The patent business for Apple is not new. And I talk about business with patents since the Cupertino company or any other company that wants and has in its hands a patent brings many benefits. In this case we are talking about something that if used in the smart watch of the Cupertino company, the gesture of waking up the device with a flick of the wrist.
This patent discovered by the site PatentlyApple, is quite recent and was requested by Apple under the name «Waking a device in response to user gestures»In mid-2015. Now you have it in your possession and it certainly seems like a very interesting patent application to avoid copies. The very design of the watch or the crown also has its patent and it is evident that Apple does not want to have problems in the future with large companies that can copy its work.
Sometimes we believe that registering a patent is to implement an improvement to the device in question, but in many cases registered patents are used to obtain benefits if any outside company wants to use what is patented for their benefit and therefore, clean money for the owner of the patent. All companies work hard to obtain patents and it is increasingly common to have registered functions that they are not really going to be used in the devices they make.
By this I do not mean that this is the case with this patent for the Apple Watch, in which the patented function if used since its inception, but there are many cases in which patents serve so that other companies have to pay if they want to use them.