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 to choose from.