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The Real Reason Apple Is Suing Samsung
doperative writes with this quote from a speculative piece at Business Insider about Apple's real motive behind its recent lawsuit against Samsung's Galaxy devices:
"Android is free. In some cases, it's even cheaper than free, with Google sharing some revenue from Google searches on Android phones with partners. This is hugely disruptive to both Microsoft and Apple's business models; Microsoft because they make money on software licenses, and Apple on hardware. And this disruptive approach is winning: Android is surging past iOS in marketshare. A lawsuit from a big company, even if doomed, still takes a lot of time, energy and money to fight off. So Samsung or someone else might settle, accepting to pay some form of license. If that happens, Apple can go around to the other manufacturers asking for the same license and have a much stronger claim. And now OEMs have to factor that cost into the decision to choose Android. And all of a sudden, Android has a price."
Samsung has fired back with a lawsuit of its own.
If you are a fanboy, YOU will be hurt to know that there are more devices being sold with iOS than with Android. Not that it matters. Both platforms are doing quite well.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Certainly the ideas of rectangular device with rounded corners came out before the iPhone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_PRADA
Apple does an amazing job of taking ideas from others, and improving those ideas, and doing a great marketing job. But practically ever big idea from Apple, did not originate from Apple.
The Prada phone obviously did not influence the iPhone. The mere idea is sillly. On the other hand, Android was very clearly inspired by iOS and the iPhone. Have you seen what Android was like even just months before the iPhone was introduced? It was a Blackberry clone. Only after the iPhone came out did it find something better to copy.
Apple did not invent:
- the PC
- the GUI
- the mp3 player
- the online music store
- the smart phone
- the tablet computer
- or much of anything else.
In every single one of those cases, they were the first to create a product that people actually bought.
So isn't Apple just as much of a "copycat" as anybody?
In each and every one of the cases you listed, Apple broke new ground and created something like had never existed before. Only then did others look at what Apple had done and began to copy them. It's not "copying" just because you make a product that someone else may have already thought of, but it is copying when your version is a copy of someone else's design. In every one of the examples you listed, any products that existed before Apple's where notably clunkier and had extremely low consumer appeal, and the products that followed Apple's successful introductions all somehow ended up looking more like what Apple had created than what had come before.
So, who's the copycat?