Apple's aggressive patent strategy is really turning me off; as it should for other people as well. I hope this is understand not only by the Tech community, but also average consumers.<p>I don't know their claims, but given the past, this is getting out of hand. Last month, I would have said that I would consider buying an Ipod because it is a great product; but because of the past events, I would not consider buying an Apple product whatsoever.<p>Man up, Apple. You are going to have competitors in the mobile and tablet industry. Stop trying to cop out with all this patent crap.
So... I feel like Apple has come full circle.<p>I find myself wishing for a Hooters waitress to come running down the aisle of the next Apple PR event and hurl a sledgehammer through the presentation.
At least Apple is a company that sells something and is trying to protect their products. They are playing the game under the current law, which is clearly flawed. Rather than complain everytime Apple/Microsoft, etc go after others, can we try to get problem solved?<p>The game is so flawed that there's an entire industry built around it, and it's getting worse.
Except for ammunition to the endless legions of kneejerk anti-Apple fandroids, what is the point of this article? It is essentially content-free, the limited claim being that Apple, who are infringed upon in many areas, is suing people who rip off its case designs as well as Samsung who ripped of the design of the iPad wholesale.<p>The patent system exists, Apple are using it correctly. Companies like Samsung should quit whining and stop copying.
It seems thar Apple does not care about the negative PR lawsuites like this generate for them. Apple owes a lot of their success to being cool and innovative. Lawsuites like this make apple neither.
This sort of behaviour isn't visible to consumers, so it doesn't hurt them in the short term.<p>But it does piss off developers. If they keep up pissing off developers with patent & app store shenanigans they'll lose their most passionate developers and end up with just those who are in it for the money.<p>And we know how that ends up. ~10 years ago passionate developers jumped from Windows to OS X, even though at the time there was virtually no money in OS X application development. And the availability of some very nice applications was a large driver of the OS X market share increase from 2% to 15%.
Am I the only person that actually thinks that charger cable (assuming its the same size) is a bit suspiciuos? It's like Samsung is either being lazy at this point, or is trying to goad Apple on to attack them.<p>I have to side with Apple on the shape of the charger issue. Especially since there are plenty of shapes they could have used, some of them standardized, like mini/microUSB...<p>By the way, the clenching feature was two bumps at the ends of the charger that, I think are used for holding the charger in place.<p>A question of course is, "should this be patentable". I'm not arguing that right now, and haven't thought about it enough to have a position, but it is awkwardly similar, and when there are already a fair amount of already-existing standards they could have chosen, they went with an Apple-specific one. ... that's all I'm saying.
Your product is in the shape of a rectangle, we invented rectangle. Pay us money for our invention or we will sue you in 50 different nations. there needs to be a penalty for the attacking company when frivolous patent suits are shown to be ridiculous.