Apple Seeks To Block 8 Samsung Products After Court Win 396
angry tapir writes "Apple has asked a U.S. court to block sales of eight Samsung Electronics products, following the iPhone maker's victory in a patent lawsuit against Samsung. In a filing to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple asked for preliminary injunctions against seven smartphones carrying its Galaxy brand, plus the Droid Charge. It based the requests on a jury's ruling on Friday that Samsung had infringed several Apple patents. Apple said it wants the preliminary injunction pending a final injunction."
What's really funny... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is that Samsung parts make up a solid quarter of the electronics in iPhones and iPads! It gets better: Samsung fabricate the phones...!
So what happens to Apple if Samsung decide to be bastards and pull the plug on parts /and/ assembly? What the fuck can Apple do about it? Precisely *nothing*!
Can the ban occur before the appeal? (Score:5, Interesting)
If phones can be banned for using pinch to zoom, why not ban them all?
The Charge? Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, I just looked up what the Droid Charge [engadget.com] looked like. It's really quite different from the iPhone. I think my lil' LG looks more like an iPhone than that one does. [mobilewitch.com]
Oh well, I guess they won't be done with this until everyone either has an iPhone or something that looks like an old Black Berry. Heh, I just realized... BB never actually sued companies over releasing similar phones like this [wikimedia.org] did they?
Maybe if they cared more about their intellectual property they'd be in better shape today. No need to worry about the competition if you can wipe them out in the courts
Re:I still don't see what the problem is (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd rather support a company that innovated and makes good products. The sad thing is Samsung would have my respect if they actually tried that instead of purposely trying to muddle the differences between their products and Apple's.
I'm not supporting the patent war (I'm against patents on principle), but I don't like supporting copycats, either. Not because I believe that innovation deserves monopoly, but because they aren't even TRYING to move us further ahead. At least Apple made a new product and tries their best to differentiate themselves. /nobody left to support. Good thing I still use a dumb phone
Re:Apple is dead to me (Score:2, Interesting)
Brings a tear to my eye to see a new gen of people get burned by them.
Apple makes pretty sweet hw and software. They do *NOT* however like to share. They have run many of their partners out of business. Usually on some sort of whim. They do it every time. Take for example adobe flash. Sure its a crummy programming environment. However, instead of treating one of their *long* term partners with a bit of respect they turned on them like piranha fed a lamb chop. Adobe *will* remember that.
In 30 years I have owned 2 pieces of Apple hardware. One Apple ][ and an iPod. Both were gifts. I remember my friends taking a cash bath with them. I remember loosing 2 jobs because of them and their practices.
They get beat every time on the same thing, price and goodwill. Whatever they come up with it only takes 2-3 years to catch up to them (if they are ahead). Then apple has a good enough guy to beat on price (which they rarely do). They then burn many people on the business end. Then say 'poor me' why dont people buy my stuff. Well DUH we remember the 80s and 90s and now the 2010's...
Remember in the 2000s Samsung was a HUGE partner of Apple. So big in fact if Apples sales were down Samsung's were down. A good portion of their ipod line was really made by them and the Chinese stitched the parts together. The original iPhone was also a good portion of Samsung parts. Again Apple turned on them. Guys like Samsung do not forget.
Mark my words. This 'huge' lead they have, they will squander it. They do every time. At this point all they will do is come up with different flavors of the ipad/phone. In many ways if they take out android they will create a worse competitor, Microsoft. MS is at its best when it has to compete (they live for it).
Re:Apple is dead to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they did everything they could to act like they had a monopoly even though they had like 5% of the market. They'd bully competitors, over control hardware pricing and availability, lock in prices and threaten vendors who sell lower, etc. They had special RAM made that only fit their systems, sued Psystar, etc. They had the reputation of being the platform for graphics and video editing but like I said, CS4 ended that damn quick. CUDA on a wimpy GT440 = 8x faster rendering than dual 8-core Xeons. Unfortunately, almost no Nvidia cards come in a mac. That doesn't stop them from pretending they're still for video editing though. Now in Photoshop Elements 10 and CS6, they have severe compatibility and font problems so it's pretty much over for them on that front. It'll take years to undo their propaganda that they're the best though. I do usually convince people with actual charts, or just reference their awful human rights violations and unfair business practices.
They've had so many macbook hardware problems lately and back in 07 they had severe overheating problems with their initial core2 duo systems because Steve Jobs is too important to have fans blowing out of his devices.
Then there's the way that they run the App store like nazis and iTunes quite similarly. You think you bought that song? Oh hell no! And you can't redownload it either. So everyone, do everything you can to tell everyone you can that Apple sucks and it will turn into another Vista. All the positive marketing in the world couldn't stop tech experts from giving people the real story and ruining their business.
Re:Look and Feel (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple lost the look and feel lawsuit mainly on issues of standing. But assuming they had won. What would have happened is Microsoft would have had to use very different GUI paradigms in designing Windows. Windows would have had to look and act less like Mac. So they would have used different input methods like maybe the stylus on a tablet / stylus on a resistive touchscreen would have been common. Ideas from OS/2 and NextStep that were circulating in the GUI community about moving towards object oriented GUIs would have been incorporated into Windows. Maybe Be Inc's view of a multimedia desktop (i.e. like Aero). Heck Microsoft might have bough NeXT or Be Inc to transition.
In other words we would have been much better off.
Re:What's really funny... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah this is the primary reason Samsung wont do that, they make enough profit from it to continue.
What they could consider doing though is upping the prices to claw back that $1billion that way, and they can even target it. As many point out Apple can go elsewhere, but not on all components - even where other manufacturers can develop other components Samsung often holds patents.
Screen technology is one area where Samsung could really screw Apple by upping the cost to them, as they're easily the market leaders in this field, both large and small, hence why IIRC even Sony now uses Samsung panels in their TVs. As they invented things like AMOLED they will hold enough patents on current/next gen screen tech to deny Apple access to the best displays, or at least up the cost to them by increasing licensing costs of such tech.
Apple puts together a good product, but Samsung invents the new technology that Apple needs to build those products, so Apple needs to be very careful. If the rumoured Apple TV turns out to be true for example then Apple is either beholden to Samsung for panels, or they put up with inferior quality panels.
There's no doubt Apple is playing a dangerous game, and Samsung is well positioned to claw back any cost Apple has made to them. If the lawsuits all continue to go Apple's way they could push Samsung out of the cellphone market, but they've not got a chance in hell of avoiding Samsung in the components market altogether - they hold too many patents and are the sole producer of too many of those components for that to be possible.
Re:I still don't see what the problem is (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, one company carried out the design work and the user testing to create a touch based hand-held computing device with broad consumer appeal--something that many companies (including Apple) had tried to do before and failed--and took the tremendous financial risk of introducing such a product into the marketplace in defiance of conventional wisdom [loopinsight.com]. Another company was able to undersell them by making little investment in design or user-testing, and simply piggybacking on Apple's already market-tested designs.
Of course, there were other genuinely creative companies. Blackberry has continued to develop its own vision of smartphone design, which remains the favorite of a substantial minority of consumers, but the company is now on the ropes. Palm developed an innovative operating system and smartphone design, but the company ran out of money and was acquired by HP (another historically creative company) which is now also on the ropes. The woes of Palm and Blackberrry are not due to Apple--they were doing OK until the invasion of the iClones, which could undersell the products of these creative companies because they did not make the large investment needed to create and introduce a truly novel product.
Re:I still don't see what the problem is (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate Apple. And I think this lawsuit is bullshit, but I try to look at the bright side of things, and I want to believe this lawsuit will mean, finally, innovation in the smartphone market again. A couple of years ago, Motorola had some interesting phones (Backflip, Flipout and the Droid/Milestone series). Nowadays most, if not all, of the smartphones out there are "full touch", thin, rounded edges.
The Galaxy S/S2 were really extreme. Samsung even copied the charger design! I It sounds racist, but the guys at Samsung were acting like typicial asians: cloning the fuck out of everything that makes money.
I hope this lawsuit will mean we'll finally start seeing innovation on the smartphone market again. My theory is that "everything looks like Apple" because manufacturers think it's about *LOOKING* like apple. Yet, Apple is still the king. The key isn't looking like apple, but *being* apple. It's giving you the experience of apple. It's getting a computer, laptop, smartphone, and tablet, and have them all work together. It's not worrying about drivers or compatibility. It's about the "just works".
I got myself an HTC Sensation the other day. I'm very happy with it so far. But I went to connect it to my PC: it required drivers that didn't even came with the phone. I found them on XDA. If I was to download some "suite" for it, it would sure be a 400MB or more download, requiring me to constantly update it. That's the reason why people choose apple. Given the same price and features, the ability for it to "just work" is the dealbreaker.
Sync has been solved by Android, but there isn't yet a *SIMPLE* backup option for my phone like there is with, say, Nokia, which just lets me plug my phone and hit Backup and have a backup file on my desktop. Sure, I modded and rooted my phone and I can do that and more with Nandroid. But to 99% of people that means nothing.
Manufacturers: get it straight, we want things that look like apple, or don't; and have keyboards or don't; and are white, or black, or silver, or red, blue, pink, purple, yellow even. We want colors, we want laser engraving, and replaceable covers. But we also want a plain black plastic phone. Or made with silly kevlar and alluminum alloy. Oh and a 4.3" screen. And also 2.5". And candybar style phones. And clamshell phones. And also slider phones. And blackberry-style phones. We also want to be able to plug to our computer and work nicely with Windows, or mac, or linux. We want full USB mass storage, or MTD. We also want the option to jailbreak/root/mod/S-OFF/unlock (locked bootloader was the reason I didn't get Moto this time). We don't want to be bothered with drivers (come on, it's easy enough for you to standarize on something and have Microsoft ship drivers with windows). Oh and we certainly don't want stuff that slow down our phones and can't be removed/replaced (MotoBlur, HTC Sense...). And we want updates. Get it together against the carriers and GIVE US THE FUCKING UPDATES. Motorola: why did the Backflip only get android 2.1 in the US, and we in the rest of the world got only android 1.6? Why doesn't the HTC Sensation in my carrier get ICS but the "no contract" one does? But any iphone gets all the goodies.
You know what we don't want? That all the phones out there are just clones of the iphone.