[BigZaphod]

This is only a patent. This is not a feature of a shipping product. Hopefully it never will be.

Apple patents anything and everything and a ton of them are never really used. Optimistically, perhaps they grabbed this idea solely to prevent anyone else from doing it. By having a patent, they can refuse to license the idea to anyone and go after anyone who tries it anyway. You never know.

[cgranade]

While I want to share that optimism, I worry precisely because of Apple's many flirtations with censorship and their having built an amazing architecture for such on their iOS platform. This patent, whilst it wouldn't make any marketing sense or design sense, seems philosophically quite compatible with modern Apple.