Apple wins dozens of design and tech patents every week, and most of them are about unannounced features and products the engineers at Cupertino may or may not use in the future. Think about the hybrid iMac: we haven’t heard anything about it yet, but the patent is out there. Same applies for hundreds of different patents: they’re cool to look at, but it’s likely that you’ll never see them in action.
Today’s patent, though, is a major win for Apple’s design team and Steve Jobs: as Patently Apple reports, Apple was granted patents for the iPhone 4 and iPad industrial design and the iPhone UI overview.As for the iPhone 4:
Apple credits CEO Steve Jobs, VP Industrial Design Jonathan Ive and team members Jody Akana, Bartley Andre, Jeremy Bataillou, Daniel Coster, Daniele De Iuliis, Evans Hankey, Richard Howarth, Jonathan Ive, Duncan Kerr, Shin Nishibori, Matthew Dean Rohrbach, Peter Russell-Clarke, Douglas Satzger, Christopher Stringer, Eugene Whang and Rico Zorkendorfer as the inventors of Granted Patent D627,778, originally filed on April 19, 2010 or approximately two months prior to iPhone 4’s launch.
Antennagate or not, the iPhone 4 still looks sexy months after its release. A patent doesn’t tell much about the relevance of a product in the market, but we’re looking forward to future implementations of “industrial design” from Apple. The iPad 2 can’t come soon enough.
