Displaying items by tag: iPad

After going through the news and editorials about the Apple V Samsung case we have found something very interesting in Apple’s attack methods. One of the lead pieces of evidence for their alleged consumer confusion is the number of returns of Samsung products to stores like Best Buy etc. Apple would like you to believe that customers mistakenly picked up a Galaxy Tab when they meant to get an iPad and then returned it after realizing it was not an iPad. It is a piece of logic that in any other place in the world or with almost any other judge would have been thrown out as preposterous, but for some reason Judge Lucy Koh is letting this stand. You see Apple’s logic and claim here is seriously flawed and here is why.

Yesterday Apple reported their earnings for Q3 2012, asked an Australian court for $2.5 Billion in damages, and were granted a patent for technology that has (again) been on the market for a few years. Although each of these could probably fill an entire article we decided to lump them into one today so we can get to some real news after we wrap things up here. So let’s kick things off with the Q3 earnings call which fell short of expectations almost across the board.

For some time we have said that companies that file bad lawsuits or that continue to make obviously incorrect claims in the market should have consequences. Apple is probably one of the worst with their continuous stream of allegations against Google, Samsung,  HTC, LG, and pretty much everyone else that they “slavishly copy” Apple and do not invent their own technology. This has been repeated so often that it is boring and even cursory glance at the any two products (go ahead and pick two) will show significant differences. There is almost no chance of the wide spread consumer confusion that Apple is trying to claim on a daily basis.

With some of Apple’s latest products it seems as if they have built in some obsolescence into them or just made the cost of repair too high for most consumers and repair shops. They have done this in a number of ways including gluing the batteries to the cases, gluing the glass to the displays (and then gluing them to the case!) and more. This heavy shift towards disposable products (meaning that people are more likely to throw them out than try to get them fixed) has been noted by sites like iFixIt who recently called the Mac Book Pro Retina one of the least repairable laptops they have ever worked with.

The US Patent system, both the methods used for filing and also the methods used to protect IP is becoming a joke. We have seen as patents are being filed in greater frequency with very little other than wording to differentiate them with other products, but broad enough to make sure the filing company can still sue someone else that makes a similar product. On top of that we have judges that are not qualified technically to preside over the cases they are being overwhelmed with. To say that the system is broken would be like calling a nuclear explosion a “bang”.

Apple and their supporters love to have fun with numbers and statistics. One of the recent ones that has caught our eye is that ratio of Macs to PCs. I have seen titles that claim the PC is dead (again) and that the new numbers are “killing” Microsoft and a ton of other crap that is as ridiculous as the titles are fantastic. However, this is nothing new for Apple (or really any company, but Apple is the king of this type of spin). They love to work the numbers in any direction they can. They take the terms median, mean, and mode to a new level (all of those are methods of finding an “average”).

When this one first hit we did not jump into the mix with the rest of the sites pushing a statement that Apple’s servers were corrupting new versions of apps pushed up to the iTunes App Store. Now, things are a little different as Apple has acknowledged the issue and is working on a fix. The issue seems to revolve around an update to Apple’s DRM software Fairplay.

It looks like Apple and ProView have finally come to an agreement over the rights to the iPad Trademark. As most of you might remember Apple used a shell company to purchase the rights to the iPad trademark, but ran afoul of the fact that the company they thought they were buying everything from did not own all of the rights. It also turns out that the shell company Intellectual Property Application Development Limited (IPAD get it) also claimed they would not make any products that competed with ProView’s own Internet Personal Access Device. Things got very ugly very quickly and the result was a very long court battle with Apple and ProView each claiming they were in the right.

Apple has lost another VP of Hardware this time to retirement. Bob Mansfield, how replaced Mark Papermaster (you know him, he is at AMD now) in 2010 is retiring after being with Apple since 1999. Bob has been the lead of iPhone and iPad hardware since 2010, but before that he was in charge of dealing with Mac hardware (beginning in 2005).

We have talked (at length) about Microsoft’s new move to the cloud and also their push with the Windows 8 Ecosystem (which is the cloud). We have pointed out many items of concern as well as shown some of the good parts to the OS; such as faster boot times, much better windows explorer interface, significantly improved task manager etc. However, the one massive point that we cannot get past is the choice Microsoft has made in making the Xbox and Windows Phone the center of the connected home. What Microsoft has done with this mode of thinking is what earned me a D- on a science paper in High School; Concluding the Assumption.