AppleInsider Staff
Apple on Tuesday was awarded a patent for the design of the glass trackpad atop the aluminum unibody enclosure of its MacBook lineup.
U.S. Patent No. D674382, simply entitled Portable Computer, was granted to Apple by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Its illustrations show the "ornamental design for a portable computer," and included among its inventors are Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and chief designer Jony Ive.
Apple notes in the patent that the surface of its MacBook computers is "metallic," and the included illustrations show the company's existing trackpad design found below the keyboard on a MacBook.
The awarded patent stems from a series of application continuations, the first of which was filed with the USPTO in 2008. In the document, Apple refers to the MacBook illustrations as "our new design."
The larger glass trackpad debuted in Apple's MacBook Pros in late 2008 when the company ushered in a major redesign with unibody aluminum enclosures. Unlike previous MacBooks that had a dedicated button below the trackpad for clicking, the new MacBook Pro glass trackpad was the first to act as a single physical button and to also understand multi-touch gestures.
In addition to Jobs and Ive, other inventors credited in the patent are Bartley K. Andre, Daniel J. Coster, Daniele De luliis, Evans Hankey, Richard P. Howart, Duncan Robert Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Dean Rohrbach, Peter Russell-Clarke, Douglas B. Satzger, Christopher J. Stringer, Eugene Antony Whang, and Rico Zorkendorfer.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
25 Comments
FINALLY. I'm really getting sick of seeing Apple inventions lose patents they deserve. The glass trackpad is unlike anything that came before it, including the way you interact with it...
I mean has anyone even seen the trackpads that are still shipping on every other notebook in the world? It is beyond disgusting.
[quote name="pmz" url="/t/155461/apple-wins-patent-for-glass-on-metal-trackpad-designed-by-jobs-ive#post_2258937"]I'm really getting sick of seeing Apple inventions lose patents they deserve... ...unlike anything that came before it, including the way you interact with it... [/quote] This is true of so many products it's amazing the other guys are still in business. Even if Apple can make a markup that is seen by some as unreasonable, there is still no competition. It's truly mind boggling sometimes.
I don't know how the PC guys are doing with their trackpad. So small and inefficient.
1. Wow, 15 people in total worked on this. From that London-design-award-goes-to-Ive-and-crew picture that seems almost to be the whole team, though I didn't heck the names. 2. Does Lenovo use the same config with glass and aluminium[SIZE=4]*[/SIZE]? [SIZE=2]* We've been over this[/SIZE]
This is clear as mud (again). Is it an ornamental patent or a trackpad design patent? The title says one and the article implies the other.
If it's a patent on the ornamental design of the MacBook Pro as it seems from the article that it is, then it can in no way actually be a patent on the glass trackpad which would be a design patent.
This is pretty typical of your reporting on patents in general. You might as well not report them and just post a link to some site that actually knows about patents and what this is all about.