NormM

Apple uses these oscillators. They are substantially more expensive than crystal oscillators, but are much smaller and use less power. This may explain why the Android phones, which are more price sensitive, didn't use them. It does seem that the current generation of SiTime oscillators don't have a problem with Helium, so perhaps current generation iPhones don't either.

I think the market has spoken. The new mobile world is here. Android phone shipments have already passed Windows PC shipments worldwide, and iPhone will also pass Windows this year. If trends continue, iPad passes the PC next year. Most people don't need some other "main" machine.

The RT version reminds me of the PC Junior, with its chiclet keyboard, and has no legacy apps. You're right about the Pro version, but it seems to me that's designed for people who need a laptop. Those people will buy a laptop.

The biggest problem in our patent system is that obvious ideas get patents. That said, the current criterion that patent examiners use to decide if an idea is obvious is based on prior art. If an idea is clearly useful but no one is using it (or has publicly disclosed it), then it's considered non-obvious.

This patent claims priority from a provisional application in 2008, which could be filed as much as a year after first publication of the idea. Also, the last paragraph of the Background section traditionally explains the problem the invention is addressing. In this case, it reads,

"One significant obstacle to vectorizing loops in program code in existing systems is dependencies between iterations of the loop. For example, loop-carried data dependencies and memory-address aliasing are two such dependencies. These dependencies can be identified by a compiler during the compiler's static analysis of program code, but they cannot be completely resolved until runtime data is available. Thus, because the compiler cannot conclusively determine that runtime dependencies will not be encountered, the compiler cannot vectorize the loop. Hence, because existing systems require that the compiler determine the extent of available parallelism during compilation, relatively little code can be vectorized."

So the claim here is that this problem can't be solved just by the compiler, and wasn't solved by any existing systems at the time of the application.

This would have been great a couple of years ago, but it's too late to bring out something that's almost as good as an iPad, but without the momentum or ecosystem. This was clearly designed by people who still don't understand why the iPad has been such a big success, and think the world is just waiting for an iPad running Windows. This is a desperation move, like the Zune, and will have the same effect on third party tablet hardware partners.

There are many strategies for survival. Some involve taking tiny steps with customer revenue at each one. Some involve solving a bigger problem that takes time and investment. Whichever approach you take, you usually need some luck to survive.

One of my favorite SJ quotes! I find it hard to believe the poster is opposed to spending time figuring out how your product should work. Maybe he really just means a startup needs to focus early on, and not waste time on inessentials. I actually hope, though, that Apple's success will make good design (in SJ's sense) more common in the tech industry.

I agree their economic value is probably negative, but because of the broken patent laws companies currently need them. Since companies like Google and Apple have recently spent billions of dollars to buy relatively small collections of patents, the entire existing pool would probably cost a few trillion to buy. It's really not a good idea to make laws that cause companies to spend this much money, and then declare their value to be zero. It's also probably not legal.

Since there are trillions of dollars worth of software patents out there, most owned by US companies, this doesn't seem like a good way to proceed even if it were legal. You might be able to stop future applications for software patents. But really there's no bright line between software and hardware anymore -- you really need to reform the entire patent system.

Absolutely agree. How do we communicate this to Apple?

It seems to me that these are really WebKit demos, which is the defacto standard for mobile browsing. Historically, I think that standards have caught up with practice on the Web, rather than the other way around.