“Apple won an agreement from Samsung that the South Korean company won’t sell the newest version of its tablet computer in Australia until a patent lawsuit in the country is resolved. […] [Apple] sought an Australian injunction and also wants to stop Samsung from selling the tablet in other countries, Burley said without specifying where. Samsung agreed to stop advertising the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and not to sell the device until it wins court approval or the lawsuit is resolved, according to an accord reached by lawyers during a break in the hearing. Should Apple lose its patent infringement lawsuit, it agreed to pay Samsung damages, which weren’t specified.” Free market and competition at work, my friends!
“The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringes 10 Apple patents, including the “look and feel,†and touchscreen technology of the iPad”
I see this headline everywhere, but no one is citing what patents?
Friends in RoK say that many people have in fact abandoned the Samsung device in favour of the iPhone; if you really believe in the market, have faith in it as a mechanism. I ‘own’ (they are tools provided by my employer) both an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, by the way, so I am hardly a reckless, parvenu Apple-basher. But you are going to reap what you sow: will there be a time when LG, Samsung or, in at some unpecified point, a mainland Chinese company serves injunctions on the sale of Apple goods in third countries, because of a patent lawsuit they have brought?
Samsung is so diversified that they are hardly affected by this type of injunction.
However Apple is very reliant on iOS devices.
Just wait until someone gets an injunction banning the sale of iOS devices in an important market and see the calamity unfold.
They aren’t selling very many tablets anyway, should a judgment go their way they’d probably get more money from ‘damages’ than if they’d actually sold the device there!
Such injunctions are simply draconian and hurt consumer choice.
A thought: Apple has no manufacturing capacity, while Samsung has end to end manufacturing capacity. Therefore, Apple is effectively the troll that is buying up or coercing other companies to cross license their patents. Having got the patents it is now intent on screwing up competitors. Clearly, something is wrong with this kind of abuse of patent laws. Time for reform!
Samsung is Apple’s biggest threat. It’s the only Android vendor which has the ability to make EVERYTHING in-house – processor, screen, memory, etc. Android is good enough as it is, so no costs for Samsung there (at least, not the amounts Apple must be spending on iOS). I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung’s margins per device are close to that of Apple – if not higher. This makes Samsung a massive threat for the last bastion Apple fanatics have shifted the goalposts to: profit per device.
Don’t forget HTC, Thom. With the recent slew of smartphone marketshare figures, I thought the most interesting thing was not that Samsung’s market share had grown so much, but that HTC now has 20% of the US smartphone market (Apple has 28%).
It’s no co-incidence that HTC are the other competitors that Apple are trying to litigate out of the market.
You could speculate, or you could just look at the numbers: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/30/the-profitphone-x-phones-sold-char…. Apple is vastly more profitable per device sold than Samsung. Due to the way Apple structures it’s component deals it’s unlikely Samsung could ever sell it’s own components to itself cheaper than to Apple.
Also, you should really leave the poor straw men alone, I’ve never seen anyone on this website talk about per unit profit.
That chart is being quoted all the time by Apple fanatics, but it’s a useless one, since it includes feature phones. In other words, the chart tells us NOTHING about margins per smartphone, which is what we’re debating.
So find any data that backs up your claim. Or that alludes to your claim. Because every single piece of data out there says you are wrong. Your fact free, emotionally laden posts seem to be trying to make up for the fact that all you can do about Samsung is speculate (especially since they won’t even release sales numbers for smart phones and tablets anymore) and hope. All of Apple’s numbers are right there in their quarterly, lets see some crack analysis from you for once instead of an endless drip of inane opinion.
You realise that knife cuts both ways, right?
What a load of crap.
No one except a few executives at the very highest management levels of Apple and Samsung know how much the profit margins per device are.
If you think Apple are making $300 net profit per phone you are utterly delusional. The Apple retailing and marketing costs (TV ads and Apple stores) alone are realistically >$100/unit.
There is no possibility that Apple can buy components for less than the manufacturing cost.
Next you will be claiming that it is much cheaper for Ford to buy all their cars from Toyota showrooms and rebadge them as Fords rather than owning factories.
Edited 2011-08-03 06:17 UTC
Umm .. where are you coming up with the dollar amounts? I may be delusional but I didn’t include any dollar amounts in my post (nor did the article I linked to for that matter).
I never claimed they could buy components for less than manufacturing costs. Or are you making the mistake of assuming that Samsung’s manufacturing division gives components to Samsung’s cell phone division for free?
What die-hard Apple fans (or Oracle/Microsoft/etc) usually ignore is that the first victims of a company focus switch from innovation to litigation is their own user base.
The assumption that you can somehow focus on both innovation and litigation is mistaken, and here’s why:
Litigation is war, and the rules of war are pretty simple: In order to fight and win, one needs weapons and ammunition, which in this case are lawyers and patents.
Once litigation happy policy kicks in the following things usually takes place:
1. The company is forced to start pushing for more patents across the board; good, bad, cheap nuclear power or right click menu, it doesn’t matter, you need more ammunition and you need it yesterday.
2. The sad truth is that obvious patents are simply put, better ammunition.
a. There are cheaper to produce. (AKA More patents to the buck)
b. There are faster to produce. (AKA Yesterday)
c. Its far easier to show infringement. (Look! They have a right click menu!)
3. Needless to say highly innovative projects/products that cannot be patented will be replaced by patent friendly projects/products.
4. Writing patents, especially offensive ones, is difficult and time consuming, both the developer side and the patent lawyer side.
5. Innovative people are *usually* free-spirited and rather dislike spending their days writing patents (especially obvious ones); The company will most likely start bleeding out the best and brightest developers and be forced to pay far more (Read: both paychecks and patents bonuses) to keep the remaining developers happy (or at least employed), and chewing up right-click-menu-like patents.
6. Litigation is expensive, legal bills (both on the patent development side, and on the litigation sides) will go through the roof. Other departments (R&D) will have to pay these bills. And this of-course, before the company gets hit by a series of counter-law-suites.
7. The company will no longer buy external assets (read: other companies) based on their technology or innovation; quite on the contrary, due to the longevity of patents, the company will rather spend billions on buying dead companies with old and extensively used patent portfolio instead of buying small companies that develop technologies that might actually advance the company’s core product forward.
8. Unless the company gains a series of quick and decisive victories in court(s), as the time passes the company will most likely go into a vicious circle:
a. What ever technology lead the company might have had in the past will be eroded as a result of the items listed above.
b. Each generation of the company’s core product will become more expensive (to pay for the mounting legal bills) and less attractive (R&D decline).
c. As the company’s core product gets less and less attractive, the company will be forced to further increasing the scope of the legal battle, at first, to justify the huge price and in the end, as the sole means of survival.
Now, if anyone here thinks that the sequence of events listed above is far-fetched – please consider this: Could iPhone 5 and Windows Phone 8 be better suited to warn off Android, if Apple and Microsoft would have *chosen* to spend the 4.5B$ they spent on buying Nortel’s patent portfolio on getting a better product out of the door? What would have better served their loyal customer base?
– Gilboa
Edited 2011-08-02 09:32 UTC
How often do you hear about car manufacturers suing each other?
Very, very, rarely. They very readily cross-licence patents (Mercedes even allows all their safety patents to be shared at no cost). They are quite willing to sell each other components. They sometimes even manufacture entire cars for their competitors.
Why don’t they sue?
Simple. The only winners in lawsuits are lawyers.
http://www.pscars.com/blog/2011/07/ford-f150-lawsuit-against-ferrar…
http://exchangemytruck.com/ford-ford-named-in-patent-infringement-l…
http://www.law360.com/ip/articles/86995/bmw-struck-with-patent-suit…
http://news.priorsmart.com/stragent-v-audi-l4cU/
http://news.priorsmart.com/ibormeith-v-mercedes-benz-l3ji/
I found those after about 30 seconds of googling. Try for yourself, just Google for “my favorite car company” patent lawsuit. You’ll find tons of hits.
You don’t hear about them because you don’t visit websites that post every single lawsuit involving car manufacturers. But, as I’ve been saying on here for a while, patent lawsuits are common in every industry.
Edited 2011-08-02 16:59 UTC
*sigh*.
Go re-read his post (car companies suing *each other*), then look at the companies suing the car manufacturers in your links (none of them are car manufacturers). Only in the first link, but that’s not a patent lawsuit – it’s a trademark thing.
As Tom has already said none of those claims are about carmakers suing other carmakers over patent issues.