Apple's Piping Hot Innovation
Want a coffee with your iPhone? — Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Chief Executive Steve Jobs wants to patent a process that will save customers the hassle of waiting to order a cup of coffee at a local Starbucks (nasdaq: SBUX - news - people ) …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Techdirt questioned whether the iPhone needed patents back in January 2007, the worry was defensive filings around a new device. Eleven months later, Steve Jobs has filed for a patent on something far afield from handset engineering: a process that lets iPhone-toting customers order Starbucks coffee remotely and skip the counter wait.
The story traveled fast — TechCrunch framed it as 'a way to avoid long lines' while Ars Technica picked it up the same day amid a wider debate over patent filings on everyday software behaviors. Coming off an iPhone launch year that reshaped the handset market, the filing signals Apple sees the phone's role less as a gadget than as a remote control for physical-world transactions.
First-order effects
- Starbucks customers carrying an iPhone gain a path to order-ahead service, cutting queue time at stores — the immediate beneficiary of the patented workflow would be the Apple-Starbucks pairing.
- Apple extends its patent portfolio beyond device hardware into retail transaction processes, giving it a claim on how phones interact with merchant counters.
Second-order effects
- Rival coffee chains and handset makers eyeing phone-based ordering now face a potential licensing wall: if the patent grants broadly, competitors building similar order-ahead features may need Apple's blessing or their own workarounds.
- Merchants gain an incentive to court smartphone platforms for order routing, shifting bargaining power toward whoever controls the customer's pocket — a dynamic that favors Apple's installed base.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone becomes the default ordering-and-payment layer for quick-service retail, with patent filings — not just apps — determining which platform owns that interface.
- The filing feeds the broader fight over software-process patents that Techdirt flagged at the iPhone's launch: consumer workflows becoming intellectual property, with regulators and courts eventually forced to draw lines around what counts as an invention.
The trend: Smartphones are evolving from communication devices into transaction platforms, and Apple is using patent filings to stake out the mobile-commerce workflows that connect them to brick-and-mortar retail.