I’ve been using a MacBook Air for a while now and I think it’s great, so it’s very understandable that makers of Windows PCs have started immitating the form factor. And yet now it turns out that Apple has been awarded a patent on wedge-shaped computers.
Once again it is difficult to see why this sort of competition-stifling government-enforced monopoly would be beneficial to the overall cause of innovation. It’s absolutely true that the record should reflect the fact that Apple made wedge-shaped computers popular and the new wave of Ultrabooks are slightly lame imitators. But we progress as a society because of imitators! People come up with good ideas and then those ideas spread. If you insist that everyone be original all the time, then you’ll never get anything done.
