Apple Hides Samsung Apology So It Can't Be Seen Without Scrolling 743
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."
Re:speelling mistake (Score:5, Informative)
In English judgment [cambridge.org] 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 [cambridge.org], but if it is an English legal thing, it never has the extra e.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No scrolling required... (Score:1, Informative)
http://imgur.com/gwdtH [imgur.com]
This is just stupid (Score:1, Informative)
Not Apple, those complaining. A slight flick of the finger and I scrolled to see the warning. OH NOES, a company wants to make its latest product as prominent as possible on its front page, and they do it in other countries too.
I am worried about some of Apple's text. It says the previous statement was inaccurate. I don't remember anything inaccurate about the last one, only that the judge didn't like it.
Re:This stunt by Apple (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Must be fixed? (Score:5, Informative)
If you are in landscape mode, and enable scripting for "apple.com", then the bottom of the webpage will be just below the four images, every time.
Even on a 30" monitor I have to scroll (Score:5, Informative)
On my 2560x1600 monitor with the browser maximized i have to scroll to see the text. Yup, I would say it is definitely fishy.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Four links. (Score:4, Informative)
There are four links (2x thenextweb, ycombinator, and reddit) in the summary and none of them actually point to the web site [apple.com] or the actual statement [apple.com]. Was this really the best submission for this story?
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:4, Informative)
Those with Apple stocks will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Laughing nervously at best. Apple stock is down 18% in the last 7 weeks. The most recent news is "down on disappointing iPad Mini sales".
Death? Not by a long shot, but crashing back to Earth to compete with the rest of the mortals -- most definitely.
Re:This stunt by Apple (Score:5, Informative)
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: [apple.com] No picture scaling
UK Site: [apple.co.uk] 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?
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. NOT! (Score:5, Informative)
... 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 [forbes.com]
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.
Re:who cares (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, this is rather blatant, I'm not sure how things work in the UK, but in the US the judge has a lot of leeway in terms of contempt of court and those are generally not subject to appeal. It's one of the things that is necessary in order to allow the judge to function as a judge.
One of the things you never do in court is piss off the judge. Judges are supposed to be impartial, but at bare minimum these sorts of moves tend to wear down on the amount of benefit of the doubt you get when things are a bit iffy.
Re:Have to scroll to see it 1680x1050 (Score:5, Informative)
In case you missed this:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6237043/applesucks.png [dropbox.com]
What now?
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:5, Informative)
That's not even counting the marketshare of OS X(which iOS evolved from).
Does this mean I get to count every device using a *nix OS as well? There is a lot of machines that run *nix, a huge huge number, which probably dwarfs pretty much every other OS. Hell, my TV runs Linux, as does my Bluray...
Re:I blacklisted Apple in my HOSTS file! (Score:4, Informative)
It's from the Time Cube [timecube.com] website. Ancient trolling [wikipedia.org].
Code in question (Score:5, Informative)
That hides the bottom 310px of the page no matter what screen resolution is used.
Page with javascript [imgur.com]
Page without javascript [imgur.com]
Re:No scrolling required... (Score:3, Informative)
NoScript disabled [imgur.com]
NoScript enabled [imgur.com]
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:3, Informative)
except that osx really isn't unix at all.. just like android really isn't unix either.. they both use a unix like kernel, but that's where the similarity ends. The meat and potatoes of osx application design and user interface is decidedly ununix.
Re:Shameful behaviour (Score:5, Informative)
If the thesis in question is "i won't be punished", then argument by punishment is not fallacious at all.
"Below The Fold" (Score:3, Informative)
...Apple modified its website recently to ensure the message is never displayed without visitors having to scroll down to the bottom first.
The industry-term for something on your home page that you have to scroll to see is "below the fold." It comes from the newspaper industry. A standard broadsheet [wikipedia.org] format newspaper (as opposed to a tabloid [wikipedia.org]) would sit on a newsstand or in a news box folded in half. With this in mind, the layout editors intentionally put the most important stories "above the fold" on the front page, and the less-important stories that are still important enough to be front-page news go "below the fold."
Putting something below the fold, whether in print or online, is not hiding it. It's still on the front page. It's just saying "this isn't the most important content on the page." And in this case, the forced apology is not the most important content on Apple's home page... Apple sells products and services, not apologies. If the judges felt it was that important, they would have specified it had to be above the fold or at the top. But they didn't. Quite possibly because the concept of something being below the fold is foreign to them, since the British journalistic diet consists primarily of tabloids, which are designed to scream, "EVERYTHING ON THIS PAGE IS IMPORTANT! BUY ME NOW!!!"
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Shameful behaviour (Score:5, Informative)
How is this contempt? The message isn't hidden, it's right there on the page. The fact that they optimise the page so that their product shot makes the most of the above-the-fold real estate is not removing it from the page in any way, it's just good design.
Oh, bullshit. Try this: go to Apple's US page [apple.com] (which is "apple.com" which I'm guessing will redirect in other countries, and apparently you can't just add /us/ to force it to stay in the US, so, you may have to pick a random country if you're actually in the UK) and compare it to the UK version of the page [apple.com]. Notice anything different?
You might not, if the browser isn't large enough, but I'm typing this on a 1920x1200 display with the browser sized to the maximum height. With that, on the US page, the entire page is visible, including the header. On the UK page, the content is sized off the bottom.
If you throw the page into Responsive Design View in Firefox (Ctrl-Shift-M) and start playing with the size, you'll notice that they explicitly designed the page to size the apology off the bottom. (Well, almost: they give up if you manage to get your browser view to be greater than 1600 pixels tall.)
That's not "using above the fold real estate," not when it's optimized to not display on anything less than 1600 pixels tall. That's called "being as asshole" at the least and, I expect, will turn into being called "found in contempt of court."
Re:Shameful behaviour (Score:4, Informative)
Not a side effect, it is deliberate. If you view source you'll see that the code is different on the UK site vs the others.
The UK site has:
which is a little script which resizes the elements on the screen specifically to hide the notice:
The US site doesn't use that script, in it's place is a script called promomanager.js.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:5, Informative)
Well unfortunately, you don't get to decide what is and is not Unix. The Open Group does and they have certified OS X as genuine Unix.
Re:who cares (Score:4, Informative)
Looks to me like Apple is complying and the Court of Appeal isn't too fussed in general.
Ha ha, you Apple apologists really break me up. Here's what really happened. [blogspot.co.uk]
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever. Do you happen to know what the maximum penalty for contempt of court is in England & Wales?
The judge does.