The iPhone contains a key invention, and several innovations. This is the simple fact of reality.
The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time.
Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology.
There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.)
There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before.
Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)
To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc.
This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself.
That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull".
It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology.
All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended.
Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.)
To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off.
In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone).
This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young:
If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom.
To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.
>There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.)
Actually it's well demonstrated that you need to have money to make money. The few cases you can site as exceptions are exceptions, and for every exception I can point to a thousand (maybe a million?) people who work hard and are barely making ends meet. And each and every one of those exception stories contains a lot of luck. Claiming that hard work == success is insulting to all of the smart people who have failed, and truly insulting to the millions who work hard in ways that you're discounting as "work."
"The multi-touch interface was developed by Microsoft Research in 2001"
It's much older. Multi-touch was invented in 1982, at the University of Toronto [1]. After that, it took quite a bit more research until an actual product was made that consumers could buy: in 1998, FingerWorks' launched its line of multi-touch keyboards [2]. FingerWorks was later bought by Apple, in 2005.
As an aside: Microsoft's Surface was announced in 2007 [1] and works with cameras instead of a capacitive touchscreen.
Your argument is akin to claiming that whoever invented magnetic audio recording on tapes didn't do anything innovative because Edison had already invented the gramophone.
The paper you cite claims that people were working on multitouch at University of Toronto. It is also true that touch panels (not multitouch) predate even that, going as far back as the 1970s.
But none of this is relevant, and the fact that the Surface uses cameras instead of a capacitive touchscreen is not an "aside", its the smoking gun.
Apple (aka Fingerworks) invented multi-touch, which is the method detailed in its patents and used in the iPhone.
Nobody, that I've seen, has provided an example of a product predating the iPhone that uses this multi-touch technology.
I think the problem is that you guys have believed your own propaganda that patents just cover ideas. They do not. Patents cover specific technological inventions, methods and processes.
Thus, 1970 era touch panels, the displays at your movie theater, the surface and everything driven with a stylus is as relevant to the invention of multitouch as the gramophone is to the invention of magnetic recording. That is to say, in the same broad field, but not examples of "prior art".
"the fact that the Surface uses cameras instead of a capacitive touchscreen is not an "aside", its the smoking gun."
I think you're confusing 'multi-touch' with 'multi-touch on a small capacitive LCD touchscreen'.
The fact that other companies chose to use cameras or other screen technologies instead of capacitive LCD touchscreen doesn't mean they weren't employing multi-touch. 'Multi-touch' simply means that the system registers multiple touches simultaneously.
Multi-touch existed long before FingerWorks got into the game, but they were the first to actually use it in a mass market product and they invented a lot of the multi-touch gestures that we now use on a daily basis.
"Apple (aka Fingerworks) invented multi-touch, which is the method detailed in its patents and used in the iPhone."
If FingerWorks invented multi-touch, Apple buying the company would not mean that suddenly Apple becomes the inventor of multi-touch, just that it holds those patents.
And the FingerWorks patents cite earlier multi-touch patents (even calling it that), so it's clear they're not claiming to have invented the entire thing.
"Nobody, that I've seen, has provided an example of a product predating the iPhone that uses this multi-touch technology."
Em, how about FingerWorks' own products, before they were acquired by Apple?
Different technology, different operating mechanism, doesn't do the same thing as apple's multi-touch (which I've explained a number of times already.) This detects a fingers location in gross space, not the pixel the finger is intending to touch. Pixel level accuracy is one of the key components of Apple's solution.
Notice that, just like all the others in this thread, you're liking to something that is not using the same mechanism and doesn't conflict with any of the claims in Apple's multi-touch patent.
Your ideology tells you that anything having to do with touch makes Apple's multi-touch invention irrelevant.
This is like saying that there was no invention in magnetic audio recording because the phonograph had already been invented.
I know this won't convince you, of course. One of the saddest things about this topic is not that so many people are ignorant of the nature of Apple's invention, but that their ideology compels them to believe that Apple didn't invent anything, and so they have no interest in learning. And, of course, rather than address the thesis of my article, I'm getting rampantly down voted and comments that are irrelevant.
The Microsoft Surface is not "multi-touch"[1]. It uses a completely different technology.
Further that wikipedia article shows that the someone had the idea in 2001. Good for them. The movie Minority Report came out in 2002, and was in pre-production for years before that. Thus the IDEA was not new. Nobody has claimed that the iPhone invented the IDEA.
That you make no distinction between someone expressing an idea, and an actual invention of a technology, shows that you're just reaching for excuses to rationalize your ideology.
Your attempt to insult my be claiming I denigrated people who work hard is also ... missing the mark.
Finally, the surface uses a completely different technology, which is driven by cameras, to the iPhone, and does not have the same capabilities as the iPhone.
So, even if the Surface itself had been invented in 2001 (rather than just the idea) it still wouldn't be applicable to this discussion.
This comment is exactly why I hesitate to post on Hacker News in the first place, and rarely respond to comments to my posts.
[1] this is a precise technological term trademarked by Apple whereby the impact area of a finger is resolved down to a single pixel, and multiple such fingers can be tracked simultaneously. The surface does not do this.
Between the time the iPhone was announced and released, Microsoft did whip up a quick demo... as anyone could have in the 1990s if they'd wanted to.
Frankly, your claim about the Microsoft Surface false. It is completely irrelevant to this discussion. And actually supports my hypothesis that those who wish to diminish the inventiveness of the iPhone do so out of ideological reasons, not out of an understanding of the underlying technology.
The Surface uses a technology whereby an image of the user is captured. It is not a touch screen at all. It does not directly measure touch.
If people aren't even addressing the actual technology in question, I find that having a discussion is ... problematic. Plus the preponderance of down votes against my well reasoned points tells me that that a lot of you don't care about accurate or inaccurate, but whether something agrees with your ideology.
Which lends credence to my hypothesis that this is ideologically driven.
You're bandying around the term 'multi-touch', and shooting down responses that don't reference multi-touch using a capacitive screen. Multi-touch is a technology-neutral term that simply means a system with the ability to respond to multiple touches at the same time, and the Surface clearly qualifies. MSR did a load of useful UI research on multi-touch devices, and deserve credit for that.
Apple released the first commercial device with a capacitive multi-touch screen (that I'm aware of), and it was absolutely a leap forward - the technology the surface used wasn't suitable for mobile devices. Apple deserve a lot credit for making an interesting, accurate, and responsive UI using new screen hardware (which, it should be pointed out, was not created by Apple). Surely this distinction isn't too hard to understand.
The key problem here is that people are conflating technologies that work on a completely different principle and don't have the same capabilities with the iPhone touch technology, and saying that their existence proves that nothing was invented for the iPhone. However, this is obviously false, as the technologies work using different methods and have different capabilities.
Multi-touch is a trademarked term[1] Apple uses to describe its technology for resolving the amorphous blob a finger makes when in contact with a screen into a single pixel.
Notice that the surface doesn't do this. It just detects a finger, but it can also detect a stylus or anything else. Its accuracy is that of an object, maybe a finger, not a pixel somewhere under the finger that is much smaller than the finger.
I'm not discounting Microsoft's work, it its just not relevant to this discussion.
When doing the trademark search just now, I found that some one else used it to talk about a switch based technology, invented around 1990.[2]
Again, "touch screens" whereby finger pressure closes a circuit by bending one trace into another has been around since the 1970s. These are almost alway single touch, but even when they can detect two fingers, they are not solving the same problem Apple did.
Apple resolved a finger down to a pixel, these things just detect fingers. There's a huge difference.
Thus, people bringing up these other technologies that do not even do the same thing, as if they are "prior art" are being dishonest.
[1]Word Mark MULTI-TOUCH
Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Handheld mobile digital electronic devices with electronic mail, digital data transmission, audio player, video player, handheld computer, personal digital assistant, electronic organizer, electronic notepad, telephone, computer gaming, and camera functions. FIRST USE: 20070109. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070629
Standard Characters Claimed
Mark Drawing Code (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK
Serial Number 77219819
Filing Date June 30, 2007
[2]Word Mark MULTI-TOUCH
Goods and Services IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: switches, switch panels, and communication circuits. FIRST USE: 19900202. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19900202
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 74438236
Filing Date September 21, 1993
Apple did not invent capacitive multi-touch capable screens, and they did not invent the common UI metaphors used in multi-touch screens. Apple's software did make for a very precise capacitive touch screens, but their improvements were incremental.
This is not to downplay their achievement in the iPhone - I think it was a marvellous device, and the first truly usable smartphone - I just don't think it's fair to ignore the contributions of those who came before, and the long history of research into multi-touch screens.
You shifted the goalposts. The trademark is listed on the USPTO.gov site, as being live and owned by Apple. They don't provide the ability to link to it directly, which is why I quoted it with enough info for you to do your own search.
I'm not ignoring the contributions that came before, I'm refuting the claim that Apple didn't invent it, specifically when people cite other methodologies.
> Current Status: An appeal of a final refusal to register the mark is pending before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. For further information, see TTABVUE on the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board web page.
Their trademark claim is basically dead in the water. Multi-touch is a generic term. I leave it to the other reply in this thread to deal with the debate about the novel work Apple/Fingerworks did.
edit: You probably owe other posters in this thread an apology for accusations of lying, based on your own misconception of what multi-touch actually means.
If you go through the references you'll find dozens of other papers on the subject. Academics in the HCI field have been working toward this kind of technology since the late 70s.
Fingerworks/Apple did not invent the technology, can we put this to rest?
Neither of those papers describe capacitive multitouch interfaces, nor do they describe the technology Apple invented for multi-touch. The first describes a multi-point interface that does not do what Apple does, and the second doesn't even describe a touch interface at all.
This would be obvious if you'd taken a few minutes to read their abstracts, and were aware of the nature of Apple's multi-touch invention.
The issue has been laid to rest, but I can't stop you and others from continuing to link to increasingly irrelevant claims.
The real question, to my mind, is why are you so desperate to believe that Apple didn't invent anything, such that you'd disparage yourself by being as dishonest as you have been here?
The first paper describes a multitouch capacitive touch tablet in 1985. It is absolutely identical to the core technology of an iPad. Apple may have improved things but the core ideas are layed out right here two decades before the iPad.
> A prototype touch-sensitive tablet Is presented. The tablet's main
innovation is that It Is capable of sensing mare than one point of
contact at a time. In addition to being able to provide position coor-
dinates, the tablet also gives a measure of degree of contact,
independently for each point of contact. In order to enable mutU-
touch sensing [...]
What's more the author of the paper, Bill Buxton, is widely cited in the literature as inventing the capactive multitouch display. Wayne Westerman, one of the cofounders of Fingerworks dissertation has dozens of references to his work. But even in his own words:
> What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."
It's all clear as day if you do your research, unless of course you're already made up your mind... then maybe it's not so clear.
I never said this video was a fabrication, or that Xerox never invented any key technologies, like, for instance, the Mouse.
Pretending that I did, is a bald faced lie on your part. You should consider the fact that, if you have to rely on outright fabrication about the position of your opponent, you don't have a very strong position to stand on yourself.
At best you're knocking down a strawman.
Either you're too ignorant of the history of computer science to understand what a GUI is, or you're simply being dishonest. Either way, I find the tendency of people such as yourself to post lies and then links to "supporting evidence" that don't even address the issue, while down voting everyone you disagree with to be... less than compatible with useful discussion.
The thing I learned a long time ago about liars is this: It doesn't matter how many time you prove them wrong, they'll just make up another lie!
So are you disputing the part that the Xerox product was graphical? Or that it was a user interface? In what possible definition that you've contrived in your mind does what I just linked you not qualify as a GUI?
The Apple II came with video built in. It also had a user interface in the form of a command line. Thus, when people used the computer, graphics were drawn on the screen, sometimes in the form of pictures (such as for games) and sometimes in the form of glyphs and even icons, to represent concepts to the user of the command line. Your position implies you believe this to be a "Graphical User Interface".
The problem here is that you're discounting that these things are incremntal in nature and saying the invention happened at Apple.
Where does the GUI start? At the ncurses-like menu-driven interface? At the point where this interface gains more than two colors? At the point where there are icons? When there is a menu? When there is a paint-like drawing tool? When there is an apple logo on it?
Some draw that line at Xerox, you draw that line a bit later and attribute the "ground-breaking invention" of a GUI to Apple.
I don't see it either way, they are all refinements along the continuim from the command-line to the GUIs we have today.
Apple happened to hit the mix that a large number of people grew to embrace and some attribute all that came before as garbage and the win to Apple. Which I think is extremely misguided, but what can you do but shrug it off.
I think you're projecting. I have never been enthralled by any of Apple's products and certainly not multi-touch. Calling people anti-intellectual because they're against Apple is ludicrous.
My problem with Apple and especially Steve Jobs is that I'm allergic to reality-distortion fields. And the unfailing hypocrisy. I distinctly remember Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" [1]. Sometimes innovation is using other ideas and combining them, and then they're saying that Android is a rip-off of their product and they won't rest until it is destroyed.
I don't pretend to understand what "welfare" (a program that has not existed for more than a decade) has to do with iPhones, but Peter Thiel is an ultra-libertarian who probably agrees with you and Hayek about the destructive effects of government social projects.
You also seem to simultaneously believe that there has been a great shrinking of American manufacturing jobs because this ideology has made the USA uncompetitive relative to the world market and that the USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. Well, which is it?
Anyway, American manufacturing jobs have disappeared mostly because of advances in automation technology - A great product of American and German cleverness and innovation.
For all that, the United States in the last two decades of the 20th and the first of the 21st centuries is more pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship than it ever had been before. The US at the height of its manufacturing heyday (when there were still many jobs in it) was a much more redistributionist society than it is now, marginal tax rates of more than 70%, anyone?
I do actually agree with you about the iPhone being an important innovation. The fact that crude versions of the technologies involved existed isn't really that relevant, implementation is everything. Let's be realistic, most innovative products combine existing ideas. That's how real innovation works, combining technologies that already exist in new ways.
BTW, the United States used British industrial innovations to kick start its own industrial revolution (before international patent treaties). Once Americans started making industrial machinery of course, they swiftly gained enough hands on experience to start tinkering and innovating. It was common wisdom in the early 19th century that American manufactured goods were inferior to British. After all, weren't they just copies? Then in the 1970s when the first Japanese cars were imported into the US, Americans believed that these were just copies of American ideas (which they were of course, Americans developed the assembly line made car) and that the Japanese could only ever compete on price.
Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.
Anyway, American manufacturing jobs have disappeared mostly because of advances in automation technology - A great product of American and German cleverness and innovation.
Now of course, people assume that the Chinese will never start innovating and only copy American or Japanese products.
Innovation is an interesting thing. I think culture feeds a lot into innovation. I wonder if the Chinese government will continue to bend enough to let innovation occur or will it hit some limit?
As an interesting aside, I was at a conference a few years ago on web services. While watching some of the presentations it dawned on me that anytime pricing or some other hard to get exactly right decision came up the students from China always defaulted to having a central authority make the decision. The students from the US always used some market mechanism/crowd sourcing option. The culture that the students grew up in clearly had an impact on their solutions.
Well, obviously culture and society play an important role in innovation. The British believed that the rigid and deferential Germans could never copy British industrial innovation which was based on independent inventors tinkering in sheds. They were right, but the Germans invented the concept of industrial education and close links with technical universities instead.
I wish that political liberty was important to technological innovation, but it might not end up being so.
Culture evolves over time, of course, and not to discount your observations, but I think over time, the success of the entrepreneurs in china will result in a shift in culture in the next generation.
The other edge of that sword, though, is the general prosperity that freedom produced in america has resulted in a culture going the other way.
I think freedom is taken for granted, and then people start thinking they can legislate whatever they want, including a central authority with great control (to "protect them" etc.) which eventually results in less freedom and consequently less prosperity.
One of the curses of getting old is seeing this in action, at least when its going the wrong direction.
"Welfare" is a general term that applies to a series of programs that date back to the 1930s, in the USA. So, it's existed for much more than a decade. I think we might be misunderstanding each other here.
Peter Theil is, you're right, a libertarian, as I mentioned. Libertarians are those who believe in the non-aggression principle. The nonaggression principle simply stated is this: "The initiation of force against an innocent person is immoral." You're correct that Peter and I agree with this. But that doesn't mean we necessarily agree in other areas. However, I suspect Peter is a fan of Hayek, and I am certainly a fan of the Austrian economists of that school, though they don't always agree, they do share the thesis that, when people are free to choose, rather than having choices forced on them by violence, the economy does better.
There's no contradiction between the claim that american manufacturing is not competitive, and america is still an innovative country. Just because America is still innovative (even if it is on the decline) doesn't presume that there's no innovation, and my general point is to argue, in fact, for the innovation of a particular american designed product.
You're right that american manufacturing has benefited from automation. In fact, american manufacturing capacity is higher than it has been in the past. But the jobs have not disappeared because of automation. Economically, automation tends to create more jobs, by providing increased leverage of each worker. American manufacturing jobs have disappeared because they are no longer competitive globally, because regulation, which allows unions to force employees to join the union, and which forced employers to deal with unions, which give unions a stranglehold on the companies. Companies which are able to avoid it via automation survive, those that can't- like much of the car industry- go bankrupt.
Please notice that I did not bring up tax policies in my article. There are many ways to measure whether a country is "pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship". Specifically I was talking about regulations.
However, since you have brought up taxation, please be aware that there are two forms of redistribution. While the tax rates may be low, we have seen record "redistribution" of wealth in the past decade. The government spent $4T in only the past severel years, in fact, which is such a massive sum that the only way to wrap your head around it is to recognize that before this happened there were only $10T in money supply in existence!
That is effectively a %40 inflation rate, cumulative, and consequently a massive hidden tax on the people.
You're absolutely right that the USA used british industrial innovation to kickstart our industrial revolution, and I don't begrudge the Japanes, or the Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc, from doing similar deals to kickstart their industrial revolutions.
The massive increase in overall wealth in China and India-- at least a doubling of the average income for over 2Billion people over 20 years, is long-term very good for the world.
Further, economics is not a zero sum game, thus it is not the case that for China and India to lift their people out of poverty, the USA has to suffer.
No, all of the wounds the USA is suffering are self inflicted.
PS- apologies to everyone else in the western hemisphere for using the term "america" to refer to the USA. I know, south america is also "america" as well. Its an old habit.
You are digging a bit deep for the invention. That multi-touch is as important an innovation you claim it to be is yet to be seen. Then, to turn it to a higher argument (them vs. us style) about innovators and the us vs china is pretty far-reaching. Not to mention the false android claims, and pretty visible bias.
To quote you - "There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here." That ideology is that great passion, which you show, excuses false data and misleading talking points.
Of course this is my opinion, filled with my biases, so take it as you will.
Do you realize you made several accusations against me, provided no facts to bolster them, and accused me of having "visible bias"? This communicates to me that when you hear something you agree with, you believe it to be "objective fact", but that anyone who disagrees is obviously "biased".
One of the things I am careful about, personally, is distinguishing between what I know, what I don't know, and what I believe. I cited facts that I know to be true, some that are obvious opinions (Eg: significance of something by definition is an opinion and "shows visible bias") and put forth hypothesis (e.g.: what I believe, and that is that there's an ideology at work here.)
If you don't see the "pretty visible bias" in things that you agree with, I think that can lead to mistakes. I recommend trying to find the faults in the arguments of people you agree with. If you can do that, you can produce even stronger arguments for your position, and you keep your mind sharp.
Anyway, as for the topic at hand, your response only serves provide supporting evidence for my hypothesis about ideology. I believe if that hypothesis were wrong, you'd have not made accusations against me, or if you did, you'd have supported them with facts, and that your primary objection wold be to an error of fact, or an error of belief on my part.
But in doing so, you provide a good example of what I'm talking about by ideology. Ideology is an act of faith, whereby you take your beliefs from another person or group, sans evidence, or by accepting their claims.
If you were responding to me on a philosophical basis, or simply on a factual basis, you would have had at your ready disposal philosophical (e.g.: logical) arguments, or specific facts that contradict my claims.
Please don't take offense here, none is intended. I'm simply disagreeing with you and explaining my perspective vis-a-vis your comments.
But this is also why I hesitate to post comments like the one you'r replying to to Hacker News. I don't find the charge of "pretty visible bias" (etc) to be.... interesting.... at all. (And the down votes I see I'm getting, for the "crime" of pointing out that the above response was personal rather than on the point, serve to further confirm my hypothesis. Hell, I even said "please don't take offense here" in response to someone who accused me of lying, but didn't even bother to be specific about what I was allegedly lying about!)
> There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone
EDIT I see that in another comment you refine y our statement to mean, only multi touch capacitance. Our technology uses camera to achieve multi touch.
This is simple false.
I worked for a company that made touch screens in the early 2000's. We had multi touch in 2000.
Our products are sold to schools where more than 1 million kids go to a classroom with one in it each and every day.
Please don't say things like "there were no multi touch devices before the iPhone" when this is so provably false. There was a multi billion dollar market of multi touch devices in schools before the iPhone was first revealed.
There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone was introduced. Nobody has provided a single piece of evidence of someone else showing the same technology. I never said there were no touch devices, and there were, in fact, "multi-touch" devices where your touch closed two switches. This is not the same.
The real problem is, either you're so ignorant of the technology in question that you don't realize your claim is false... or that your ideology leads you to not care.
BTW, if you want to make a claim like that, you could at least provide a citation of the actual name of the product so I can research it. But I don't think you care... you jut want to assert I'm wrong ,and act like you've proven me wrong, when the reverse is true.
Its sad that Hacker News has such a contingent of anti-intellectual, anti-technology, anti-innovation people that you can post these kinds of lies and not feel any shame.
Well, I guess that's not quite true. You felt enough shame to omit the name of the product you're "citing".
> "Users can also place a finger on the screen and touch another finger to the right of it for a right mouse click. These advanced mouse features eliminate the need to press extra buttons or find scroll bars on the screen."
>" DViT technology, introduced by SMART in March 2003, uses proprietary digital cameras and sophisticated software to pinpoint contact by a finger or stylus on a display. "
>. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)
Why don't you tell us what a GUI is, even if it's a personal definition?
You've come up with multiple posts where you claim Xerox didn't invent the GUI and dismissed anyone who said otherwise as being anti-Apple, but have never presented a shred of evidence or even an argument that Xerox didn't invent the GUI.
The reason these stories are constantly appearing on HN, nearly 4 years since the iPhone was introduced, is because those who want to diminish the invention of multi-touch, like everyone else, sat awed at the iPhone when it was first introduced. That was a very magical moment, and if the iPhone hadn't been a radical departure, then it would have been just another cell phone introduction. It's not often you get to see a new technology that seems magical for the first time.
Theil is talking in terms of making a dent in society. Obviously his standards for a "dent in the universe" are different than Steve Jobs. That's fine for him, but don't confuse it for support for your ideology.
There were no multi-touch devices before the iPhone. (and every time I bring this up, some one posts a link to thin-plastic keyboards from the 1970s, or the screens of the automated ticket stand at movie theaters as if they were the same.) The technology for understanding the shape of the finger when in contact with a touch sensitive display, and being able to reduce that amorphous blob down to a single pixel-- and get the pixel the user intended to touch, instead of the one at the center, or whatever, had never been done, let alone, tracking multiple fingers at the same time, a non-trivial problem. This invention enabled a raft of innovations that Apple spent 7 years developing that resulted in only the second new user interface paradigm in my lifetime- touch UI. (The first being the GUI, which was also developed under Steve Jobs.)
There's an entire ideology that is anti-intellectual, anti-science and anti-mind at work here. One manifestation of that ideology is support for things like welfare, etc, because they believe that it's just chance that separates Steve Jobs from you and me. (and not hard work.) Another manifestation of it is to pretend like the products of the mind have no value at all, and one way they like to do this is to pretend like its only "good marketing" that made the iPhone successful because it was just a random collection of parts that had been invented before.
Sure, LCD screens, Mac OS X, ARM CPUs, RAM, Flash memory and lithium polymer batteries existed before, and with the exception of OS X, all had appeared in other phones. To them, that means that there's nothing innovative about the iPhone. Innovation doesn't exist in their ideology, in fact, it demolishes their ideology, so they have to pretend like nothing was invented for the iPhone. Inevitably, when anyone expresses any defense of innovation you get a lot of nonsense claims about touch panel displays int he 1970s as if that were "prior art" for multi-touch. I've even seen people on Hacker News insist that Xerox invented the GUI. (showing either they don't know what a GUI is, or they don't care.)
To the extent that this ideology has succeeded in america, we have an economic depression, little growth in industry, a great shrinking in american manufacturing jobs (because this ideology has regulated them out of being competitive with the world market) etc.
This ideology might even succeed to the point where a major institution of this country, enshrined in the constitution itself, is destroyed, simply because Google wants to make a competitive phone without bothering to spend 7 years coming up with something innovative itself.
That would be a real shame... because the place that road leads is one where the president has a "kill switch" for the internet, things like SOPA are the law of the land, and startups have to get permission from government to operate their businesses, just like manufacturers do now, and said permission isn't going to come unless you have a lot of pull. We've seen what government control over the purse strings in an "innovative" area results in: Democratic contributors getting $500M loans from government for "green energy" only to go bust a few years later... its just a looting of the public for the direct benefit of politicians and their friends. This is the aristocracy of "pull".
It's instructive to remember that Theil is a prominent libertarian, and thus very clearly not a proponent of this ideology.
All this has happened before, and repeatedly. The USA is the last remaining beacon of innovation in the world. I understand that Hacker News is frequented by a lot of college age or early 20s hackers. Don't fall for the anti-innovation, anti-mind, anti-science, anti-intellectual ideology that says Apple is evil for inventing new things or putting the product and customer first, and those who just ship ripoff products are to be commended.
Don't fall for the claims that inventing is useless, and that america is destined to just be like china (Where everything we make is a ripoff of something invented somewhere else.)
To paraphrase Margarat Thatcher: The problem with not inventing anything yourself is, eventually you run out of other people's inventions to rip off.
In fact you can see this now: The android market is commoditized. Nobody is innovating, and nobody is making any money. In fact, Apples commanding %56 of the entire phone industries profits with only %5 of the smartphones, while most phones still aren't even smartphones. (this is why android marketshare is surging, its becoming the new feature phone).
This is a significant lesson for people who want to do startups. I learned it by trying to sell things on ebay when I was young:
If you don't have anything unique or innovative, you can only compete on price. And that's a race to the bottom.
To the extent that innovative companies can succeed, it is good for the startup economy. To the extent that anything innovative is ripped off, with no recourse, then the larger companies will maintain dominance because newer companies have nothing to compete with, and can't compete on economies of scale. The more things go that way, the less viable startups become and the less innovation society will have from which to benefit.