A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 26th Aug 2012 10:28 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless In light of the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung, the one-liners and jokes flew back and forth. One in particular, by Dan Frakes, has been copied and pasted all over the web, and it goes like this: "When the iPhone debuted, it was widely criticized for having no buttons/keys. Now people think the iPhone's design is 'obvious'." This is a very common trend in this entire debate that saddens me to no end: the iPhone is being compared to simple feature phones, while in fact, it should be compared to its true predecessor: the PDA. PDAs have always done with few buttons.
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RE[7]: Revisionist History
by TM99 on Tue 28th Aug 2012 04:16 UTC in reply to "RE[6]: Revisionist History"
TM99
Member since:
2012-08-26

No, I'm perfectly fine with the fact that people were working on these areas.

What I'm not fine with is claiming that Apple does not and has never invented or innovated anything, however, a device that required a licensed OS, hardware manufacturing from Tandy and Casio, and marketing and distribution from those two hardware manufacturers, and Donna Dubinsky from Apple doing financing and recruiting (mostly from Apple) to keep the company afloat to produce a product AFTER the Newton that was an even bigger flop is somehow designated groundbreaking and revolutionary.


No actually you aren't fine with what is being said otherwise you wouldn't bring up tired straw man arguments constantly.

Apple and its current fans have a mistaken mindset currently that says because our products are a commercial success, we did this first, best, or alone. We are the great innovators and Jobs, who was a narcisstic ass-hole was somehow a creative genius instead of the prick he really was. Therefore we deserve to receive legal protection and can control the market as we see fit. We can destroy Android simply because Jobs lost to Microsoft and by gods, he wasn't going to lose again even after he was dead.

When others push back against that and say things like, well, there is prior art. Apple may have innovated that but they built it on the foundations done by this company or that company, you call us 'fandroids' or 'haters'. You pull out straw men and tell us that we don't see anything that Apple has done well.

Bullshit! I don't know how old you are but I am willing to bet that I was using Apple products before you were even born. Some of us remember history. We know about Xerox PARC. We know and used Zoomers and Amigas. We know about GRiDPads. We had Newtons and used superior Palms. We remember SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and rebranded it as iTunes.

We remember the Apple Quicktake, which was called the first consumer digital camera, but we know that it was simply a rebranded Fuji or Samsung. Yeah, we remember that and know that iPhones and iPads contain more prior art from other companies like this so we do pause. We remember when Apple almost went out of business and now they are the highest grossing corporation ever. And we know that what goes up, will eventually come down.

So please give this line of reasoning a rest. It is quite tiresome and wholly unconvincing to those of us who were there from the beginning and those who may be young but at least take the time to educate themselves on what really has happened in the history of modern computing.

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