Every time Apple applies for a patent, the blogs speculate on why, how, and when the technology will show up in a product. Let me give you a hint: filing a patent has absolutely no significance with respect to those questions. Any technology company worth its salt patents whatever it dreams up that it believes is patentable. Engineers come up with ideas in the course of their work that may or may not have an application within the company, but a good company has a process for identifying those ideas and funneling them into an intellectual property process.
Here's a fundamental patent concept that may help: patents give you the right to stop someone else from doing what you teach in the patent for some period of time. They do not give you the right to do something. See the difference? If I have a patent that teaches X, and you start doing X, I can sue you to make you stop and/or pay me. It doesn't matter if you have a patent that seems to say you can do X as well. So it is just as likely that Apple patents technology to make sure others can't do what it has no intention of doing as it is that they intend to do that thing.
While the above poster is correct for the most part. I have seen cases where patents were invalidated because there were no plans for commercial use(in some venues like the ITC) and the patents were just sitting around doing nothing. Also just filing a patent does not guarantee that the patent is truly valid even though the patents are prosecuted after they are filed(a process I am not familiar with I have only seen this mentioned when a patent is challenged after it is approved) there are many htings that can break a patent afterwords stuff like double patenting pre existing prior art and so forth. It does however add a layer of protection to the inventions of a company and so it is a common practice if they ever decide to use it.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Every time Apple applies for a patent, the blogs speculate on why, how, and when the technology will show up in a product. Let me give you a hint: filing a patent has absolutely no significance with respect to those questions. Any technology company worth its salt patents whatever it dreams up that it believes is patentable. Engineers come up with ideas in the course of their work that may or may not have an application within the company, but a good company has a process for identifying those ideas and funneling them into an intellectual property process.
Here's a fundamental patent concept that may help: patents give you the right to stop someone else from doing what you teach in the patent for some period of time. They do not give you the right to do something. See the difference? If I have a patent that teaches X, and you start doing X, I can sue you to make you stop and/or pay me. It doesn't matter if you have a patent that seems to say you can do X as well. So it is just as likely that Apple patents technology to make sure others can't do what it has no intention of doing as it is that they intend to do that thing.
There, I feel better.
While the above poster is correct for the most part. I have seen cases where patents were invalidated because there were no plans for commercial use(in some venues like the ITC) and the patents were just sitting around doing nothing. Also just filing a patent does not guarantee that the patent is truly valid even though the patents are prosecuted after they are filed(a process I am not familiar with I have only seen this mentioned when a patent is challenged after it is approved) there are many htings that can break a patent afterwords stuff like double patenting pre existing prior art and so forth. It does however add a layer of protection to the inventions of a company and so it is a common practice if they ever decide to use it.