Apple has reacted poorly, but if I were British I would be a bit upset that my judges were wasting time on punishments like this. The point is to punish Apple, so just fine them and be over with it. The end result is the same, just without all this drama in the middle.
EDIT: I'm going to retract my opinion here because a few good points have been made and I shouldn't have spoken when I was not 100% informed on the matter. Sorry!
Apple sought to use UK courts to their own ends, and then threw a bitch fit when the ruling didn't go their way.
The judge is absolutely right to slap them down. You shouldn't get to pick and choose which court orders to respect, even if you're the richest company in the world. That's hardly the basis for a sound legal system is it?
Frankly, whoever authorised this reaction in the first place is a disrespectful idiot. They treated the UK like a fucking banana republic, and got reamed accordingly.
Self determination is a sacrosanct right, and this punishment crosses the line.
Maybe if no one had noticed and Samsung hadn't complained (I don't know if they did) then nothing would have happened. But you can't show contempt for a court ruling in a massively public way and expect no consequences.
Justice has to be seen to be done. And Apple caused this to drag on further than it should have.
Although it is ultimately quite petty, Apple are refusing to comply with court mandated actions and the court standing up to them is definitely something people want to see -- from my circle of British people anyway.
All I'm saying is that the apology is an inefficient punishment. It's meant to sting Apple which eventually means they lose money. All I'm saying is skip the drama and just take the money.
The best argument I've heard against this is that it would be difficult to determine the dollar value equivalent of the apology, which is certainly true.
It seems to be that it would be much easier to serve justice by compelling Apple to correct the misinformation, rather than trying to compute a price for this behavior.
That would mean that the fine would be no deterrent, and further fines could merely be the cost of doing business.
I'm not upset at the judge. I am upset at companies taking this stuff through court, and other companies not just putting a simple apology up.
Plus, it makes far more sense to tackle the root of the problem — the harm caused to Samsung's reputation — by ordering Apple to make public announcements that its allegations against them were false.
If industrial espionage sets back a company's R&D by a decade, you can't fix that with money. Throwing money at the problem won't magically get your research back. It won't magically get your market-leading position back after your competitors take advantage of your setback. And we're not even starting on what happens if the party doing the injuring goes bankrupt before paying all that is owed.
The idea that money is a magic panacea that fixes everything is completely wrong.
What would you offer as punishment in the example you just stated?
For another example, you could consider the case where a company has lost a dominant market position due to libel and slander from a competitor. Being given money wouldn't magically repair that company's market position.