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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it.

Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not.

As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.

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This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.

And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.

Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears.

Or do people think Apple invented that, too?

And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.

Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.

It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense.

It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.

To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.

> It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.

How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,

To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.

To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.

None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?

So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?

To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).

The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.

Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.

> Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.

Exactly.

If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?

Multitouch and the accompanying interface was most probably developed by Synaptics, Apples touchscreen supplier: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c...

They bought a company called FingerWorks in 2005 - Synaptics had nothing to do with the iPhone.

> This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.

Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook.

> I think it only seems obvious after the fact.

It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design.

There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.

Who was going to do it?

Microsoft was stuck on making Windows Mobile a small PC.

RIM was poo pooing the touchscreen two years after the iPhone came out.

Google was aping the Blackberry with the Android and completely started over after the iPhone came out.

Nokia didn't have the OS or the platform to make a full fledge smart phone. But they were the most likely.

LG Prada?

Don't get me wrong - the iPhone was ground breaking. It's the hundred little details that made it special.

But would someone else have done it? Yes. Is this relevant? No

Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually.

But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.

You mean like the HTC Dream?

The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?

None of those things were the subject of this patent suit.

The original statement that I was replying to was:

The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.

The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.

This assertion is valid only if you think that products "evolve" in the absence of demand-side market pressure.

Which explains the incessant mockery Apple received when they revealed it.

Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops.

The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.

To support the obviousness of multitouch interfaces Camperbob mentions: See this prototype from Synaptics from 2006: https://www.slashgear.com/synaptics-onyx-concept-live-demo-c...

The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.

At best that is an iteration of Blackberry or Nokia-style smart phone interfaces. It doesn't look particularly impressive, even for 2006.

That was the point: The evolution of stylus-based interfaces to multi-touch was clear to the major players in the field, and the direction the necessary UX changes had to evolve to were obvious.

That tech demo came a year after Apple acquired FingerWorks; who had been producing and selling multitouch technologies since 1998.

Thanks, didn't know that.

I reminded by that quote for The Social Network. “If you invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook”.

But Facebook wasn't a thing that had to be "invented." It was simply an incremental refinement of things that already existed. Only its marketing was innovative -- the key idea being to build, then connect, audiences of homogeneous users at colleges.

And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.

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