So the U.S. International Trade Commission has this week issued a major ruling against Apple for allegedly infringing against a key Samsung patent related to 3G technology. If upheld, and that’s not a certainty in such cases, it would mean that imports of several older Apple mobile products that run on AT&T’s network would be blocked. However, only the entry-level iPhone 4 would see potential impact. The other products, which include the iPhone 3GS, the original iPad 3G and the iPad 2 3G, are no longer available.

A hollow victory? Perhaps, it shouldn’t seriously impact your ability to buy an iPhone 4 if you want one. Besides, by the time Apple has appealed the ruling, and a final decision is made, they will have moved on to even newer iPhones. At worst, the iPhone 4, offered free by AT&T with a two-year plan, would be taken off sale for a brief period of time ahead of the arrival of a newer lineup of iPhones. It would hardly seem to matter.

The media, however, has begun to portray this ruling as a major defeat for Apple. But it has pretty much become obvious that, with all the legal interplay around the world involving Apple, Samsung, Motorola and other mobile handset makers, one victory may turn to a defeat or a draw once appealed, or if contradicted by yet another ruling in a different jurisdiction. Very little is ever accomplished beyond enriching high-paid legal teams.

The ruling in question states that the affected Apple products infringed on Samsung’s U.S. Patent No. 7,706,348, which covers an “Apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communications system,” which involves UMTS wireless technology.

If not overturned, the ban will not go into effect for 60 days, and it’s always possible Apple could win yet a further delay via an appeals court ruling pending resolution. The ruling could also be blocked by President Obama, but a decision of that sort would seem highly unlikely. At worst, I suppose Apple could move as many iPhone 4s into AT&T’s warehouses ahead of the effective date, which would mean that the product would continue to be available until the next model appears.

However, since the next generation iPhones are due no later than September, whatever ultimately happens as a result of this ruling wouldn’t make much of a difference. This is the unfortunate fact of such legal skirmishes. They take so long to move through the judicial process that models that may actually infringe on this or that patent are often discontinued before the rulings are issued, or the appeal process is complete. All that hard work for so little gain. You wonder why they even bother.

This doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t complain if their intellectual property is infringed upon. Unfortunately, patents may be so general or so confusing as to confound any attempt by legal experts to figure out their impact. I also wonder if a large firm, such as Apple, might simply take a chance when entering into a gray area, figuring that even an unfavorable patent ruling will have little or no impact by the time it is granted. This is the sort of calculated risk that usually pays off, and don’t get me started about essential standard patents, where equal licensing terms are required, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Some suggest that Apple should spend more time innovating than suing, but the same could possibly be said about Samsung, Motorola and other companies that have filed lawsuits alleging patent infringement.

But the worst problems involve so-called “patent trolls,” firms that buy up loads of patents but actually do not build anything. They simply go after other companies, large and small, demanding royalties for alleged infringement. Some companies may just pay up so as not to get embroiled in a costly legal dispute.

In a recent series of actions, President Obama came down hard against patent trolls. He issued a set of executive orders that call for rules that require disclosure of the actual owners of patents, and for more stringent government review of patent applications. He also called on Congress to pass legislation that would be designed to reduce the number of supposedly frivolous patent lawsuits.

Such legislation would, for example, allow courts to assess monetary sanctions against parties that file what are considered to be frivolous lawsuits. Such a sanction could, for example, include paying the other party’s legal fees. However, getting the U.S. Congress to do anything in the current political climate would stand but a slight chance of succeeding.

In the meantime, I expect little is going to change. Apple will win a few, lose a few, and the same is true for other companies. At the end of the day, few if any products will be forced off sale, but maybe a few software or hardware changes will be made to halt alleged infringement. But it won’t mean much of a change in your ability to buy the products you want with the features you want.

To paraphrase what someone once said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

After a drought of several years, Apple is reportedly posed to launch a major upgrade for the Mac Pro workstation. While the increasingly powerful iMac has become a worthy substitute for many content creators, some still crave the higher math and 3D rendering power and expandability of the traditional tower configuration.

Unfortunately, Apple placed the Mac Pro on the back-burner for several years. Since moving to Intel processors in 2006, the updates have been relatively minor, involving processors, graphic cards and hard drives. Most of the changes, therefore, have been simple component upgrades based on current technology. But Apple hasn’t even kept up with Intel’s most powerful Xeon processors of late. Last year’s refresh was so minor as to go almost unnoticed, and it made very little difference in terms of the actual performance of the workstation. Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 were not in evidence.

However, both Tim Cook and Apple PR have confirmed the arrival of a significant Mac Pro upgrade this year, but the substance behind that claim is still murky. It wouldn’t involve a huge amount of development costs to simply take the present overweight box and stuff it with new guts and peripheral ports, and the latest and greatest processing and graphics hardware. There could even be an enhanced set of SSD customization options along with the Fusion drive that debuted in the iMac and Mac mini.

One published report suggests a more minimalist approach by Apple, and the end result would be something along the lines of what Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes and I have separately written about, which is a more affordable and smaller form factor with reduced expansion options. But the configuration I’ve read about won’t win Apple any brownie points with computing professionals.

The report, clearly not confirmed by Apple, speaks of a smaller Mac Pro with no internal expansion options whatever. There would be two graphics processors, to handle multiple displays. This alleged 2013 Mac Pro, or whatever Apple chooses to call it, would still contain the latest Intel Xeon chips, and enough slots for plenty of RAM. If you want to add extra drives or other peripherals, you’d use the Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 ports. Optical drives? In keeping with most of the rest of the Mac lineup, they’d be history, unless you want to buy one of Apple’s external USB-based DVD drives or someone else’s.

Now I expect that loyal Mac Pro users would be howling if Apple came up with a solution of that sort. Why no expansion options beyond RAM? I suppose Apple could argue that Thunderbolt is a worthy alternative, although it’s hardly suitable if you care to transport your Mac Pro from location to location. Why have to bring a bunch of extra gear with you? Besides, there are, so far, a paltry number of Thunderbird accessories. The reason isn’t important, but it makes it doubly inconvenient for a professional Mac user who needs to expand the computer beyond the basic configuration.

Sure, most Mac users do not upgrade their computers beyond a RAM upgrade — and that’s become less possible as more and more Macs have memory soldered to the logic board — but content creators have traditionally required flexible upgrade options. How does Apple serve their needs?

One admittedly non-existent possibility is that the new Mac Pro won’t replace the current model, but will coexist as a less-expensive alternative. Call it a Mac Pro mini. The existing model would receive refreshed components, and Apple would, over time, evaluate sales and see whether external expandability matters anymore.

But it’s not that Apple ever listens to me. It’s a sure thing that Apple wants to move PC technology forward, in this twilight of the era. So it may well be that there will be a more minimalist Mac Pro in our future. But the computer that Dan Frakes and I envisioned was probably more in the form of a headless iMac, taking the guts of the iMac, and dispensing with the display. Perhaps a progenitor to this type of Mac is the IIci from the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the world has changed.

Of course, a commentary of this sort will have an extremely short shelf life, coming less than a week before Apple is expected to unleash new versions of iOS and OS X, and some brand new Mac hardware. Some of that hardware will amount to mere refreshes of current models to take advantage of Intel’s new Haswell chips. There may be more significant changes, such as the rumors of a slimmed down 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.

But content creators have been hoping and dreaming for a new Mac Pro, one that will provide the power and expandability on which they’ve come to depend. Time will tell how well Apple will meet those hopes and dreams, and they probably shouldn’t get their hopes too high.

In releasing an iPhone and iPad app for the forthcoming WWDC, Apple may be offering a front and center preview of the new “flatter” interface for iOS 7 touted in recent press speculations. At least if you can regard this new app as a harbinger of things to come very, very soon.

By the way, I’ll ignore an alleged leaked image of an iOS 7 home screen for now.

The WWDC app is available free from the App Store, but you won’t see all the features unless you sign in as a developer. But there are screen shots aplenty online, and I spent a short amount of face time with the app on a third generation iPad to see what has changed.

Assuming this app represents Apple’s forthcoming direction in iOS, and I see little reason not to accept that as a high probability, you won’t be seeing flat tiles in the fashion of Windows 8. The changes are subtle. There are gradients within buttons as there were before, but the effect is subtler, classier. Icon labels appear to be more sharply defined. Where less is more, Apple appears to have succeeded admirably, and done so in a way that doesn’t alter the iOS user experience. That’s something Microsoft has yet to learn, and it may explain why there are now published reports that CEO Steve Ballmer is working on a major restructuring of the company. Well, better late than never.

Returning to the iOS interface, some suggest the recently revised Podcasts app was another key example of how Apple will tone things down. Gone are the reel-to-reel tape effects, and in their place are simple controls to find, add and play your favorite shows. Maybe that was step one; the WWDC app continues the simplification process, but in smart way.

This, of course, won’t be the first visual refresh for iOS, although it will likely be more drastic than before. For example, those controversial skeuomorphic elements, such as the ones you saw in Podcasts, Contacts, Calendar, and others, are expected to be history. Such designs may have made sense in the early days of the original Mac. Everything was new and different then, and iOS simply carried part of that tradition to mobile devices. But it’s time to move on.

Curiously, and despite all the serious flaws, Microsoft also realized that it was time for traditional user interfaces, such as the one they “borrowed” from the Mac, to change in some fashion. Their approach, however, was schizophrenic, with one layer all new, and one layer based on the traditional Windows look and feel. No wonder customers are confused. At least Windows 8.1 will have an option to boot directly to the desktop to bypass the mess formerly known as Metro. This move may indeed be a last-ditch effort to attract a decent number of business customers.

I also expect Apple to keep the changes in OS 10.9 relatively subtle in the scheme of things. As with iOS, you should be able to use a Mac the same way you always have, but the look and feel will be simpler and more consistent. It will probably not be near as drastic as some of the tech pundits are suggesting, and that is Apple’s way. It’s also a lesson well learned.

Some of you no doubt recall when Apple bought Steve Jobs’ NeXT in 1996. The initial attempt to create a Mac user interface, Rhapsody, was demonstrated in 1997 and seemed more NeXT than Mac. Developers balked at having to seriously restructure their apps to support an unproven operating system.

Apple’s compromise, Aqua, was a beautified version of the traditional Mac OS with some notable changes, such as the Dock. But it was still Mac-like, and there was a Classic feature that allowed you to run Mac OS 9 in its own application window, so you’d be able to use most of your existing apps until they were ported to OS X. To simplify the process, Apple came up with Carbon, a refined set of Mac APIs that made the migration process easier.

In essentially redoing what became OS X, Apple learned a lesson that they cannot just throw out the tried and true when it came to user interfaces. They had to tread carefully. Even baby steps have consequences, and in the scheme of things, bringing over iOS features to Lion and Mountain Lion didn’t seriously alter the Mac look and feel. But such features as natural scrolling, and mouseover activated scrollbars remain controversial, although both features can be disabled in System Preferences.

I am also eager to see how Apple presents the expected interface changes at the WWDC. Will they make a huge deal, or simply state that they have simplified the look and feel to make it easier for OS X and iOS users to get things done? There will still have to be loads of significant new features to make the upgrades worthwhile, although other companies would rest their laurels on the form, forgetting the substance.

In any case, it is good to see that the WWDC app doesn’t make changes that alter iOS usability. A little can go a long way.

Apple fans and Wall Street were clearly disappointed when Tim Cook announced, during April’s quarterly conference call with financial analysts, that Apple’s new product rollout would commence this fall? Why should it take so long? Isn’t something missing?

Well, it seems that Apple appears to have different plans in mind. It is already known that Apple will demonstrate new versions of iOS and OS X at the WWDC, which begins on June 10. It also appears that these will be major upgrades, with a number of interface changes shepherded by chief designer Jonathan Ive, who took control of the software division last fall.

While the new operating systems won’t change as drastically as Windows 8, and that’s a good thing, the early predictions have it that there will be a flatter look, free of fluff, frills and skeuomorphisms. The real question is whether Apple will come up with another 100 or 200 changes over and above the interface redesign. But the changes do not appear to be minor.

Continue Reading…