This ignores the cost of missed opportunity: investing any amount of time and money on something else is almost certainly going to generate higher RoI than trying to make fast, responsive eink displays work.
It's almost never about whether a company can do something, but about whether they leave money on the table by not doing something else.
I see this mistaken assumption repeated everywhere by people unfamiliar with the display technology industry. You can attend display conferences and see lots of startups trying to make stable displays. The limitation is not patents. You can ask a simple question to prove this to yourself. Which E Ink patent is blocking progress and will suddenly cause the industry to become amazing after the patent runs out? At best, you'll get lazy answers like ALL of E Ink's patents.
Not everything Trump might have said is a "Trumpism". As for the statement "people said", it's absolutely fair to point out that your argument has been incorrectly stated in the past in very similar circumstances.
And you can look up e-ink's dozen or so patents that still have about half of their lifetime left. They're pretty fundamental to the technology. I personally try not to patent bomb here on HN so I don't push someone into willful infringement.
Good point, it has many of the same advantages: low power, sunlight readability. Why isn't it used more often? The OLPC had a dual LCD/LED display (PixelQi) and it worked very well.
RLCD is starting to pick up in some niches in China (e.g., the Hisense Q5). Its main disadvantage is that it tends to have a color cast depending on the nature of the ambient light, which e-ink doesn't, but it is cheaper and has higher refresh rates.
