That is a fair question -- the neonode phone may count as prior art (although it looks a bit different to Apple's patent claims), but it's not exactly a well known phone. It's very unlikely that people at Apple would have been aware enough of that to make their own implementation 'obvious' based solely on that -- unless it was big in the US but never made it far here? Edit: and two independent implementations (out of the hundreds of phone models) certainly doesn't prove obviousness; that's a nasty insult to the engineers/designers who worked on the neonode and may well have been proud of their innovation.

Still, for all that I love Apple and their products, swipe to unlock is a pitifully small thing to waste a patent on. To my mind, patents are needed but should be:

* non-transferable to a new owner -- no buying and selling, and lost altogether when the owning company is itself acquired.

* only applicable to actual products -- invalid if none of the company's products use it within, say, one or two years of application.

* short term -- two or three years from initial product release ought to be enough, while still allowing some competition down the line.

* very low base cost, but with a small cost per product model and maybe even a tiny cost for each device sold.

Those four changes could probably bring the patent system back to its original intent, in my opinion.