Slashdot Mirror
Apple Hides Samsung Apology So It Can't Be Seen Without Scrolling
An anonymous reader writes "Apple today posted its second Samsung apology to its UK website, complying with requests by the UK Court of Appeal to say its original apology was inaccurate and link to a new statement. As users on Hacker News and Reddit point out, however, Apple modified its website recently to ensure the message is never displayed without visitors having to scroll down to the bottom first."
When you've been slapped down for contempt of court, your next action really shouldn't be this kind of open contempt. I wonder how Apple's UK employees feel about this disrespect to their courts?
Apple managers are apparently unaware that sneaky behavior is likely to get a big story on Slashdot.
I wonder exactly how much patience the judges have for this kind of nonsense.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
In English judgment is spelt without the extra e when it refers to a legal judgment given by a judge. I don't know why, it just is. Usually the two spellings can be used interchangeably, but if it is an English legal thing, it never has the extra e.
Kiteo, his eyes closed: AOL buying Time Warner.
The space is occupied by an ad for the iPad mini, with a resolution of 1024x768. Yeah, you're full of shit. You only have a retina resolution on an iPad if it's less than 8 months old, or else it would be 1024x768 as well, so don't go talking about 1920x1080 being obsolete since the year 2000 as if you're making any damned sense.
Apple.com doesn't scale the ipad mini ad like this, it just has a static size. Apple.com/uk does. That much seems suspicious as hell. Now, that said, Apple.com/ca for Canada also does, despite not having legalese.
Viewed from my 1920x1200 monitor, landscape orientation. I first got something with this resolution in 2006 IIRC, maybe 2007. Clearly I'm a damned luddite.
Actually last week I was able to see the footer on both websites without scrolling.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
He's not saying 'they're done' as in 'they're bankrupt' - wrong context.
He's saying they've made a pretty serious mistake, which is true; it doesn't matter how big a company you are, there's a point where you can't just ignore the law of the land any longer. This is now the second time that Apple's failed to comply, and the means makes it clear it's deliberate. How do you expect the courts to react to that? Or the people for that matter?
The UK has a different culture than the US; this won't be seen as 'sticking it to the man' but as childish petulance; it's bad press that Apple does *not* need in a market where they're already behind Samsung. If sanctions go to the EU level then Apple could realistically end up a US-only phone company - so don't underestimate the seriousness of this.
On my 2560x1600 monitor with the browser maximized i have to scroll to see the text. Yup, I would say it is definitely fishy.
Not only that, it appears that they've turned off the normal redirect from apple.com to the UK website and aren't displaying it on the main apple.com website for UK visitors, so it's not actually visible even with scrolling to most of the people it's meant to reach. They're literally begging to be found in contempt.
Probably very little, given how quickly they reacted to Apple ignoring the spirit of the law last week. Frankly, I'm stunned that Apple seriously expected that any kind of special treatment of the message posting wasn't doing to get picked up given the level of tech press interest in the UK - the story has even been on the front page of the BBC news site. I'm guessing we'll have wait a few days to find out whether they are going to get another chance to do the right thing by the spirit of the law, or we're just going to go straight to contempt of court and see some more serious punitive action - like having to put the message in place of that nice picture of the iPad Mini.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Prosser: But the statement was on display.
Arthur Dent: On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar.
Prosser: That's the display department.
Way back in the early days of the Mac, Apple should have been able to rule the world. Unfortunately Apple was run by and anal-retentive asshole who actually tried to rule the world. The Developers and hardware manufacturers who could have participated in Apple's success figured out really quickly that Apple didn't want anyone to share in their success.
So the developers and hardware companies made Microsoft and PC's a success. Apple would have lost out completely, but they actually built a decent graphics display and a few software developers were able to build some very desirable products that couldn't be run on a PC clone.
MS could have run Apple out of the marketplace at any time, but they didn't have to because Apple had already cut their own throats. And the bean-counters were unable to make Apple competitive company again.
When Jobs was invited back (out of sheer desperation on the bean-counters part) he invented the iToys and revitalized a dying company, but in 20 or so years he had never learned a thing and was still an anal-retentive asshole.
Android has already captured 50% of the smartphone market and once it becomes possible for developers to make a buck (without all the walled garden BS) Apple is once again destined for a 5-10% market share - unless the marketing guys for Android think they can make a buck with their own walled garden.
Unless they finally learn something, that high-flying Apples stock might turn into an excellent opportunity for short-sale speculators Rim used to make more money than god. It didn't take much to turn that around...
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp
No, iOS is not OS X derived as Android is Linux derived. iOS is less than OS X (being a crippled OS X minus a lot), whereas Android is more than Linux (being the Linux kernel plus a lot), and Apple TV is tiny, irrelevant, close to nothing compared to TVs and various set top boxes running Linux (TiVo and more). Then you've got pretty much every single popular wireless router except Apple's running Linux.
So, with iOS not being OS X, and iOS being smaller than Linux, how about not being such a giant wanker.
If you're going to make a claim like that, you might want to spare thirty seconds to check out the actual web sites.
US Site: No picture scaling
UK Site: Picture scales to hide the bottom of the page. I had to turn my monitor on its side, making it 1920 pixels tall, in order to get the notice to appear.
I really don't understand how some people think they can get away with such obvious lies on the internet. Do they really think that not a single person will bother to check?
Hey, even on my 145inch 8K monitor I have to scroll down... Oh wait, let me turn the magnification down a bit... Ah yes, there we go... Damn! Now where did I put my reading glasses?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
... you do understand that "Market Value" has nothing to do with "largest company", right?
Apple isn't even top 20 in terms of actual value
Apple's profits: $33 Billion Rank: #2
Apple's assets: $138 Billion Rank: #187.
Apple's sales: $127 Billion Rank: #26
Their stock is over-priced and it will return to earth eventually. They probably cannot maintain their profit margin over the next 3-5 years and as soon as the sharks see them miss a few growth estimates, it will be bye bye Apple market value.
I wonder if a creative judge wouldn't have an original redress, like:
On apple.com, and all your international sites, in the languages you already display, you must display the apology in a click-thru manner, such as NO customer to any apple property is unaware that
Dear customers, we've been found before British court to have falsely accused samsung of theft. Moreover we've been found also by the british court, in contempt of court for not informing our british customers of such.
Please click here to continue to your normal apple site.
They obviously value publicity far more than money, and should be hit appropriately.
Well, if 48 hours was an unreasonable amount of time to make this change, perhaps Apple should have complied with the original order which gave them 14 days. Instead of, you know, being giant cocks about it.
That hides the bottom 310px of the page no matter what screen resolution is used.
Page with javascript
Page without javascript
iPad mini is estimated to have sold 1.5m in the first weekend. It appears Apple has redefined success. Anyone else sells that amount, it is an unqualified success. If it's Apple it's meh.
Holy crap there's more, it also clips off the top of the page if it is too short vertically, but maintains the bottom of the page being just above the statement. They are sacrificing viewing their page navigation to ensure the bottom of the page isn't viewed...
UK and Samsung at Tanagra. Their arms closed.
That's not quite right. iOS and OS X are both built on top of the same base OS, Darwin. iOS then took relevant core libraries from OS X. Then each each has libraries dedicated to its purpose (OS X doesn't need touch or phone, iOS doesn't need windowing or Time Machine support). As far as mobile is concerned, iOS is more than OS X.
Apple TV is a single-core A5 chip, vs basically a weaker version of a Raspberry Pi in a Roku HD. Roku is running the base Linux kernel plus a small collection of libraries and software. Apple TV is running iOS with one included app, the Apple TV software. Not quite nothing in comparison.
Apple uses NetBSD, probably the best OS for embedded network applications.
The total number of iOS-based devices is greater than the total number of Android-based devices.
Not true at all. Android phones alone have more than five times the market share of iOS phones, the iPad doesn't sell five times the iPhone, and neither does the iPod touch which is the only iPod running iOS. The total number of iPod Touches sold by EOY 2011 was 60 million, which is a relatively small number considering 136 million Android phones shipped in 3Q12 alone.
So, your notion that there are more shipped iOS devices than Android devices is not even close to true, even if you just count Android phones. Put that into your head and let it spin for a while. There are more Android phones sold than the total number of iOS devices.
Here is another important number for you. Apple's market share is falling. It dropped by 2.1 percentage points from 3Q11 to 3Q12, and all preliminary numbers from iPhone 5 sales says it is a disappointment as related to market share. If you have a 15% market share and it is dropping 2 percentage points year over year, you're in trouble.