Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I suppose the non-semantics point of everyone in this chain is: there is nothing about this patent from Apple that explains why using a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers is uncommon in laptops. They are neither the first nor last to get a patent to do this, why then should it be the "real" reason most laptops don't?


See my other comments about patents in practice. They don't matter until you end up in front of a jury (or settle with a troll, which is a different case). A jury comprised of 12 random people off the street, specifically selected by counsel to be as ignorant as possible on the subject matter at hand (easier to influence).

My original point - this isn't enough of a distinguishing feature to drive sales and revenue for any manufacturer to risk that.

Ok, you sold 1% more laptops because you have good speakers. Then Apple sues you and potentially wins damages on a larger percentage of ALL of your sales of that "infringing" product.

Not worth it, not even close. Not even worth it to try to circumvent and still risk getting sued.


I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few just care about crappy laptop speaker sound enough to write a driver modeling each device and speaker combination for a significantly wider variety of shipping hardware. But I suppose it's impossible to know without asking every manufacturer.


We're saying the same thing.

They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.


Hmm I don't think we're saying the same thing at all. I'm not saying patents are part of the reason companies don't care, I'm saying they didn't care before the patent and there is no reason to suspect the patent is the real reason they don't care since. If any part of the reasoning for why not has to do with the patent being there then it's not what I'm saying, even if it would sound similar.


Patents do matter, you can get a patent knocked out at several phases in litigation prior to actually arriving at a trial. That's not even assuming the defendant goes and gets a stay to IPR the patent.


If its really this obvious, it should be trivial to get this patent knocked out.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: