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-====== Why I won't be Buying Any More Apple Products (in the foreseeable future) ======
-Firstly I should make it clear that I am not anti-Apple per se. Rather the reverse.
-My first personally-owned computer was a 512K Mac bought in 1985. I still have it.
-At all times since then, my primary computer has been a Macintosh (with one brief
-excursion onto a Lisa running the MacOS compatibility mode in the late 1980s). I'm
-typing this on my current main machine, an 11" MacBook Air. They are good products.
-If this were the only issue, I'd probably still be buying them. In my view, that's
-what Apple should be continuing at: being creative, having the best systems because
-they move fastest and design best, and leaving it to the market to sort it out. That's
-something they stopped doing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, losing their focus,
-emphasising short-term profitability rather than long-term quality -
-and look what happened. It was only when Steve Jobs returned and re-introduced their
-focus on perfection that their market position recovered.
-However I also care about the future of computing. In particular, I care about the
-chilling effects of dubious software patents. The issue is, the validity of patents
-depends on the obviousness of a particular idea to an 'ordinary practitioner skilled
-in the art'. I think it's clear, in the context of the apple user interface patents,
-that the the relevant group of 'ordinary pracitioners' in the mid-2000s was PhD-level
-researchers in user interface design. Sounds too high level? Actually, I don't think
-that's the case. Nobody else was doing touch screen interface work at that time -
-nobody else had the resources to do so. And therein lies the problem. What is obvious
-to people of that level of expertise may not be so obvious to lay juries or patent
-examiners. They may not be able to put themselves in the position of the relevant
-group of practitioners; and more important, they may be bamboozled by technical
-details which are not the substance of the patent.
-Let me put it clearly. I have personally examined some of the most important
-patents at issue. I can put myself back into the knowledge I had in the mid 2000s: with
-an ordinary general knowledge of that time (i.e. knowledge that multi-touch screens
-were possible, combined with a general awareness - not even a practitioner-level
-knowledge - of the HUI research of the time), combined with a reasonable ability to
-think about the implications (i.e. what one would expect of any PhD level researcher).
-Let's take as an example the so-called pinch-to-zoom patent.
-I believe that the ideas behind this patent were obvious to such a practitioner.
-The detailed knowledge of how to do it (the required drivers and hardware) weren't obvious
-(and indeed vary from device to device).
-I would have no
-objection whatever if Apple had patented that. But of course, such a patent would be
-easy to avoid simply by doing the drivers and hardware a different way.
-But that isn't
-what Apple has patented. What it has patented is the mapping of particular real-world
-gestures to multi-touch-screens. The idea of mapping real-world gestures to particular
-technologies was ancient at the time, so there was no innovation in that. The innovations
-were not in real-world gestural innovations (we had all used pinching or rotational motions
-to indicate physical world changes long before Apple's patents, and we had all used
-pausing a moment and then resizing again to indicate continuing the motion - for example,
-indicating really, really tiny by squeezing then moving the fingers out and re-squeezing).
-So Apple couldn't - and didn't - claim to invent the real-world gestures. What Apple
-appears to me to claim as its innovation is mapping some specific gestures to multi-
-touch screens. And that's what seems to me obvious: that these would be informative gestures,
-that they could be mapped to a multi-touch screen, and what the resulting touch-screen gestures
-would be. The specific forms of the gestures
-result not from any great inspiration, but from the obvious restrictions resulting from
-mapping from a 3D world to a 2D one. It isn't just obvious now with hindsight, it was
-clearly obvious at the time. That's precisely why the gestures seem natural: they are
-the natural analogues of the 3D ones. And that's precisely why everyone is fighting
-about them - if there were other equally natural 2D abstractions from the 3D gestures,
-the competitors would use them.
-This is not to take credit from Apple: they recognised that a library of such gestures,
-combined with a consistent UI, would make a great piece of hardware that would sell a motza.
-They also recognised that multi-touch, rather than single-touch, screens were the way of
-the future. Those were strokes of marketing genius. They deserved all the credit (and the
-corresponding income) that they generated. But they were marketing insights. They weren't
-patentable contributions to technology, and they shouldn't be protected by distorting patent law.
-Bottom line, I can't support the decision of Apple, either to lodge these patents or
-to attempt to enforce them. I think it's bad for the future of the computing world.
-Equally important, I think it's bad for the future of Apple: it diverts them from their
-real strengths. Apple, please put your efforts into the next device, not into protecting the
-last. That has generally been your strength. Think back to the early 2000s. You could have
-put your efforts into protecting your ipod market. Most market analysts thought you should.
-Just as they thought Nokia should protect its symbian market by crippling maemo devices.
-You didn't follow that view, and bet the farm on supplanting ipod with iphone, while Nokia
-played it cautious...
-Bottom line for me: any Apple purchase I might make in future would provide support
-for Apple's current patent litigation direction. I think it's wrong. Therefore I won't be making
-such purchases. Fortunately, these days, there are any number of good (and probably safer)
-[[linux:distros|linux distros]] to choose from.

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