Side-Effect of the Apple v. Samsung Trial: Increased Sales for Samsung

New submitter jbernardo writes "There seems to be an interesting side-effect of the flawed jury verdict of last Friday — Samsung sales have surged. Even with the approach of the launch of Apple's new iPhone, the Galaxy SIII is sold out in many stores, and there is a measurable increase in sales, according to Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, cited in Forbes. Maybe Apple really managed to convince its customers that Samsung phones are equivalent or better, so they are being overcharged? Or is it a rush to buy the currently best smartphone in the market in case there is an injunction on its sale in the U.S. any time soon?"

Comments

Streisand effect?

[Reibisch]

At this scale? That'd be interesting.

Re:Streisand effect?

[EdIII]

Not really all that many factors.

It is supposed to be a kick ass Android product. Pretty good chance it will be banned from sales in the future.

I can easily see people that might have waited otherwise rushing to get it now before they can't. What's the alternative? Apple??

Yeah, right. There are quite a number of people out there that would sooner die then choose Apple because of their shiny retarded walled garden approach to computing. I'll go back to a clamshell phone before I choose Apple for anything.

I don't know what Apple is thinking here. People that want Apple, largely have it. People that will never choose Apple are not going to embrace them, especially if they approach competition like this. Nobody likes to be forced.

Re:Streisand effect?

[Desler]

How is there a 'pretty good chance' of the G3 being banned when it wasn't ruled infringing and isn't part of the list that Apple is asking to be blocked?

Re:Streisand effect?

[jedidiah]

Samsung has become more trendy independent of this trial.

The public is fickle and Samsung is their new fad. This was something that you might have noticed before this judgement was handing down. This influenced my local iFan to defect from iPhone to G3.

Access to a Samsung tablet also helped. That access was enabled by the fact that a smaller Android tablet represents more of an impulse buy. It's something that is cheap enough that someone might buy it just to try it out.

Now the iFan wants a full sized Galaxy Tab and doesn't pay much attention to her iPad anymore.

Re:Streisand effect?

[Isara]

It also has a lot to do with brand awareness. Before the trial, Samsung was kind of a "generic" brand, not a hip brand like Apple. Now it's gone up against Apple and has a sheen of the bad boy, and people will remember its name when they go looking for phones.

Re:Streisand effect?

[EdIII]

let alone anyone else, would clearly exhibit a dearth of faculties, as you would be willing to forfeit your existence over something so trivial as a piece of technology.

Your failure is thinking the choice of technology is trivial. It is not trivial, but in fact crucial to our very future. That is not hyperbole.

How we approach computing in the future with respect to freedom, privacy, and anonymity will be a deciding factor in the very nature of freedom, privacy, and anonymity outside of computing.

It is inarguable that our lives in cyberspace and "meat space" are progressively becoming so intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable. If you want to argue that is untrue, explain how somebody was arrested for a tweet? How the stock markets can lost a half a billion in a matter of moments affecting the economies? How we could have massive power outages due to negligence or malicious hackers? How an incorrectly entered piece of data in an insurance carrier platform can result in suspended license plates and somebody being pulled over and arrested? How child porn could be put on a machine and result in the loss of freedom for an individual?

The walled garden is a very simple paradigm:

1) You own nothing.
2) Your very existence is at the discretion of the garden. Failure to comply with the will of the garden can result in punishment, which can be all the way up to expulsion from the garden.
3) You may only perform actions that are compliance with the will of the garden.
4) You may not perform any actions that could endanger the garden, or make it less "shiny".
5) The garden cannot be wrong.

At first glance that may seem like hyperbole, but is quite accurate.

Now apply that to real life and see if you would not be part of a revolution to overthrow it .

Re:Streisand effect?

[GPierce]

Jobs sunk Apple back in the early 1980s due to his anal-retentive approach to marketing. Large numbers of potential developers took one look at the developers agreement of the time and decide to become IBM PC developers.

If it weren't for Apples superior graphics, the probably would have lost everyone. Similarly, the end-user market rejected Apple because you couldn't install a third-party hard drive. If Apple didn't offer it, you couldn't get it.

There is nothing irrational about refusing to do business with this kind of company. Jobs saved their butt with a truly creative product design - and then proved that in thirty years, he hadn't learned a damn thing. In two years, Android has taken over half the market. In five years, Apple will be back to being a marginal player with about 10% market share. .

Supporting this kind of company demonstrates a kind of mental deficiency. The intelligent rational people will avoid Apple products until we see that Apple has finally learned something and changed it's evil ways.

Re:Bias

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Here's a wholly anti-Samsung piece to even things out:

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2012/08/26/devils-advocates-play-up-sympathy-for-samsung-after-apple-trial/

Re:Bias

[wierd_w]

And that is just fine. Opinions are meant to be shared. Goodness knows the apple crowd is very vocal with theirs.

Just remember that loathing apple does not spontaneously elevate the one doing the loathing to Samsung Fanboi.

Fairly sure it's because of the trial

[gentryx]

...and the coverage in the news. Here is a nice story on how people react on the verdict.

Just bought mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I went and bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 even though it wasn't a part of the lawsuit or a ruling against the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. I had been scouting it out for a few months now. Even though I disagree with the ruling, I wanted to buy it before an increase in price due to licensing fees, in case Samsung decides to license the technologies that were borderline borrowed from Apple.

Re:People Worried?

[Machtyn]

For those who don't want to live in the Apple-verse, would like a little more freedom with their devices and apps, and want one of the best Android devices on the market, this is an obvious move. I understand that Apple wishes to protect its properties, but this limits customer choice. They did, after all, get a nearly 5 year headstart with their devices, made billions of dollars from sales and continued cross-market promotions, etc. But Apple won't make one dime off of me.

Re:Could that post be more biased?

[Chibi Merrow]

Pick an objective measure where the Galaxy S3 is not one of, if not the best.

People are just noticing the difference

[na1led]

Because the Samsung Galaxy S3 phone has been on the front-line news so much, people finally took a good look at it, and realized it's superiority over the iPhone-Toy.

Other sites report the exect opposite

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Marketwatch sees a completely different phenomenon :

"While many experts predict Apple Inc.’s court victory over Samsung could shake up the wireless industry over the long term, it’s already having an impact on one key area: the resale market.

Since the $1.05 billion verdict Friday — which found that Samsung infringed on six Apple AAPL -1.04% patents — customers of Samsung have been dumping their Android products on at least one major resale site. Gazelle.com reports a 50% increase in Samsung smartphones over the past three days, which has led to a 10% drop in prices for those devices"

Re:Bias

[djchristensen]

I'm with you. When the most valuable company in the world, EVER, goes whining to the courts because another company has phones with "pinch zooming" and "rubber-band scrolling", I cannot respect that company and will avoid their products. I mean really, how many iPhone purchases honestly didn't happen because Samsung had these features? Certainly they would have played zero role in any decision I have or would have made.

There are four iPods and an iPad in my household, but those are the last Apple products I'll willingly buy (with a wife and kids, can't really say absolutely never). I'll be getting a smartphone and likely a small tablet for myself soon and won't even consider an iPhone or iPad, with Apple's legal behavior being responsible for going from "would consider" to "no freaking way".

Re:Bias

[jc42]

But I can loathe a company that tries to stop competition with frivolous lawsuits, that copies everything and patents the most obvious stuff to stop others doing the same, blocking innovation the same way James Watt's patents blocked the evolution of the steam engine for 30 years.

It's interesting to read comments pointing out what assorted historians have been saying for a long time: The primary use of patent laws has always been to block technical progress. We keep hearing the propaganda (enshrined in the US Constitution, among other places), that patent law is to encourage progress. But the historical evidence is contrary to this.

The only actual use of a patent to to prevent your competitors from using something. Yes, you can use it to extract royalties, but this is just an indirect way of making the products more expensive, and thus interfering with competitors' development and sales.

But more important than price is the effect of multiple patents. The historians' explanation of Watts' delay of the steam locomotive is that a practical locomotive required a number of other inventions in addition to Watt's efficient steam engine. But Watt and several other inventors each wanted to own it all, and refused to license their inventions to each other unless they each got the lion's share of the results. They pretty much all held out until their patents expired. Then, since Watt had the largest bunch of good engineers working for him, he was able to quickly start manufacturing and selling practical locomotives. He became rather wealthy late in life, but could have become rich decades earlier if he and the other inventors hadn't been so greedy, and had agreed to share the proceeds in a reasonable manner.

Part of the history is also the patenting of well-known ideas. But that's a different story from Watt's. It is a lot of what's going on now in the US, as exemplified by the Apple-Samsung case. We have somewhat reduced it to an ongoing series of jokes about patenting a rectangle with rounded corners. But it's a lot more pervasive than that. There was a cute offshoot of this humor yesterday on SMBC, based on the idea of lawyers in India filing suit against the Western computer industry, based on the fact that the number 0 was invented in India, and stolen by Western traders. (Actually, it was stolen by Arabian traders, but that's "Western" to people in India. ;-)

I'm surprised at who is now making fun of Apple

[FauxReal]

There's been a new comedic meme emerging, "Anything you do might get you sued by Apple." and people are starting to run with it. Maybe the 1 Billion dollar verdict sounds ridiculous to people who's assets are measured in thousands?

Non-technophile and iphone owning friends of mine are posting memegenerator images or making silly comments about the lawsuit on Facebook. I'm seeing the same stuff from random people on sites like imgur and tumblr. Samsung also just unveiled a new Galaxy mirrorless interchangeable lens (AKA 4/3s AKA 3rd gen) android powered digital camera that some people are excited about.

Personally, I'm not sure on what the reason is but I am surprised at how many people aren't cheering for Apple in this one.

Re:Walled garden

[Anguirel]

My problem with iProducts is that iTunes is malware, as far as I'm concerned, and Apple expects you to do just about everything through iTunes.

I've found ways around it, eventually, but doing something as simple as importing e-books I'd bought well before the iPhone existed took multiple hours to figure out (for a device marketed as "simple to use, UI-is-everything, it just works"). I tried to add them as "Books" to the device. Nope. Apparently that only applies to the iBooks program, so it has to be in the Apple format already. I tried drag-and-drop. Nope. I looked for other ways to get them onto the device within iTunes and didn't see anything obvious. I ended up using Calibre, a third-party program, to import the books to Stanza. And then discovered that if I wanted to test out a competing e-Book reader app, I need to import the books again, because there's absolutely no data sharing between apps. That's also what clued me in to how to add things in iTunes -- you need to have the app installed first, and import it straight to a specific app.

If you're willing to do everything inside the Walled Garden, sure it works. As soon as you want to step outside, even for data, it's not quite so easy, and can often be quite a hassle.