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.

I agree with the first comment, and I think Brian is missing the point. How many of the buyers either a) have no idea they are buying a computer that doesn't run Windows or Windows software (please don't bring up WINE) or b) are tech-savvy and bought it as an additional Linux box or to run pirated Windows on?

I really don't see this as any real indication of the mainstream acceptance of Linux.

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