Apple has been granted three patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office. Following is a summary of each.

Patent number 8006121 is for systems and methods for diagnosing and fixing electronic devices. Systems and methods for reducing the cost and time required for diagnosing and fixing electronic devices are provided. A host electronic device may be configured to generate a log of events that it experiences. A help component may access the generated log and analyze the log to detect if the host device has experienced a problem. Data may then be exchanged between the help component and the host device in order to fix the detected problem.
The inventors are Svetlana Samoilova, Wing Law and Andrew Bert Hodge.

Patent number 8004492 is for methods and systems for providing sensory information to devices and peripherals. Per the patent, peripherals and data processing systems are disclosed which can be configured to interact based upon sensor data. In at least certain embodiments, a method for sensing motion and orientation information for a device includes receiving a motion event from at least one sensor located in a device. The method further includes determining an orientation for a display of the device.

The method further includes determining whether the device is currently moving. The method further includes determining whether the device moves within an angle with respect to a ground reference for a first time period. The method further includes switching the orientation of the display of the device if the device moves in excess of the angle. The inventors are Scott Herz, Dan Keen and Wayne Carl Westerman.

Patent number 8005865 involves index aging and merging. Systems and methods for processing an index are described. An index may be merged with another index of comparable age and size into a single index. Since older indexes are less likely to need updating, they are "set aside" to age based on certain adaptive criteria such as the age and size of the index, percentage of deletions, and how long it takes to update the index. An index that has been set aside may be compacted into a format that is optimized for fast searching. John Martin Hornkvist is the inventor.

-- Dennis Sellers