Slashdot Mirror
Tim Cook Prefers Settling To Suing and Has a Huge Quarter
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's current legal battles with Samsung encapsulate a large number of patents, innumerable suits and counter-suits, and have resulted in legal motions in 11 jurisdictions across the globe. As you may remember, Steve Jobs in his biography was quite vocal about his intent to go thermonuclear on Android, vowing to spend every last dime in Apple's coffers to destroy Google's mobile OS. But Tim Cook is a bit more level headed about things, expressing during Apple's earnings conference call yesterday that he has has always hated litigation and would much rather settle than to battle in court. The caveat, of course, is that Cook doesn't want Apple to 'become the developer for the world.'" It may not be what Jobs would do, but as zacharye notes, it doesn't seem to be hurting earnings. "Despite early-morning jitters on Wall Street, Apple on Tuesday reported yet another blow-out quarter. The Cupertino, California-based company managed the second most profitable quarter in its history, posting a net profit of $11.6 billion on $39.2 billion in sales. Apple sold 35.1 million iPhones into channels last quarter, along with 11.8 million iPads, 7.7 million iPods and 4 million Mac computers. While the firm continues to dominate the technology industry — Apple is currently the most valuable company in the world — several analysts think Apple is just getting started."
The thing with Adobe is that it's by no means all Apple's fault.
One of the core issues was Adobe's creative suite, when they ported it to OS X they used Carbon rather than Cocoa. They knew Carbon wouldn't live forever yet they threw a temper tantrum when Apple started dropping Carbon in favor of the all-Cocoa future. Then they seemed to realize that if they dropped OS X as a platform they'd most likely end up losing customers as others (possibly including Apple themselves) filled the void, apparently they figure out that users of Adobe software on Apple platforms are generally more loyal to Apple than Adobe...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Adobe killed mobile Flash last year. Are you expecting Apple to now build their own Flash client implementation for this buggy, insecure, dying technology? Jobs was right about Flash.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Wrong. The holiday quarter and quarters containing new product launches have a huge influence over revenue. You can't measure things quarter to quarter, you have to go to the year ago quarter to check growth and even then you have to take into consideration if one or the other was a launch quarter.
If you want to know why certain people (yours truly included) are betting big on AAPL, consider this:
.
And also realize that the phone market is a billion+ handsets per year. Their customers love the iPhone more than any other phone and so the growth potential is huge.
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
you can patent implementation, not the idea
No, patents protect the idea, copyrights protect implementations.
car companies have all kinds of engine patents yet there are something like 10 different car companies selling cars in the US that all take the same gasoline
The basic idea you are referring to is the Otto cycle and it was indeed patented. The patent has long since expired.
if someone comes out with an idea you can always find a better way with some time and effort.
No, you can't, especially when patents are simply too broad. If someone patents the idea of multitouch on a phone, there is no way of implementing multitouch interfaces on a phone without violating the patent, no amtter how much research you do.
its always the asian companies that only want to rip off someone's work just to sell it for less.
Whereas, American companies want to rip it off, sell it for more, then sue the inventor?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Sixth one from the left, top row looks predominantly rectangular and all touchscreen. I also find it interesting that they have all of the screens lit up on the left hand side, whereas the right hand side are all blacked out. That certainly goes a long way toward making them LOOK more uniform, not that a mac fan site should be slighted for using clever advertising.
Also, iPhone came out on June 29th, 2007. The N810 in October of 2007 and looked pretty similar. You can't tell me the N810 was in reaction to the release of the iPhone. There had to be a good deal of parallel development time there.
Finally, I bring you about to the LG KE850, which was announced in January, 2007. Seems if you run the circuit, everyone was pretty much doing the same thing at the same time. It's almost as if Apple's a marketing company first and a technology company at about the same time everyone else is. Funny how that works.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Ya know, maybe they don't "invent" things. Whatever.
Yes.
One can say for sure that most of the industry tends to copy Apple's, er, um, 'not inventions'.
Designs. The word you are looking for is designs.
What did smartphones look like before the iPhone?
Well, in 1992, you had the IBM Simon which was a blank slab with nothing but a touchscreen. Due to the manufacturing tech and other constraints of the time, it was quite thick and a bit lumpy, because the basic aerial and speaker tech was not advanced. But bsaically, it's a cuboid with a screen and nothing else.
Then, later you had the LG Prada which was basically the same idea with 2006 era manufacturing and phone tech. That makes it a rather slicker cuboid with a screen and little else.
So yes, Apple didn't invent the idea or basic design, but they produced a very refined version of it.
What did tablets look like before the iPad?
Er, pretty featureless cuboids with little else but a screen and as thin as possible given the state-of-the art manufacturing tech, like the Hp-Compaq TC1100?
Aren't all of the ultra books attempted copies of the Macbook Air?
Again, they were not the first company to make thin or light laptops.
You're again confusing inventing the original idea with producing a good or even leading implementation of the idea. The latter is what Apple do, not the former. There's nothing wrong with that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That's not the point Baloroth was trying to make. The claim was presented that there was no phone that looked like the iPhone prior to the iPhone coming out. That is false.
All your argument suggests is that Apple is better at advertising and marketing.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
A short look at the numbers shows that their quarter actually sucked. They sold less units in this quarter than they did in the last quarter.
Almost no one compares quarter to quarter results for this simple reason: Apple's Q2 covers Jan - Mar. Q1 covers Oct - Dec (the holiday season). For a consumer electronics company, you'd expect them to have a slight drop off in sales after the holidays.
The opposite quarter-over-quarter was true for the same period in '11.
Where do you get that? Apple's numbers in millions of units:
Q1 2011
Q2 2011:
Q1 2012
Q2 2012
Except for iPods which are constantly declining they are increasing sales year to year.
Their absolute numbers are higher than they were last year because they entered new markets. But they are already declining in these new markets after being there for only 2 quarters.
I don't understand how you came to this analysis. The iPad was launched in 2009. Every years it sells more and more. The iPhone was launched in 2007. Every year, more are sold.
They have not gained any market share on Android.
So one company with variations of one phone manage to sell more every year with a majority of the profit, yet cannot outsell dozens of companies with hundreds of models but don't make as much profit and you're not impressed. Also same company pretty much has the majority of tablet sales. You're not impressed.
Everyone is trying to compare them to last year because it's something to compare to which shows an increase. But a quarter-over-quarter decrease is a very troubling sign.
No this is not a sign of trouble because your analysis is faulty. Everyone else is doing the analysis correctly. Year to year is the way to do it.
And they haven't quite beat the reduced market estimates. The estimates were that they would sell 13 million iPads. They sold less than 12 million iPads.
Please. Half the analysts have said that Apple was going to release a iPhone mini years ago. An iPad mini, etc. Analysts predictions are always off.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No, patents protect the idea, copyrights protect implementations.
No, Copyrights protect "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression." (17 U.S.C. 102). Patents protect new, nonobvious, and useful "process[es], machine[s], manufacture[s], [and] composition[s] of matter." (35 U.S.C. 101). Neither protects "wouldn't it be cool if ..."
I can tell you from firsthand experience that patent examiners frown on merely claiming a desired result. If your patent claim is "I claim a cloaking device capable of preventing visible detection of an object," the examiner will usually reject the claim for lack of specificity, even if you've fully disclosed a fully-enabled embodiment of a cloaking device. Of course, your attorney may be clever enough to draft claims broad enough to cover every method of implementing a cloaking device that people are able to come up with for the next 20 years, but if anything I would say that is persuasive that you have something truly revolutionary that deserves patent protection.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.