If that Cupertino tax passes, this amount of money should cover it for several decades.
Or it will help pay for Apple to build a new campus in another state and leave loony CA,. Many states would welcome the jobs for some 16,000. CA would be left with a ton of unemployment claims. and a loss of tax revenue from 16,000. Apple has just announced they are looking for a site for a new campus.
Samsung lawyer John Quinn told Judge Judy Koh he had some issues with the verdict that would be addressed in post-trial motions.
Yeah... we all have issues with the verdict. Samsung should have been forced to pay the original $1B verdict!
Either way, this is perfect. Samsung once again got smacked in the face. Now stop stalling and pay the damn judgement!
In the end, Samsung still laughed to the bank. It made billions of dollars off the iKnockoffs over the years. It's like robbing at bank, paying a fine with the stolen money, and getting to keep the rest of the stolen money.
To Samsung, this is just a business expense, a cost of doing business.
Yeah $500 Million is a lot, but in the end its still a bargain and the amount of time and money Apple's legal team spent on this is got to be in the millions of dollars alone. Samsung made out in the end. I still think they knew they were in the wrong and were purposely dragging the case on to make Apple lose as much money as possible on this.
Yeah, Samsung made out like a bandit and so did all of the other cloners whose entire smartphone future was based on switching over to the iPhone as the design archetype for their own products. Sure, most of them tweaked their designs just enough to avoid the obvious plagerism that took place, but in the end every successful smartphone shipped since the iPhone can trace its lineage to the iPhone. Behind the thin veneer, the marketing smoke and mirrors, and self serving deceptive claims to the contrary, every single builder of smartphones and accompanying iOS clones like Android was very intentionally and purposefully copying the iPhone. They knew it and the market knew it all along. As Apple fans we can lament the lost opportunity for 100% total world domination in a product segment, but at least the cloners and me-too designers avoided what probably would have resulted in intervention from governments had Apple refused to license its IP to others.
I view the iPhone as the HMS Dreadnought of the mobile phone market. Once it appeared on the scene all older designs were instantly obsoleted and all future designs that deviated from the archetype that it represented would not be viable. The motivation to clone and copy is irresistible - patents be damned, fines are better than total obliteration. However, missing out on a breakthrough design does not preclude other vendors from trying to leapfrog the current archetype and attempt to develop a product that may represent the next generation or improvement on the current archetype. That's a very difficult and costly endeavor made even harder when the IP for the current archetype is defined in a broad enough sense to preclude derivative designs. But it can be done. Historically, and certainly in the case of Samsung, they took the patents-be-damned approach and hired a team of lawyers to fend off the onslaught. In the end, if all it cost them is a little over $500 million USD their macro strategy was a spectacular success. They should slither back to their camp and try to use this payback to brush some of the dirt off their already messy reputation.
I don't believe you nor anyone would sign up for Apple owning 100% percent of a product category.
I agree, but nobody really "signs up" for how history unfolds.
Using the battleship analogy again, while the HMS Dreadnought forever changed battleship design and rendered all earlier designs obsolete, the battleship category as a whole was obsoleted in a fairly short period of time by the aircraft carrier. So even if the other phone makers believed that they had no choice other than to copy the iPhone they could have conceivably come up with the successor to the iPhone that would blow the iPhone out of the water. But they didn't even try - and are still not trying.
You're asking for a lot. I don't think even Apple could come up with the successor to the iPhone or current smartphone design.
More often than not the company that creates a paradigm shift doesn't get to enjoy the fruits of its labor because other companies rush in not only to copy but to improve. Kudos to Apple for being able to stay on top.
I recall that was one of Steve Job's aims. If any company were to design or improve a product that would take away from their design leadership, he wanted that company to be Apple. Unsure if that principle is still alive and well at Apple but time will tell. Their R&D budget is huge and their secrecy surrounding their research is pretty tight. But we do know of some areas being looked into like flexible/foldable phone displays, AI, AR, autonomous vehicles, etc. and for what little we do know, there remains a ton of stuff that we can only guess what they are up to. Besides making a lot of money for it's shareholders, Apple has proven they are not a one innovative concept and done company.
How many more “decisions” do SamSh*te need before they admit what they have done and just pay up. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was not just a small part of the parents companies quartly profits. Apple’s not the only company to make multi billion quarterly profits.
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https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-samsung-elec-results-preview/samsungs-first-quarter-profit-seen-at-13-7-billion-as-dram-chip-margins-soar-idUKKCN1HA2VI