Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

And Apple takes another PR hit. It's like they want us to hate them.

Like the article posted here the other day said "I want a MacBook Air not made by Apple". I think the Macbook Air looks sexy, but no way I'm funnelling money into an organisation this hellbent on taking away my choices.

Here's hoping Apple and it's power-crazy, trigger-happy lawyers are a short-lived phenomenon which goes away when people stop buying their products as a protest.

View on HN

Unfortunately I think that you've been misled by the high-profile nature of all-things-Apple: these patent suits are common practice and as I understand it par for the course in the industry but because of Apple's popularity (in the media) these cases involving Apple are put under a spotlight. Don't confuse this with Apple somehow being an (evil) exception to natural conduct in the industry. Note also that Samsung has infringment suits against Apple. And of course there are many other cases not related to Apple that involve design infringement. This is how the game is played, for better or worse. I don't think you'll find a major company out there that doesn't concern itself with patents and legal action against its competitors when it feels it may have the grounds to do so.

Edit: Hm, I don't want to speak too quickly here, but after looking at your profile I'm guessing that you already have a strong opinion about Apple that I'm not likely to sway. So if you've made up your mind, fair enough. No sense in arguing about it. I just thought I would provide a counterpoint to what seems to be a common misconception about these suits.

Patent suits are all too common a practice, I agree, but it has become quite clear over the past year that Apple is going well beyond the pack in their use of patents to shut out competitors. This injunction isn't a shakedown, but an attempt to deny a competitor the right to participate in the market.

It seems to me that most of the other infringement suits amount to a shakedown: "you're using our IP; pay us". Is there any company other than Apple that's using IP claims to force other products off of the market entirely?

Apple's most high profile product launch in recent memory - the iPhone 4 - was a borderline PR disaster (antennagate, nasty Consumer Reports recommendations, suing Gizmodo)... and it's arguably their most successful product yet, still outselling everyone 15 months after launch. Argue the legal/moral merits all you want, but this doesn't even register in terms of Apple's public image.

Hasn't things been always like this? People would complain that Macs were too expensive, wouldn't run most apps/games, that the iPod had DRM, that the iPhone had no SDK, that you had to code only in Obj-C (section 3.3.1, dropped).

In the past, people would try to come up with arguments as to why Windows is better, and ran more games. Today it's all about Android.

It really makes me cringe that some people buy Android because it's "not Apple" rather than because there's amazing Android devices out there.

(Disclaimer: I own an iPad, a Xoom and some Macs)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com