Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it too far.
It's a troll piece from the EFF and has been responded to on both sides in a similar fashion. Leave this nonsense for the Reddit boards. It's about time we all stopped being so damned idealogical about computing and computers, phones and tablets and actually spend the wasted cycles arguing about it to produce great things. All of it is just pissing in the wind.
The iPhone was revolutionary in execution, not concept. Every individual component (touchscreen, installable apps, browser etc etc.) of the iPhone was already on the market when the iPhone launched, just not gathered together in the same device and executed anywhere near as well as what Apple did.
This is simply not true. This is a post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationalization that works with people who see that almost all the smartphones out there have copied the iphone and so they believe that they must have existed contempraneously with the iphone.
Or put another way, you might as well have said "There was nothing new about the iPhone, everything important about it existed in the Motorola Razr-- it made calls, worked on GSM, had a screen, installable apps and would let you browse the web."
Or, "Marconi and Bell are the ones who invented the iPhone! And they did it decades before Apple came out with their shiny toy which people only buy because its pretty and marketed really expensively."
Being opinions these statements are more or less true, but they make the same error yours does.
Just because the landline phone pre-existed cellphones doesn't mean that cellphones are not innovative. A cellphone isn't just an execution of a landline phone.
At the same time, just because rudimentary touch screens existed (like Jeff Han's which used cameras) does not mean there was nothing new in the iPhones' touch screen (or do you believe there is a camera sitting about a foot behind your iphones screen taking pictures of your fingers?)
If you recognize that Jeff Han's camera based touch interface is obviously not the one used in the iPhone, then you must recognize that the iPhone contains unique (at the time, before it was copied) innovations.
You do realize that there where a number of touchscreen phones before the iPhone showed up right? Non of them (obviously) using a camera. A company I used to work for was developing software targeting phones driven entirely by touch back in 2000-2001 (the phones never caught on however and the project was never completed)
But back to the point. Yes the iPhone as a package was unique at the time. Certainly the touchscreen was much better than anything I'd seen up that point, and all the apps kicked the respective asses of what had come before. They where also the first company that managed to make a smartphone that was good enough that people actually wanted to own one. That I suppose could be considered revolutionary.
What specific innovations are you thinking about when you're talking about 'unique' innovations?
>Go look at devices before & after the iPhone was announced.
Check out 'LG Prada' my friend, it was iPhone minus the heavy marketing, which your friends at Apple had 'inspired' from. I still think it wasn't revolutionary. But I doubt if I suddenly become a moron, because some random uncivilized guy calls me so, just because I don't agree with him.
The LG Prada was nothing like the iPhone, and using it, simply because it had a form of "touch" interface, to try and defend your point is simply false.
None of the key iPhone technologies were present on the LG Prada. It was single touch, it did not resolve touches into single pixels like the iPhone does, it thus had very large buttons. It had no stack oriented UI, no tab or navigation based UI, no scrolling lists. No two fingers, and really to call what it had a "UI" is not quite correct at all. It wasn't even a smart phone, it was a feature phone with a gimmick. There were no apps, except for the built in features that make up all feature phones.
In short, none of the innovations of the iPhone were even in it, and it didn't ship until After the iPhone.
It was announced before the iPhone shipped in part to try and steal some of Apple's thunder but it doesn't even compete in the same category as the iPhone. So, bringing it up is, quite simply, dishonest.
It really is quite astounding the level of self deception and rationalization that Apple haters have to employ to pretend like Android and all these multi-touch smart phones that came after the iPhone, are not copying the iPhone simply because someone had a device with a screen you could touch prior to 2007.
But when you state such things in public, you step beyond self deception and into the arena of simple deception.
Further, the fact that the LG Prada example has been brought up ad infinitum for the past 5 years from people such as yourself, and that you still bring it up now, shows that the actual facts of reality are not relevant to you.
Your only point is to defend your ideology. And to do that, you are, quite simply, lying.
Touch is not what Apple invented. There were touch screens going back in the past. Jeff Han made one using Cameras. That's not prior art for the iPhone. Neither is the movie 2001: A space odessy, or any of the other long refuted nonsensical claims one finds android fanatics making.
Consequently, I am forced to reach the conclusion that you recognize that Android is a blatent ripoff of the iPhone, and you simply don't care. You either hate Apple or Love google, or you've attached to some anti-IP ideology, and that is more compelling to you than logic and reason, and the simple facts of history.
I know that this site is full of people who share your ideology and you will shout down and vote down anyone who disagrees, while calling them "uncivilized" and other names.
But that does not change the facts, and you cannot refute the facts.
You can only evade them. Or you can lie, and choose to live in your own made up reality.
The iPhone completely changed - revolutionized - the cellphone industry, and the iPad single-handedly revived an industry long thought dead. Do you deny it? Please give a serious answer.
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect its because of too much bias from you in favor of Apple. Patent wars aren't good for anyone regardless of who started it and like sbuk says this has to stop.
Your comment is hilarious, so please don't take this personally. It is hilarious that you would say his comment has "too much bias in favor of Apple" and then follow it with a claim of an ideological position as fact.
Your actual statement -- that you "suspect it is because of.." is probably completely correct.
The very idea that you should downvote someone because of "bias" is such a Generation-Y concept. Obviously everyone's biased. I've yet to see an anti-Apple post from anyone (including this EFF post, or any comments anywhere on HN) that wasn't full of bias.
In fact the bias is so blatent it is to the point of simply lying to try and rationalized it-- for example, claiming that Apple did nothing new, or innovative in the iPhone is absurd, since no phone worked like the iPhone at the time it was announced and the iPhone clearly had a massive impact because it was so innovative. Or another example- claiming that the Mac was a ripoff of Xerox.
So, when someone says "you're biased" it simply means "you don't agree with me, and I can't argue against your points, so I'll engage in ad hominem and call you a name"....
But the profoundly sad thing about it is that I really think they think that they are being "objective" when they believe this anti-Apple ideology.
I haven't seen any evidence of actual damage from the "patent wars", and if Apple is triumphant here, it will be good for the industry and good for consumers.
Innovation is Good.
The idea that it "has to stop" or that it is "bad" has only come up at the same time that android has come into existence, and so the motivation for claiming that patents are somehow problematic seems... excuse the use of the word-- biased!
You cannot speak positively (or even neutrally) about Apple on Hacker News, without being downvoted.
On this subject, it is simply not possible to have discussion. Hacker News has is overrun with android fans who will tell you that 2001: A Space Odessy is "prior art" for the iPhone and iPad... and mean it.
Four years ago, this site would have some good discussion on it, but at this point, most of the people who hang out here can barely remember a time before the iPhone. For them, there has always been google android and that its "silly" for Apple to be suing over this, since this is "how all phones work."
If you talk favorably about Apple you are accused of being "Biased", while the most nonsensical, irrational rant against Apple is upvoted.
I do not participate on this site much at all anymore simply because of this. You can't have good discussions here, unless you happen to hit a topic for which the reddit ideology has no opinion. (I call it the reddit ideology because that's where it seems to originate- it shares the characteristics I see on reddit all the time.)
Are you a salesman for Apple? Cut out the junk words, seriously. There's nothing wrong in defending a product/company you like, but just don't push it too far.