alt Hacker NewsI'm interested in reading more information as it comes out, but a lot of the comments claiming it's "just vibrations" are being a bit reductionist. These devices are controlled by complex algorithms, and they take a lot of time and money to create. Why shouldn't this company enjoy the same IP protections that Apple enjoys on their work?
My issue with stuff like this is their work is not worth $6 billion dollars. Yes it takes time to develop this stuff but it isn't ground-breaking work and isn't especially novel. A room of experienced engineers, given the same constraints, would likely be able to come to the same design conclusions without much time or expense. Patents in general have this problem. A lot of it is a race to patent as much obvious and fringe-not-immediately-useful-today stuff as possible and it unfortunately works a lot of the time.