darelrex

Hey, wasn't Google going to squelch this with an Android non-compete clause? Whatever happened to that?

Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf: "Apple's complaint contains a lot of assertions, but in the end, this is a commercial dispute over the price of intellectual property."

No, it's not, as I'm sure Mollenkopf knows very well. When Qualcomm (like many other companies, including Apple) allowed certain of their patents to be included in a telecom standard that is now unavoidable by any company that makes working mobile phones at all, they specifically agreed to a per-device, FRAND-contract-stipulated fee for those patents. This suit is about how Qualcomm has been charging much more than that fee, charging different amounts to different phone makers and for different phones, and in general trampling all over the terms of the contract they willingly entered.

This is hardly "frivolous" (Thinkman); it cuts to the very core of how telecom standards can function without everyone in the business being held hostage by any one company that doesn't care what it signed. It is also not a "zero sum game" (Thinkman); if Apple buys these chips from Intel, then Intel can simply send the FRAND-contract-stipulated royalty to Qualcomm, and Qualcomm can scream for more, but not receive more. That is perfectly legal under the terms to which Qualcomm agreed.

Colligan was eventually right in the sense that "PC guys" wouldn't be able to "walk in" ...on Apple.

Rather than working out like Jobs' return to Apple, Rubinstein's webOS project ended up much more like Jobs' departure from Apple in 1986 and his subsequent formation of NeXT Computer.

If all Gooligan wants to do is boost some app ratings and force more ads to appear on your wannabe-iPhone, then I would have to agree: why would Android users even care? Par for the course, where they live.

Soli: I'm skeptical of your Cydia comparison. (a) What tiny percentage of iPhone users have even hacked ("jailbroken") their phone so that it can use Cydia at all, not to mention actually used Cydia, and (b) What Gooligan-like scourge is currently hitting 1M+ Cydia users?

It reminds me of how for many years running, we keep hearing that macOS is just as vulnerable to infection as Windows, but in the real world that somehow never translates to the same malware festival. (Security-through-obscurity used to be the fallback explanation, but when half the laptops on display at Starbucks have an Apple logo on the back of them, you start to wonder if the security experts know half as much as they pretend to.)

One more point: Isn't Android's openness supposed to be a big selling point, making it superior to the "walled garden" of iOS? If stick-to-Google-Play is the answer, then what happened to Android openness?

Great article overall, but this one line made my day in particular: "Unlike Microsoft a decade ago, today's Apple has not only never significantly failed in any major new product category over the past decade, but has instead consistently turned formerly dreary, dead-end technology cul-de-sacs (like tablets, digital music downloads, mobile software and now smartwatches) into massively profitable multibillion dollar, world-leading enterprises."