electronic paintball markers, even despite the presence of prior art [0] and in many cases a very different fundamental design [1].
Or, as another curiosity, the whole thing where Doom 3 only got EAX support to keep Creative Labs happy, about them holding a patent on Z-Fail that Carmack didn't know about when he independently discovered it. And hell, the irony is, the technique is still instead known as 'Carmack's Reverse'.
Or, I remember the time I was at a company and I got to sign patent rights away for a dollar. The overall concept was so vague, I had to cringe in every meeting around describing the so-called 'novelty'.
tl;dr - patent 'infringement' is a murky field, and certainly different from hoovering up material protected by copyright, regardless of your opinions on current copyright laws (I do think they are way way way too long, also I think patent law has changed for the worse in the last 20-ish years.)
[0] - Specifically, there was a patent for a US Navy 'Pneumatic machine gun with photo cell interrupted circuit' that was actually listed as a prior art citation on the Smart Parts Patent, but most of the companies that were truly non-infringing were also too small to have the cash to fight in court.
[1] - The original Smart Parts markers used a mechanical/electrical switch, board controlled air valve to move bolts and hammers back and forth, but they would even go after manufacturers that used a mechanical solenoid and hall effect sensor to do the trigger pull. i.e. Smart Parts markers were designed for electronic valves from the start, whereas many of the other manufacturers pursued, the 'electronic' upgrade was just a different Grip and trigger setup.
I think they do, but the company themselves found Apple didn't infringe, and then the court agreed. somehow it got appealed and then the appeals jury said they did not willfully infringe, so ... $5.7 billion?
Something is way weirder than usual in this case
But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
What got them in the same room in the first place was them being the only group of people (most likely) working on a specific piece of enabling technology that they believed would be rewarded by the market and adoption AND they needed to make a living in the mean time (getting paid to do that work.)
A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with to allow said group / company to invest the time and money in advance to making that technology and wants to risk/trade 20 future years to collect profit on the work they do now.
If you don’t like the game, get better at it.
The interest in a shared problem and the passion to solve it?
> A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with
I think that’s a bold claim in the face of the numerous contributions from e.g. universities, open source communities, single-person projects, etc that have pushed the world forward. We simply do not know a world free of the oppression of patents, the institution sustains itself.
> If you don’t like the game, get better at it.
I don’t think people will be playing this game much longer in the face of generative AI, unless ofc the ruling classes succeed in locking down access to that tech, gobally.
If whoever happens to need the technology first is almost certain to invent it, it's not worth $6B. The idea behind patents is supposed to be disclosing things that people wouldn't otherwise come up with on their own.
Not saying that's true here, but it's certainly true for a lot of patents. (Variable-speed windshield wipers deserved a government-enforced monopoly? Really?)
"Apple's Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction's technology, which Taction's own testing of Apple's products confirmed during trial," Apple said in response
So the article doesn't explain why it was appealed, then found shady on appeal.
it's a weird article, worth reading.
Appeals said that was inappropriately based on narrowing the claim too far and excluding expert testimony.
Second time a jury heard the whole thing, and found Apple infringed.
Also, “The jury did not find the infringement willful. Apple said it will appeal.”
Apple still lost the American lawsuit however, but because of all the prior work in Japan, Germany and Britain from the early 1900’s the American patents have no standing in the rest of the world.
https://www.enzuzo.com/blog/data-privacy-lawsuits
https://openclassactions.com/news/apple-siri-settlement-paym...
I wonder what it’ll be like after appeal.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10659885B2/en?oq=us10659... claims 17 and 19
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10820117B2/en?oq=us10820... claim 16