OMG! Apple Just Patented The Lanyard.
Surprising news via cellphone9. Apple has filed a patent for the lanyard.
Apple is starting it. They filed a patent for the oh so typical lanyard you string around your neck to hang the iPod to make it do more things. Like flash lights to the beat of your heart when jogging or interface with other wireless devices. The future of the lanyard is now!
Okay, I guess it’s not really your typical lanyard that just serves the sole function of letting you strap your phone to your wrist or hang it around your neck. It’s more of the high-tech lanyard gadgetry, wherein you can plug in accessories and other peripherals. In short, the lanyard is a peripheral in itself—something that adds connectivity features to your device.
MacNN says it’s more than your regular strap.
Apple’s patent generally relates to lanyards for handheld electronic devices and more particularly, lanyards that incorporate electronic circuitry. Apple’s next generation of lanyards discussed in the patent go far beyond today’s designs to accommodate their upcoming iPhone and other future iterations of the iPod. In some cases, the lanyard itself will add functionality beyond those of the attached devices, such as adding telephony to any iPod, lighting effects that relate to heart rates for joggers and additional input facilitators such as buttons, touch pads or sliders.
But this is the kind of news that tends to make me critical of how far companies will go to grab the rights to a simple technology. Sure, you have to specify what exactly a technology should be and do, to qualify as a patent holder. Then if someone else wants to do something exactly like how you do it, he must pay royalties.
Of course, there are arguments for and against patenting technologies. And this pretty much centers on innovation. Some would say that patents are stifling to innovation since it becomes costly to develop products based on another entity’s patents, since you have to pay licensing fees or royalties. Others say that patents encourage innovation, since an inventor can potentially earn from whatever new technology he invents or designs.
It’s the same double-edged sword for consumers. We’re happy because companies like Apple can invent the iPod, the Mac and the iPhone—all based on several technologies that they own the rights to, or have paid licensing fees for. But then the other side of the coin is that we consumers also have to shoulder part of the cost of licensing technologies, as part of the retail price.
So Apple reinvented
the wheelthe lanyard. Some day these people will think of a way to plug in the lanyard directly to a port at the back of our heads so we can hardline music to our brains!
Hello peoplee9edd4
limewire said this on November 28, 2007 8:33 pm