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Comment by wetwiper | Hacker News Reader

> Apple adopted the term to describe a new sensor that measures depth

Not to be _that_ person, but someone should maybe inform the author that use of LiDAR has been around for quite some time already... the "sensor that measures depth" is pretty much a description of what LiDAR is used for and this isnt a new application of the term. And sensors to do this already exist so no "newness" in this field. I mean sure, if they were talking about it being included for consumer usage in everyday mobile devices, then maybe thats a new thing? But the wording of that phrase seems to want to credit Apple for something newly coined or invented, which isnt the case

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Basic reading comprehension

It says adopted, not invented or created. If you continued reading for two more paragraphs you would have read the author say that the auto industry has also adopted lidar. Is the author implying that the auto industry has also invented lidar?!?

It’s not even close to insinuating that Apple invented lidar. And this article isn’t from Apple, anyway.

Wow this is a fairly harsh reply to the parent. Their point was merely that LIDAR is already a known thing; you would say “Apple adopted the term GPS for their location device” either. Why would anyone need to “adopt” a term that’s industry standard?

I agree that it’s not as if the author claims that Apple invented the term, but asserting the parent lacks “basic reading comprehension skills” is a bit mean, don’t you think?

Mean? No, I don’t think so. Finish reading the article before jumping to make a comment that is contradicted by the article itself.

You are claiming that being verbally abusive in response to a correct claim is justifiable as long as the author eventually wrote something that may be itself derived from the same correct claim.

More concisely: you're way out of line here and doubling down is pushing you further over it

But since when does using a known word for it's intended meaning is adopting ? It's just the right word. They did not adopt the word camera for their camera, it is what it is.

Apple isn’t claiming to have adopted it. The author is.

“Adopted the term” doesn’t mean “adopted the technology”. The former is used to implicate you’re doing something brand new and are naming it.

The sentence is a bit awkward but I think it is phrased that way to suggest that Apple’s sensor is different from other things called lidar which tend to involve scanning with a rotating mirror.

Solid state / flash lidar systems are also fairly established in autonomous systems. Usually the reason most these lidar systems use rotating mirrors is to reduce cost, power requirements, etc.

I almost forgot that Apple bought PrimeSense in 2013 (the company that used this IR pattern technique in the old Microsoft Kinects). It's really structured light depth based sampling which is a bit different than lidar.

Appled used PrimeSense technology to enable FaceID, take a closer look at an iPhone sensor array in the notch and compare it to Kinect - https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/17/16315510/i...

Even in consumer devices it's not new. Hobbyists pulled lidars from roombas for a while to wire into arduino-driven toys. Nowadays you can just buy inexpensive (and not very good) lidar hardware on aliexpress and such.

I remember hearing about LIDAR in the 2003 movie The Italian Job.

https://jorgeonline.me/The-Italian-Job

So, we’ve know about LIDAR for about 20 years.

removed

The lasers used are going to be class 1, which is so low-power it can't hurt and doesn't require a label.

Well, the lasers currently in use are approx. 2 mW at 905 nm. They become Class 1 due to the continuous scanning. If a laser beam were to become stuck pointing in one direction, as GP mentions, it becomes Class 3R.

And with the current limitations to stay in Class 1, range is 100m or less, so basically useless on a highway. There is a lot of work going on to find good tradeoffs in power and wavelength to give useful range while staying in Class 1.

You can't win this fight. Soon, LiDAR will be Apple's invention. And besides, it already has a lowercase "i" in the name.

It's similar to how Apple invented the tablet and the smartphone (though, curiously, they don't have any broad patents on these concepts).

>It's similar to how Apple invented the tablet and the smartphone (though, curiously, they don't have any broad patents on these concepts).

Did Apple say anywhere that they invented the tablet and/or the smartphone?

No.

But they could boast, and they would be right, that they invented the modern tablet and the modern smartphone, because all modern tablet and smartphones copy their iPhone and iPad designs (heck, the first Android smartphone came out a year after the iPhone), not the tablet and phone designs that came before them.

> they could boast, and they would be right, that they invented the modern tablet and the modern smartphone

Then why didn't they patent them, given that Apple always thoroughly and excessively patents stuff when they get the chance?

Answer: they didn't invent them.

>Then why didn't they patent them, given that Apple always thoroughly and excessively patents stuff when they get the chance?

Because "invented the modern X", doesn't mean created X as a raw technology (to patent it), but created the version of X most people actually care about from them on...

That said, they do have tons of patents on the iPhone and iPad, and on phone/tablet design. Not to mention they've made the Newton already, a defining 90s tablet...

As for the inventor of the smartphone, that was IBM, with the Simon Personal Communicator. Do you care much for those devices in 2020? Didn't think so, like I don't see people buying TV sets from the inventor of TV, or clothes from the inventor of clothing...

As someone who uses a smartphone mostly for browsing the web and who hates installing another app, I just can't see the big innovation here.

If however, you're a developer selling apps, then I can see your point. Apple took the business model of game consoles and brought it to smartphones. Most people love it, developers love it, and that's probably why they call it an "innovation" even though it isn't.

>As someone who uses a smartphone mostly for browsing the web and who hates installing another app, I just can't see the big innovation here.

Well, as someone who mostly likes raw meat from animals I kill, I also don't see the big innovation with this "cooking" thing.

But I hear it's popular with many....

>Apple took the business model of game consoles and brought it to smartphones.

They also added the multi-touch all-screen UI that everybody else copied immediately, gestures, various sensors and capabilities, native apps, proper web browsing (and not the crappy "mobile" experience of smartphones of yore), and several other things besides. Plus things like the ability to listen your voice messages in your order, or send text messages without the SMS/MMS toll via the same app you use for regular text messaging.

And the first iPhone didn't even had third party apps. People demanded for it to get an app store...

Also true when the iPhone appeared: most people didn't have any kind of smartphone, and the apps they could run were at best Java mobile crap. There were smartphones but they were not as popular, and not as user friendly (I had a few, e.g. Sony ones, there were Nokia etc. Nothing compared to the iPhone or the "modern style" smartphone. And most people had a regular phone or -if they did business- a BB). After the iPhone everybody wanted to get into the smartphone thing...

In the meanwhile they also somehow managed to file patents for rectangular products with four evenly rounded corners[1]. My kitchen cutting board might fit the bill.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/apple-awarded-design...

This is only true if you are lazy enough to not bother to read the patent or really understand how design patents work at all.

Because you can't patent a rounded rectangle nor is that what Apple did. They patented the very specific design for the iPad.

Regardless, it makes no sense to allow anyone to "own" rudimentary geometric design elements.

And yet, it's common practice, and it makes quite a sense:

"I think most people don't understand what it means that this is a design patent - it's not the same thing as a "regular" patent (a utility patent). Design patents allow a company to get an exclusive right to the form of a functional object so that a 3rd party can't make a different device with identical appearance (well, not legally at least). Almost every company that puts the time into making a distinctive shape for their devices gets one: Microsoft has one for the Xbox, George Lucas got one for Yoda etc."

It took Jim Henson's veteran designers several hours, if not days or possibly longer, to design Yoda and refine the puppet's shape and form.

It took someone 20 seconds in a CAD tool to do the exterior product design on the iPad, using intern-level skills.

There's a difference.

>It took someone 20 seconds in a CAD tool to do the exterior product design on the iPad, using intern-level skills.

You'd be very suprised.

Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.

You'd be very suprised.

Hardly, but that's irrelevant.

Not to mention, if it was so trivial, tons of other companies would have made the exact same design before, not copy it after it was released.

Gee. It's almost as if it's what's inside that matters, and lacking the technology inside the iPad, those other companies had no reason to adopt the corresponding product design.

(Except, of course, in the TV and movie industries, where any number of prop designers did exactly that, decades before Apple.)

>Gee. It's almost as if it's what's inside that matters

Gee, when it comes to design pattens (or product design in general), it's what's outside that matters. Division of labor and all that...

Agreed. Apple doesn’t, hasn’t applied to, and wouldn’t be granted such a patent.

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