Well, those products didn't exist when they made eink displays. The whole point of a patent is to grant a temporary monopoly in exchange for the patent holder making details of the invention public. The patent holder gets a monopoly on producing and selling that thing so they can recoup their investment, and competitors can make derivatives after the patent period.

If a product already exists, you can't patent it because it falls under the "prior art" restriction.

That said, I absolutely agree that patents should have a much shorter duration. I think the right number is somewhere in the 5-7 year range, but others certainly have different opinions. What I'd like is an actual, national discussion about it instead of just random ranting on social media.

No disagreements! It does seem like an area that needs improvement.

Well I think I should probably avoid saying the company name that sells the air-conditioning system with the bullshit app and tablet as a package only because it's fairly specific to where I live but the app is called ezone and when I called them about replacement and balked at the outrageous cost they said it's because they have the tablets put together for them so they're custom and not mass produced the same way as an off the shelf tablet. If you go in to the settings on android for it and the about section it says the model number is just ezone1.

They have it pretty well sewn up.i love controlling the aircon from any room easily but the bullshit with the broken connectivity and secretly changing my temperature to 18c all the time is enough that I'd rather have had a traditional IR remote with a digital clock style display. At least it works reliably.

You know what else sucks about this thing? Obviously it doesn't need to be fast or high performance, but they cheaped out so much that it barely manages to run the only app it's supposed to run. When we first got it, it was slow and unreliable and connected only intermittently (rather than solidly for months followed by not at all for months) so we updated the app, but now they've updated the app to have little animations and it's too much for the tablet to bear and it almost crashes trying to run a little spinning fan animation and takes forever to wake from the lock screen. So dumb, why make it do that when you know exactly what hardware a huge proportion of the user base will be stuck with? I'm sure if you bought it now the tablet might be slightly better but what am I supposed to do? I'm not paying a goddamn ransom to be able to operate my otherwise perfectly functional airconditioning. A machine that controls temperature is supposed to be the impressive hard to make part not the damned control surface.