Apple’s crucial overscroll bounce patent claim is valid, U.S. patent office says
The USPTO has confirmed four claims of Apple's overscroll bounce patent, including claim 19 of the patent, according to a document filed with a Californian court on Thursday. That claim played a crucial part in Apple's $1.05 billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung,.
Apple's "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touchscreen display" patent describes a way to scroll past a document's border. When a user reaches the edge and stops scrolling, the screen bounces back to the nearest display area.
The most important claim in the patent is claim 19. During the Apple/Samsung billion dollar patent trial the jury found that 21 accused products infringed claim 19, and the jury awarded damages as to 18 of these products. The Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Tab 10.1 (WiFi), the Droid Charge and the Nexus S 4G were among the infringing devices. Read more...
Apple to kick off in-store iPhone trade-in deals to spur sales
Apple will launch its own iPhone trade-in program this month, exchanging older iPhones for in-store credit, according to Bloomberg and other sources.
Companies already active in "re-commerce" -- the buying of used consumer electronics like smartphones and tablets, primarily in developed countries, then refurbishing them for resale in less affluent markets -- took Apple's entry in stride, at least on the surface.
"The biggest challenge to re-commerce is consumer awareness," said Israel Ganot, chief executive of Gazelle, a Cambridge, Mass. firm that buys used smartphones and tablets. "Apple's entry would be a huge validation of re-commerce. They're going to change consumer behavior and make it much more mainstream to sell your old iPhone." Read more...
Apple: No tax gimmick left behind
Tim Cook did Steve Jobs proud at this week's Congressional hearings into Apple's tax avoidance practices. During his testimony the CEO pulled a mind trick or two out of his iPocket, rivaling even the late Apple visionary in his ability to weave reality distortion fields.
The Senate report released prior to Cook's testimony detailed Apple's "complex web" of offshore entities set up to avoid paying taxes. Yet in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Apple's CEO defended the company, saying Apple uses "no tax gimmicks."
Puhleeze -- long before the world was swooning over iPhones and iPads, Apple pioneered the accounting sleight of hand known as "double Irish with a Dutch sandwich." A New York Times in-depth report this week traced the ways Apple, starting in the 1980s, has acted to avoid paying taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands, then to the Caribbean. Read more...
Senate report: Apple claims subsidiaries with no taxing jurisdiction
Apple has set up three foreign subsidiaries that the company claims are not resident in any nation for taxing purposes, in an effort to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes to the U.S. and other countries, according to a new report from a U.S. Senate subcommittee.
Apple has set up a "complex web" of offshore entities to avoid paying taxes, with some subsidiaries set up in low-tax Ireland, according to a report released Monday by the investigations subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
One of the subsidiaries set up by Apple has paid no corporate income tax to any nation for the past five years, although it reported US$30 billion in net income from 2009 to 2012, the report said. Another subsidiary has paid a tax rate to Ireland of one-tenth of 1 percent or less in 2009, 2010 and 2011, far below the normal Irish corporate income tax rate of 12 percent, according to the subcommittee report. Read more...
Progress at Foxconn factories, but working hours still exceed Chinese laws
Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a month, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.
The report released Thursday is the latest audit from the FLA, which has been tasked by Apple to monitor the working conditions at three Foxconn factories in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Chengdu that produce iPad and iPhone products. Since the initial audits were carried out in February of last year, the factories have instituted new changes, including enforcing breaks for workers and stopping student interns from logging overtime hours. Read more...
Apple tops Consumer Reports survey on PC tech support
If you're looking to keep that computer running smoothly, Apple is the one to turn to, says Consumer Reports. On Monday, the consumer advocacy publication announced that the company from Cupertino had once again topped a reader survey of the best computer tech support, even going so far as to beat its own scores from the previous year.
To the surprise of nobody who's actually paid attention to the PC market in the last several years, Apple beat out competitors Lenovo, Asus, Dell, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard/Compaq, and Acer/Gateway/eMachines by a healthy margin, scoring an 86 out of 100, which the publication describes as "very satisfied." The next closest brand was Lenovo, which scored only a 63, or "fairly well satisfied." Read more...
Apple to stage ‘Tech Talks’ roadshow
After selling out its worldwide developer conference (WWDC) at a speed usually reserved for hit counters on Psy videos, Apple has hinted that those who want to get up close and technical with it will soon be served locally.
We're working on the basis of the tiniest of hints here, as the company has issued a statement about the WWDC sellout that offers this tiny, wee nugget of information: Read more...
As PCs decline, it’s Apple that’s making real money from PCs
Apple doesn't even make the list of top five sellers of PCs in the world (though it is No. 5 in the United States), but some number crunching by Asymco's Horace Dediu shows a surprising fact: Apple earns 45 percent of the operating profits in the PC industry. The top five sellers -- Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer -- together make only 33 percent of operating profit. (Operating profit is the cash the companies keep after all expenses, including day-to-day operational costs, are paid for.) Read more...
German court says nein to Apple’s slide-to-unlock patent
Apple's slide-to-unlock patent has been ruled invalid by a German court because it's not really a "technological innovation" in the eyes of European patent law.
The Bundespatentgericht (federal patent court) in Munich ruled that the famous patent is invalid because European law doesn't allow for the patenting of software that doesn't represent a "technical solution to a technical problem", the Frankfurter Allgemeine (translated with the help of Google) reported. Read more...
Apple reportedly pushing hard for iRadio launch as soon as June
Apple could launch its long-rumored iRadio service as soon as this summer, finally giving iTunes a streaming music app to take on Pandora and Spotify.
"iRadio is coming. There's no doubt about it anymore," an unnamed music industry source told The Verge.
The report says that Apple is pushing hard for a summertime launch of the streaming music app after making "significant progress" in talks with two top labels, Universal and Warner. Read more...
U.S. patent office rebuffs Apple’s iPad Mini trademark request
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has provisionally denied Apple's trademark application for "iPad Mini" because the term is "merely descriptive" of the tablet's size.
Notice of the rejection was mailed to Apple on Jan. 25, but was only made public in the last week, according to Patently Apple, which first reported on the decision.
The iPad Mini was launched last October, and went on sale in early November at prices starting at $329. Apple filed for the trademark Nov. 15, 2012. Read more...
8 myths about the smartwatch revolution
By the time Apple ships its rumored "iWatch" smartwatch, the company will be entering a crowded market.
A smartwatch is a wristwatch device that connects to the Internet (directly or via a smartphone) and runs apps.
The Financial Times this week reported that Google's Android group (not the company's X Lab) is developing a smartwatch. That suggests Google plans to ship a smartwatch soon, possibly this year, and could even announce it at the Google I/O developers conference on May 15.
A Samsung executive this week not only announced that his company is working on a smartwatch, but that they've been working on it for a long time.
A Chinese company called Gouke plans to sell both an Android version of its Bambook Smart Watch by this summer as well as another version running the Firefox OS. Read more...
Oracle pulls Java 6 plug, but Apple likely to keep patching OS X Snow Leopard
Apple on Monday patched Java 6 for OS X, following Oracle's lead and quashing a browser plug-in vulnerability that hackers have been exploiting.
Oracle issued the "out-of-band," or emergency, update for Java 6 and Java 7 to patch two critical vulnerabilities. One of those bugs -- designated CVE-2013-1493 -- has been exploited in the wild since at least Feb. 28, according to security firm FireEye, which discovered the attacks.
Because Apple maintains Java 6 for OS X -- unlike Java 7, which Oracle handles -- it followed with its own update, as usual. Read more...
UK judge who forced Apple apology now legal expert for Samsung
How's this for irony: The U.K. judge who ruled Apple must publicly apologize to Samsung as part of a patent appeal is now an expert on the Korean manufacturer's legal team.
Foss Patents reported Thursday that Professor Sir Robin Jacob, a retired U.K. judge-turned-professor who famously forced a public apology out of Apple last year, now appears to be working for the very company he ruled in favor of.
Sir Robin is currently one of nine experts "working on behalf" of Samsung Electronics, defending the Korean manufacturer against an Ericsson complaint filed with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).
The ex-judge's latest endeavor is raising eyebrows in the wake of the appeals court verdict he handed down - along with two other judges - less than four months ago. Read more...
Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois
Maintaining an awareness of sensory cues in the vicinity has just been patented by Apple – for portable electronic devices, anyway.
The technology outlined in Apple's new Patent 8,385,039, which the US Patent and Trademark Office granted on Tuesday, would make iPhones, iPads, and a potential iWatch capable of sensing certain cues in the environment and adjusting the devices' performance accordingly. The idea is that the devices could predict or anticipate users' desires, given what's going on around them.
An environmentally-aware mobile device would use sensors to monitor a variety of factors – including temperature, ambient light, motion, vibration, pressure, touch, noise, orientation, and time – and then use the sensory cues to choose one operational mode over another. Read more...