I doubt e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others have been shipping >100 million laptops per year longer than this patent has been around with most, if not all, without the feature primarily because Apple was one of many (and not the last) to file a patent on their implementation of a common feature in the sound industry and they are now afraid of and upreprade for legal battles related to making laptops. More likely few just care about crappy laptop speaker sound enough to write a driver modeling each device and speaker combination for a significantly wider variety of shipping hardware. But I suppose it's impossible to know without asking every manufacturer.
They don't care because it doesn't impact sales enough to care. If some R&D person in these orgs took interest in this it would get smacked down by PMs, execs, etc because it doesn't matter and they don't care. That's all well before it even gets to legal where this patent would be discovered. With these factors compounded it doesn't happen - and Apple has a tiny edge on what is probably their core market/demographic anyway.
Hmm I don't think we're saying the same thing at all. I'm not saying patents are part of the reason companies don't care, I'm saying they didn't care before the patent and there is no reason to suspect the patent is the real reason they don't care since. If any part of the reasoning for why not has to do with the patent being there then it's not what I'm saying, even if it would sound similar.
