gregg thurman

radarthekat said:

Typically, if your patent is cited as prior art in 46 of someone else’s patents, it’d be a fair bet they looked hard at your patent and either decided they aren’t infringing or they picked apart your claims and engineered their solutions to ensure they don’t infringe. 

Apple did not try to hide the existence of SpeakWare's prior art.  Apple actually went out of its way to make sure patent examiners were also aware of the prior art.  That patent examiner awarded Apple a patent for its newly developed IP speaks loudly to the fact that Apple's solution does not infringe on SpeakWare's IP.

SpeakWare is suing because Apple has refused to accept SpeakWare's claims and refuses to pay licensing fees.  This suit is going nowhere, except maybe the trash can.

" It is unclear what the current goal for Apple's work is, "

What if Apple sees driverless cars as nothing more than street mapping tools.  Instead of Google's Street View vehicles, that probably were on the road for about 8 hours a day, Apple's cars could be roaming streets 24 hours a day/7 days per week.  What if these vehicles weren't just learning to map by GPS coordinates, but also visual landmarks, entry points, etc.

Expensive solution?  Yes, but the development of the artificial intelligence/machine learning engine to do that would have applications all over the place.

But does this rumored new chip support LPDDR4?  Granted the low end of Apple laptops most likely need 32G memory, but the clock speeds sure indicate graphics/video power, and without the memory will not benefit from the faster clock speeds all that much. 

During fiscal 2017 Apple sold 19.2 Million Macs.  Assuming 50% were variations of the newest MacBook, then Apple sold 9.6 Million MacBooks.

During the same year, Apple sold 216 Million iPhones, of which 70% were the latest/greatest, or 151 Million of the newest iPhones.

During the same year, Apple sold 43.7 Million iPads, of which 60% were the latest/greatest, or 26 Million of the newest iPads.

Total devices using Intel processors = 9.6 Million

Total devices using Apple processors = 177 Million

iPhones and iPads will see LPDDR5 memory LONG (2022?) before Mac laptops do (unless Apple is able to incorporate A-Series processors into its laptops before then).

IreneW said:

"the market is so miniscule"? India has a huge, growing middle class, most highly educated and tech savvy. They could afford an iPhone if they wanted. But for some reason Apple is not attractive enough for this market.

One of India's biggest exports is its highly educated youth.  Ex-pat Indians are everywhere in the finance, hospitality and tech world.

This is what you get from a protectionist mindset, which India has had since 1949.  The wealthy got wealthier, and the rest barely survive.  The educated leave town.  Modi seems to be trying to reshape the government's mindset and is having some success because A/ expats returning to India with attitudes developed in free markets, and B/ the shrinking of the old guard through retirement and age-related death.