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Comment by miles | Hacker News Reader

would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this

Apple has certainly done this before:

Apple Literally Stole My Thunder https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455

Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejecte...

Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC http://www.macworld.com/article/1035200/konfabulator.html

Apple stole Karelia Watson http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/topic/2477-apples-stol...

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> Apple Literally Stole My Thunder https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455

The article states "I’m not naive enough to claim Apple actually took my idea." You apparently are, though.

> Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo

C'mon. "Wi-Fi Sync" is hardly a surprising name for such a feature, and making its logo the bog-standard Wifi logo with a bog-standard Sync logo superimposed is hardly a surprising choice either. It was a long-expected and long-awaited feature.

> Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC

A controversy about the bog-standard term "widget".

> Apple stole Karelia Watson

Well, it made its own version and named it cheekily. This seems to be the one mostly valid case in your post.

Three of those four are pretty poor examples.

It was a different time when the images/weather app was rejected by Apple. They were deliberately trying to prevent people creating thin wrappers around websites and calling it an app. And at the start it made a lot of sense.

Syncing over WiFi was a feature that users had demanded long before that app had been around and the name/logo are not distinctive. They are the most common sense choices you would use.

And widgets existed decades before Konfabulator thought to bring them to OSX. They were available as Desk Accessories in the previous versions of Mac OS as well as on Windows/Linux.

Also, re: the shock of someone lifting the icon of the wifi sync thing. If I am an Apple designer, the first idea for a wifi sync icon will be combining the wifi icon with the sync icon. The most obvious way to do that is to put the sync icon (two circular arrows) around the wifi icon.

It's pretty clear this was just two people coming up with the same logical icon concept simultaneously.

The iBooks interface, too:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...

Both of those appear to have "stolen" from real-life.

Ironically, the "Stole My Thunder" guy ripped off that design/animation from Solar: http://thisissolar.com/

HTC already had that on Windows CE phones (remember those?).

I believe Instapaper belongs on that list too.

Instapaper was an idea, and Marco is pretty firmly in the camp that you can't steal "ideas" (Though, you can do feature-by-feature clones, which another of his competitors did in a really annoying fashion. )

Yes, and he has discussed his fear on the launch of Read it Later, but the non effect (it was it a slight bump?) on his sales. To me however, that is a courteous approach. Apple saw and copied with a better implementation that 3rd parties couldn't copy.

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