Some Chinese company had little gmail-style icon boxes that sat on one's desk and could be programmed to light up in varying colours and patterns to communicate various events. THIS IS NOT NEW. It is at least 5 years old if not more, for sale in Canada at MemEx.
This Apple patent is about: a logo, with on top of that an electronically controllable tint/haze/opacity/mirror, with on top of that a dialectric stack to make a thin-film interference filter, and on top of that a transparent layer.
That's literally the configuration that the Apple patent is patenting, not more, not less.
This construction isn't even vaguely related to the gmail-style icon boxes. Sure they achieve the same end. But a patent is about how the device is constructed, not about the ends it achieve
Oh FFS this already exists. (Score:3)
Some Chinese company had little gmail-style icon boxes that sat on one's desk and could be programmed to light up in varying colours and patterns to communicate various events. THIS IS NOT NEW. It is at least 5 years old if not more, for sale in Canada at MemEx.
Re: (Score:3)
This Apple patent is about: a logo, with on top of that an electronically controllable tint/haze/opacity/mirror, with on top of that a dialectric stack to make a thin-film interference filter, and on top of that a transparent layer.
That's literally the configuration that the Apple patent is patenting, not more, not less.
This construction isn't even vaguely related to the gmail-style icon boxes. Sure they achieve the same end. But a patent is about how the device is constructed, not about the ends it achieve
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Stacking things which exist on top of each other and putting it in the shape of an Apple logo is not a patentable invention.