Like my Mac's trackpad ? Can someone ELI5 how it works ? It's gotta be magic-adjacent cos when the machine locks up, the trackpad is deader than a doornail.

It's not really "high tech", it's just tuned well, with some high power for the size.

Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones and 4.5 billion iPhones, iPads, and iPods together.

$5.7B seems low if every one of those devices infringes.

If it’s iPhone 6s and later and all watches (for taptic input), that’s around 2 1/3 billion phones and 1/3 billion watches, so even just $2/device gets you into that range.

One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.

Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.

There isn’t one mind. We are unique individuals with different opinions. Opinions of an individual can even be contradictory!

Tell me you’re not so thick

But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

What got them in the same room in the first place was them being the only group of people (most likely) working on a specific piece of enabling technology that they believed would be rewarded by the market and adoption AND they needed to make a living in the mean time (getting paid to do that work.)

A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with to allow said group / company to invest the time and money in advance to making that technology and wants to risk/trade 20 future years to collect profit on the work they do now.

If you don’t like the game, get better at it.

So the article doesn't explain why it was appealed, then found shady on appeal.

it's a weird article, worth reading.