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:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. NOT! (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry to burst your bubble there, but Samsung is by far the largest smartphone maker in the world and their profits seem to be quite close to Apple's. So no, they're not that far behind.
Re:This stunt by Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Side-by-side screenshots (Score:5, Interesting)
apple.com/uk vs apple.com on a 1600-px high screen [imgur.com]. I had to hit F11 *after* loading apple.com/uk to include the notice in the screen capture.
Pretty sleazy.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. NOT! (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has no debt. Did you factor that in?
The $33bn number is "old news". Apple made $41bn in their just ended fiscal year. They are still seeing growth in 3 of their 4 main product lines (iPods are understandably seeing negative growth). Their product mix is still high value and high margin. I frankly do not see them taking an axe to their margins for market share. The bottom line is they sell in the high end of the market, where people spend money (App Store revenues are still ahead of Google Market/Google Play revenues), even with a much diminished market share/install base.
Re:Facts... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is just stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Even the judge admitted Apple is free to disagree.
Did Apple post the result of the judgement? Yes. Did Apple state there is no injunction in the EU? Yes.
The problem isn't that Apple included inaccurate information, the problem is that Apple included too much factually accurate information, information that the judge didn't care to be seen.
Nobody has been able to show me what in that statement is not factually accurate. The judge forced Apple to post a factually inaccurate statement in the revised text, the inaccuracy being that the previous text was inaccurate.
Re:How long until they just reach for a big hammer (Score:2, Interesting)
The next step might be an order to replace the Home page of both Apple.com and Apple.co.uk IN THEIR ENTIRETY with the order in ASCII text format and no HTML, and 1000 empty lines before any additional content, or HTTP link to their ordinary front page content, and keep it that way, with no changes allowed for 30 days.
Re:who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't believe me then go to here [apple.com] and scroll to the bottom, then try to read the paragraph without your eyes wanting to take a holiday.
Congratulations to Apple web designers for using a technique that typesetters knew over a hundred years ago and yes unless the judge is ignorant or does not care about typesetting (in this case web layout) tricks like this then I can see Apple being found in contempt.
Re:Contempt (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't understand. This isnt about Samsung vs Apple. This is about Apple vs the UK.
A judge is god of his courtroom. Just as the saying goes don't fight the police, fight in court. Well the followup to that is don't taunt a judge in his domain.
Feel free to request a review of a judicial order, but you better be starting to comply immediately if you aren't granted a temporary stay on the order pending review.
A judge has the authority to toss your ass in jail if he thinks you show contempt for the court. Unless you are in the US and trying to perform civil disobedience in order to have standing to constitutionally challenge a law, its always bad to piss of a judge.
The judge can also find you in contempt even if you follow the exact letter of the law. That's why they are called judges. We give them the authority to use judgement in applying most laws. They can ruin your day.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. NOT! (Score:3, Interesting)
*sigh* You have no idea what you're talking about. For a bubble to exist, the stock must be *OVERVALUED*. Of the two stocks, Google is the one which is MORE overvalued by any measure you care to look at.
Really? Let's compare the two companies, based on the major components of their revenue streams:
Apple: Laptops, desktop computers, peripherals, tablets, phones, music players, set top boxes, music sales, app sales, software sales.
Google: Advertising.
Or did you think Gmail, G+, Youtube, and Chrome were Google's "products"? Those are known as loss leaders, which get people into Google's infrastructure, so Google can rape their privacy and sell the resulting data to their CUSTOMERS, the advertisers.
Android is not far from being an economical failure for Google - it *is* a financial failure. It makes them almost no money directly - Google dumped it into the market in order to prevent from being frozen out of the mobile advertising space. Except it turns out that that mobile advertising space isn't very lucrative, and now Google is struggling to find a way to make money off mobile advertising to replace its declining desktop advertising revenues. This is in their very public SEC filings - I'm not sure why you're trying to claim that I'm making this up - this is GOOGLE saying it [businessinsider.com].
This doesn't mean Android itself will fail - it won't fail any more than Linux could fail - the problem is, SAMSUNG is making all the profit off of Android, not Google. Which means that when Google eventually crashes and can't afford an Android development team, they'll either try and restrict it to their Motorola division only, leaving Samsung to try maintaining their own forked version, or they'll simply stop development, and all the handset manufacturers can go do their own thing with the latest code drop. It's not making Google money, it was intended to be a loss leader: "you get this awesome phone os to build phones with, and in return... we get all the money from advertising on them!"
In a few years, Apple will still be making strong money off its many devices (do you REALLY think they don't have additional products and features in their pipeline? please), Google will still be struggling to make money off advertising, and Microsoft will have chiseled a sizable (but still minority) share of the smartphone market largely on the backs of Android manufacturers leaving the market since they can't profitably compete with Samsung. At that point, I'll gladly welcome your concession that I was right, though i won't hold you to it - I know how hard it is for you without the constant pacifying effect of Google's dick in your mouth.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Shameful behaviour (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Apple are pushing the fourth generation iPad on their USA site and the iPad mini on all their other sites. That's the determining factor for whether the resize code is used.
Wrong. They're showing both the 4th gen iPad and the iPad mini on the US page. I know, because I just accidentally double-opened the page while double-checking and got one of each.
But wait, it gets better. When I wrote my original post, it was based off seeing the iPad Mini ad. It looks like this [xenoveritas.org]. Note that there's plenty of room at the footer to place an apology.
The iPad version actually takes up more vertical space than the iPad mini version! It looks like this [xenoveritas.org]. This one kind of cuts off the footer.
So, yes, they're being flat-out asses here. The fact that the same iPad mini resize code runs on every international site is probably more a factor that Apple runs two versions of the site: for the US, and for "everyone else."
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Shameful behaviour (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly I notice that I no longer get redirected to the UK site when I go to Apple.com too so it suggests they've disabled that, at least for UK visitors so that people see the US site where the apology is not posted.
Say I then click store, because I also have to scroll down to notice I'm set to the wrong country on a 1920x1200 monitor and hence proceed anyway, get to the store, and then realise I'm on the US site because all the prices are in dollars not pounds, and then change country it changes it to the page I'm on completely bypassing the front page where the notice is.
They've gone out their way to try and avoid people seeing this. I do hope the judges are made very aware and that they are properly punished as a result.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20091054 [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20091505 [bbc.co.uk]
This year all of Apple's products have been surpassed and they were hit with the Apple Maps debacle. The litigation against Samsung probably hasn't helped either because it seems to have drawn people's attention to the fact that there are equivalent but cheaper and more flexible alternatives to Apple products.
Re:OK, stick a fork in them, they're done. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's nice, but it doesn't change the fact that typical OSX applications are still not Unix applications. They're OSX applications. You can't recompile them on Unix. You might be able to port them to OpenStep...