Two types of A Game of Apples

IP is evil in a Game of Thrones kind of way and is wasting a tremendous amount of all of these companies' time and resources. It is an inherently non-market game, a win/lose game. And IP has to some degree forced all companies to play that game one way or another (defensively is less morally offensive than aggressively).

That said, it still must be noted in the context of comments such as the above that execution and "invention" are utterly different things. The definition of "product" in the video is technological, but not subjective. The "product" is the entire thing that the consumer is buying, including the surrounding experience. That is precisely the "technological recipe" discussed, which is just the right idea, except that the speakers seem to continue to imply the technical elitist view that this is an inherently lesser function than supposedly pure "invention."

However, without execution, invention serves no one. Creating an end-product that people actually buy is at least as much an art, and Jobs' vision was explicitly to work at the intersection of technology and humanities, including aesthetics. It is the result of making the recipe (the dish on the plate) that _always_ constitutes the consumer product that is bought, not the underlying technologies that are of interest mainly to engineers and technical elitists. A consumer does not go to a restaurant and ask for a portion of one of the ingredients from a bin in the kitchen.

Apple legal is being evil and Jobs had, among his weaknesses, an IP and overstretched credit-claiming mentality. But this is a different matter from the company's habit of reinventing entire industries for the benefit of ordinary people, which they did precisely by realizing that not only the ingredients, and not only the recipe, but the dish on the plate _is_ the important thing in business; not the "technology" taken in isolation from what matters to the end users. I think all this can still be appreciated separately from judgements about the company's horrific IP antics, which amount to trying to prevent competing chefs from using certain types of ingredients in their cooking!