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s@mke10
absolutely true!!!
s@mke10
exactly! you dont only patent software that work like a horse's backside, it ...
A look inside Apple’s kitchen table group
Rick Merritt
7/31/2012 9:23 PM EDT
SAN JOSE – A 17-year veteran of Apple’s small but powerful industrial design team provided a glimpse of the design process at Apple in the first testimony of the company’s patent infringement case against Samsung.
Apple attempted to use the testimony to evoke the ethos of Apple’s painstaking dedication to original design. However, under cross-examination Samsung’s attorney made clear Apple closely follows competing products.
Christopher Stringer appeared in court in a white cotton suit and well-worn cowboy boots. His shoulder length hair and full beard were streaked with grey. Lean and tanned, he resembled a 40-something Jesus with an Australian accent.
“I’ve worked on every Apple product since I joined in 1995,” Stringer said. “I can say that because we work as a team and take that very seriously, dedicating time every week so we all get together and talk about every project we are working on,” he said.
Stringer is named in many of Apple’s patents, as are most of the roughly 16 people in Apple’s industrial design team run by Jonathan Ive to whom Stringer reports.
“We work together around a kitchen table,” Stringer explained. “It’s a culturally diverse group with members from Australia, Japan, Britain, Germany, Austria--and we’ve been together a very long time, many of us for 15 years, so it’s a very familiar small environment which is remarkable for a company the size of Apple,” he said.
Nevertheless the group is a powerful one. Stringer repeatedly said the group can make design decisions without concern for the manufacturing difficulties or costs they may entail.
“We link directly to the highest levels of Apple and are involved in all the products Apple ships,” he said.
While the “kitchen table” meeting area of the group sounds cozy, it is not always a comfortable place to be.
“It’s a brutally honest debate [there], that’s where all the ideas happen,” Stronger said. “We sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth--that’s where the brutal criticism comes in,” he said.
Once the group settles on sketches it likes, it takes them to a separate team of CAD specialists that creates computer and 3-D models of them as subjects for further brainstorming and debate. Sometimes the models “might be just a little corner of a product,” he said.
“We will even sketch on models or use a sketch from a different design session, [the process] weaves and knits [ideas] until we think we have something really special,” Stringer said. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people, we obsess on details, every single detail is very carefully crafted,” he said.
“The process is not linear,” he added. “It doesn’t go from thought to sketch to model to production—we can jump straight back to idea stage if a better idea is created,” he added.
Indeed, Apple’s lead attorney, Harold McElhinny, showed how what became the industrial design for the original iPhone was one of dozens of models designers had created, rejected and then later returned to re-evaluate. The final form factor was set as early as the spring of 2006, according to the dates on Apple’s CAD files.
Among the many models created was a “extruded lozenge” form factor Samsung alluded to in its opening statement. Samsung alleged Apple changed from that square-edged model to a more round-edge version after an Apple designer saw a Sony phone he admired.
Apple claims one of the patents Samsung infringed was a patent on the rectangular shape with rounded edges of the original iPhone. In selecting that design from the many other models Apple designers realized “it was the most beautiful of our designs--we sometimes don’t recognize it [at first] but we finally realized it,” Stringer said.
Interestingly, Apple was working on tablet concepts with multi-touch screens before it came up with the idea of the iPhone, Stringer said. The iPad “was a long project, we tried so many things,” he said.
Apple showed early models of iPad designs including some reminiscent of Grecian columns with sharp square outlines and curled edges. The company also considered similar industrial designs for the iPhone and iPad.
In the end, “we decided the [iPad] deserved its own identity, we couldn’t copy ourselves,” said Stringer. “It wasn’t like a consumer electronics product at all--it didn’t feel like a device, it felt like a new object,” he said.
Next: “We’ve been ripped off”
Apple attempted to use the testimony to evoke the ethos of Apple’s painstaking dedication to original design. However, under cross-examination Samsung’s attorney made clear Apple closely follows competing products.
Christopher Stringer appeared in court in a white cotton suit and well-worn cowboy boots. His shoulder length hair and full beard were streaked with grey. Lean and tanned, he resembled a 40-something Jesus with an Australian accent.
“I’ve worked on every Apple product since I joined in 1995,” Stringer said. “I can say that because we work as a team and take that very seriously, dedicating time every week so we all get together and talk about every project we are working on,” he said.
Stringer is named in many of Apple’s patents, as are most of the roughly 16 people in Apple’s industrial design team run by Jonathan Ive to whom Stringer reports.
“We work together around a kitchen table,” Stringer explained. “It’s a culturally diverse group with members from Australia, Japan, Britain, Germany, Austria--and we’ve been together a very long time, many of us for 15 years, so it’s a very familiar small environment which is remarkable for a company the size of Apple,” he said.
Nevertheless the group is a powerful one. Stringer repeatedly said the group can make design decisions without concern for the manufacturing difficulties or costs they may entail.
“We link directly to the highest levels of Apple and are involved in all the products Apple ships,” he said.
While the “kitchen table” meeting area of the group sounds cozy, it is not always a comfortable place to be.
“It’s a brutally honest debate [there], that’s where all the ideas happen,” Stronger said. “We sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth--that’s where the brutal criticism comes in,” he said.
Once the group settles on sketches it likes, it takes them to a separate team of CAD specialists that creates computer and 3-D models of them as subjects for further brainstorming and debate. Sometimes the models “might be just a little corner of a product,” he said.
“We will even sketch on models or use a sketch from a different design session, [the process] weaves and knits [ideas] until we think we have something really special,” Stringer said. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people, we obsess on details, every single detail is very carefully crafted,” he said.
“The process is not linear,” he added. “It doesn’t go from thought to sketch to model to production—we can jump straight back to idea stage if a better idea is created,” he added.
Indeed, Apple’s lead attorney, Harold McElhinny, showed how what became the industrial design for the original iPhone was one of dozens of models designers had created, rejected and then later returned to re-evaluate. The final form factor was set as early as the spring of 2006, according to the dates on Apple’s CAD files.
Among the many models created was a “extruded lozenge” form factor Samsung alluded to in its opening statement. Samsung alleged Apple changed from that square-edged model to a more round-edge version after an Apple designer saw a Sony phone he admired.
Apple claims one of the patents Samsung infringed was a patent on the rectangular shape with rounded edges of the original iPhone. In selecting that design from the many other models Apple designers realized “it was the most beautiful of our designs--we sometimes don’t recognize it [at first] but we finally realized it,” Stringer said.
Interestingly, Apple was working on tablet concepts with multi-touch screens before it came up with the idea of the iPhone, Stringer said. The iPad “was a long project, we tried so many things,” he said.
Apple showed early models of iPad designs including some reminiscent of Grecian columns with sharp square outlines and curled edges. The company also considered similar industrial designs for the iPhone and iPad.
In the end, “we decided the [iPad] deserved its own identity, we couldn’t copy ourselves,” said Stringer. “It wasn’t like a consumer electronics product at all--it didn’t feel like a device, it felt like a new object,” he said.
Next: “We’ve been ripped off”
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rick.merritt
7/31/2012 9:38 PM EDT
Is Apple's design process as original and powerful as they claim, or are they drinking Kool-Aid at that kitchen table?
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dylan.mcgrath
8/1/2012 12:44 AM EDT
It's pretty interesting (and surprising) to me that Apple's products are designed by such a small team, and that they've been together for such a long time. Maybe that's not atypical, but it's not what I would have expected.
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yalanand
8/1/2012 6:56 AM EDT
@dylan.mcgrath, I totally agree with your observation. Its surprising to know that such a small team designs the apple products. This team clearly knows what the end users like and I eagerly waiting to see the next big product release after iPAD.
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t.alex
8/1/2012 2:48 PM EDT
From Steve Jobs biography lots of things at Appple come from small teams. Jobs rather recruit small teams of great players than big teams that cannot deliver.
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docdivakar
8/1/2012 7:53 PM EDT
@Dylan: that is only part of the story... engineering at Apple I am sure had many restless nights to make the concepts dreamed up by Apple's intelligentsia into reality. Frames, bezels, rounded corners are all fine but to find components, designing and packaging the entire product is a nightmare. This is not to lessen the credit due to the few in that dream team at Apple.
MP Divakar
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rick.merritt
8/1/2012 1:53 AM EDT
Yeah unlike Samsung that makes a bazillion phones in many styles for many different kinds of users and markets, Apple makes one phone and one tablet a year and may fuss over it for a looong time. Very different approaches.
Also Samsung does lots of user surveys and pours over them. Apple prides itself on doing no user surveys.
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junko.yoshida
8/1/2012 6:19 AM EDT
Moreoever, from what I gather, Samsung actually has several different design teams working -- in parallel -- on the same project.
They fierecely compete among themselves.
So, if you are a chip supplier thinking that your chip will be in Samsung's next Phone (because you are making so many trips to Korea to support Samsung's design team), chances of your chip gets actually designed into Samsung's next phone is...well...not guaranteed. That team you have been supporting all this time could lose out in the internal race.
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Rob.B
8/1/2012 5:17 PM EDT
Apple's design process isn't particularly original, but it can be very powerful, particularly if you have an active synergy between the team members. My four-man "Skunkworks" team with a former employer was the most productive and innovative group within the company, and quite possibly in the entire industry. You have to have the right team makeup for it to work, and sometimes you need to bring in "new blood" to shake things up a bit and get some fresh ideas. This can re-energize a team that's been together for years and may be starting to lose its edge.
As for not doing user surveys, there are both major advantages and risks. The risks are that you will come up with a product or features that the customers don't want, need, won't pay for, or worse, actively dislike. The advantage is that you aren't constraining yourself to reiterating or re-inventing a product, or playing the "Me too" game. You are open to imagining completely new products or ways of doing things, to fill a need or desire that your customers may not even know that they have. For this, your team has to be closely in-tune with the potential customers, and not just think about what they as individuals will find "cool" or useful. Too many interesting products have failed because the designers lost focus on the end customer, and Apple has had their share of these in the past as well.
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junko.yoshida
8/1/2012 6:14 AM EDT
This story gives us a glimpse of what's going on at a design team of otherwise a very closed company -- Apple.
Fascinating stuff.
Because truth to be told, none of those people who are now appearing in the court has ever been made available for interviews or for the public to know who they are.
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guns
8/1/2012 6:16 AM EDT
What kind of patent absurdity is this? Patenting rectangular side, rounded sides blah blah..This is detrimental to innovation.. I can think of thousand things that could have been patented which would have not made it possible to develop the 'oh so passionately designed phone' in first place.
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yalanand
8/1/2012 7:03 AM EDT
@guns so true. Imagine what would have happened if Dennis Ritchies who invented C and Unix patented them? We wouldn't have seen softwares based on C and Unix. I feel Apple is mis-using its muscle/money power.
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Gordon.Apple
8/1/2012 4:16 PM EDT
Fortunately, software was not patentable in those days. I was working at Bell Labs at that time and had a number of patents. I remember discussions about how they someday hoped to be able to patent software as an extension of hardware.
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MClayton
8/3/2012 4:57 PM EDT
Patenting software has bad mixed results, just like patenting genes. Copyrights for software, and kill the Dole-Bayh act for other patent nonsense!!
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eewiz
8/1/2012 9:45 AM EDT
@ guns. Clearly you dont have any background in IP and related stuff. You may want to read my reply to a similar comment in this post.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4391488/Apple-v--Samsung-kicks-off-innovation-debates
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s@mke10
8/10/2012 8:39 AM EDT
exactly! you dont only patent software that work like a horse's backside, it takes vision and innovation to come up with slick and fluid design that the end user will like.
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guns
8/1/2012 10:42 AM EDT
@eewiz Sure, I dont have any background of IP ( I wish I never have to deal with it ) but what I said is a general disgust against the practice of patenting absurd things (remember Amazon's one click payment). Ornamentally or so, 'the oh so awsome looking phone' can easily resemble an earlier made candy box (just a thought) which probably no one bothered to patent. I observe this is due to ever shrinking margins and competitors just want to use every tact up their sleeve to oust others.
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Duane Benson
8/1/2012 12:54 PM EDT
I've always thought that industrial design and user interface design are Apple's greatest advantages. But, really? "patent on the rectangular shape with rounded edges". Pretty much all designs are at least inspired by predecessors. Some are genuinely unique and distinctive enough to deserve patent protection, but a flat rectangle is not. If that's one of the main claims of the patent, it's too obvious which makes it ineligible for a patent.
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tpfj
8/1/2012 1:27 PM EDT
All Mac computers (desktop and laptop) have rounded corners and are rectangular. These pre-date the iPhone too, so this "design" cannot be covered by a design patent if indeed it had already been disclosed in the public domain previously. In my mind it has. Never mind the fact that there is nothing novel about a rectangle with rounded corners (a necessary requirement for a patent). RIM's phones have all had rounded corners for years. Not just a rectangle with rounded corners, then no one has yet copied an iPhone (remember iPhones use their own connector, the position of the speaker, earphone, USB (oh that's right, iPhone does not have one) removable cover, SIM (not present on an iPhone), removable battery (oops, not present on the iPhone), SDcard slot (this is getting boring now ...). Yup, you right, it's a knockoff.
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selinz
8/1/2012 2:55 PM EDT
Perhaps Apple can sue AutoCAD or Solidworks for having a fillet or chamfer function in their software. They could also sue furniture manufacturers for having rounded corners on tables... After all, Apple first thought of rounding off corners.... Wait, perhaps we should go back to the invention of the wheel...
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RGRU
8/1/2012 2:59 PM EDT
Excellent point. If you're CAD software will round the corners with a single click, maybe you didn't invent this "feature". How funny...
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Frank Eory
8/2/2012 5:27 PM EDT
Maybe that CAD software violates both Apple's rounded corner patent and Amazon's one-click patent :)
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MikeSmith2011
8/1/2012 3:01 PM EDT
There is no question that Apple revolutionized the phone - the simple button-less touch screen interface was never seen before. Subsequently however most smart-phones are based on touch. I can see why Apple would feel "ripped off" when it took them so long to come up with something so innovative.
But the real question is so what? The first person who invented the round wheel could feel cheated that all automobiles now use it but that is the challenge of coming up with something so innovative isn't it. Otherwise the world would only have one company manufacturing and selling wheels!
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Daniel Payne
8/1/2012 3:08 PM EDT
Let's get real here, the design concept of a rectangle with rounded corners has been used for decades. Does anyone remember the Palm Pilot as a PDA? The iPhone UI is preceded by all bank ATM machines which have been using touch screens much earlier than phones. Our patent system is broken when a rectangle can be patented, pure and simple.
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iniewski
8/1/2012 3:23 PM EDT
I am going to file a patent on a rounded triangle tomorrow...and if I get going I will follow with a rounded hexagon! Kris
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John.Hartman
8/1/2012 3:56 PM EDT
There are utility patents (your new engine that runs on goose poop), and there are design patents, like the shape of the iconic Coke bottle.
I presume that the "rounded rectangle" patent is a design patent. Lower bar to get such a patent, lower level of protection.
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tpfj
8/1/2012 3:52 PM EDT
@MikeSmith2011 Palm had a touch screen even before the iPod let alone any phone from Apple, so no, sorry you are wrong. Sure the iPhone's is better (it is a decade newer design, so you'd expect that), but that is not due to Apple, they simply buy their displays from someone else.
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MikeSmith2011
8/1/2012 5:03 PM EDT
Yes - I had a palm pilot and pre and loved it. What I meant was that the iPhone was the first one to eliminate all buttons and replace them with touch.
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Dr DSP
8/1/2012 4:45 PM EDT
Apple has found that the look of their products can command a very high margin. (As long as they look cool). They will do everything they can to protect this money generator. I hope Apple has a small team of very good lawyers too...
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iniewski
8/1/2012 4:47 PM EDT
I thought it was software/hardware integration and the resulting smooth/reliable operation that was the key to Apple's success not the look
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SPLatMan
8/1/2012 6:11 PM EDT
This is absurd!
I am just glad Ug didn't patent the wheel or we'd all have very bumpy rides to work.
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iniewski
8/1/2012 6:16 PM EDT
The caveman must had patented the wheel but fortunately the patent expired ;-)
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Googles
8/1/2012 8:21 PM EDT
“we decided the [iPad] deserved its own identity, we couldn’t copy ourselves...”
This made me laugh so hard. When it was first released, the iPad was simply a big iPhone... hardly its own identity.
I would have liked to see/hear the questioning, but, it sounds like Stringers testimony was hardly what the Apple team had hoped for.
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Neo1
8/1/2012 10:24 PM EDT
Chill out guys, the staff from Apple are just repeating the rehearsal they did with their attorneys.
To be fair Apple devices' major pull factor has been it's simplistic and elegant design and beautiful marriage of form and function. It's their DNA so to speak but this cannot be captured in language and once this is described in a patent it starts looking silly and absurd. This is their problem.
But it's pointless for A to be arguing over the physical description of their design because that is not actually the case here and that's not novel at all.
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Frank Eory
8/2/2012 5:30 PM EDT
You hit the nail on the head. People can laugh at things like rounded corners being patentable, but the truth is that Apple's industrial designs are innovative and unique, and that is precisely what Apple was attempting to cover in some of these patents.
How can you put into words the look and feel, the simplicity and elegence, without the words sounding silly?
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s@mke10
8/10/2012 8:58 AM EDT
absolutely true!!!
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rick.merritt
8/2/2012 10:24 AM EDT
Stay tuned. Friday Apple's marketing VP Phil Schiller will describe how the iPhone came into being and he will be followed at some point by Scott Forstall who oversees iOS development.
No doubt some wonderful Samsung execs and designers will make an appearance as well.
Many shoes yet to fall.
And I am open to questions I should explore while sitting there for you, so fire away!
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SiliconAsia
8/2/2012 12:36 PM EDT
We all give Steve Jobs credits creating a phone he wants to use - revolutionizing the usage paradigm. But iPhone was not born out of Apple's own technologies. All the components were there for Apple to use which in fact means technologies were existed way before Apple thought about creating iPhone. Using lego blocks, our kids can create some shapes you never imagined. I give credits to this kid to create something no one ever imagined but also give credits to lego who enable this kid to be creative using their technology.
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hm
8/2/2012 9:29 PM EDT
It will be challenging decision for judiciary and very nice to observe for design community and innovative organization like Apple.
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MClayton
8/3/2012 4:48 PM EDT
To many trivial patents, too few screeners.
Look and feel patents came with spreadsheet vendors and may end with phones..but they should end. Copyrights are better tool for designs.
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chanj
8/5/2012 10:54 PM EDT
The most interesting part of the story is Apple actually comes up idea of iPad first. The rest of the product, iPod Touch, iPhone are just part of the roadmap to the ultimate goal. If nothing comes out good from the allegation, this part of story tells us more of how Apple foresaw the consumer demands. What's the next goal that Apple is trying to achieve?
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