“Samsung, which uses Google’s Android mobile operating system and offers several different models, has emerged as Apple’s biggest competitor in smartphones. Samsung, also one of Apple’s biggest suppliers of components, accounted for 19.1 percent of global smartphone shipments last year, compared with Apple’s 18.8 percent, according to Bloomberg Industries data,” Bonnie Cao and Adam Satariano report for Bloomberg News.
“The two companies also are battling in court, with Apple being awarded more than $1 billion last month by a California jury that said Samsung copied the iPhone’s design. Samsung said it will appeal,” Cao and Satariano report. “‘I hate it,’ Wozniak said when asked about the patent fights between Apple and Samsung. ‘I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s very “Woz” of Woz to say such things. After all, Steve Jobs had to persuade him to sell the Apple I instead of giving it away.
Woz lives in a utopian fantasyland; a likely result of being made fabulously rich at a young age and then losing touch with how the real world works. Banging his head really hard in a plane crash probably didn’t help matters, either. He likely still doesn’t realize that if he gave away the Apple I, some Bill Gates-type would be selling it the very next week.
Samsung has very clearly (to most people) dedicated themselves to knocking off Apple products for many years now (see related articles below).
Woz is a legendary engineer. He obviously does not fully comprehend Apple’s levels of innovation when it comes to operating system user interfaces and how the end user intrinsically interacts with devices like iPhones. Once you experience something or use an innovative product, familiarity tends to make invention seem obvious. Apple makes the very difficult seem easy, but their ideas – their patented ideas – are really the result of a lot of expense and hard work. Just look at the pre-iPhone phones. Look at the pre-iPad tablets. What Apple did and does is very, very, very valuable. It’s simply not free for all to take and profit from. Kumbaya.
Despite it all, we’ll always love Woz!
Reportedly Woz still gets a paycheck of approximately $120,000/year from Apple Inc. Before AAPL shareholders begin to question the wisdom of that, we wish somebody from Apple would sit him down and carefully explain things to him, like how much effort went into the patented ideas, why they deserve protection, and that he’ll always be Apple’s co-founder, so he should try to think before he speaks.
Related articles:
Welcome to South Korea, the ‘Republic of Forgery’ – September 11, 2012
Is Samsung copying Apple’s patented earphones? It sure looks like it – September 8, 2012
Samsung mimics Apple product videos in Galaxy S III promo (with video) – August 24, 2012
Now slavish copycat Samsung attempts to knockoff Apple’s retail stores (with video) – August 23, 2012
Samsung: Shameless slavish copiers – August 13, 2012
Apple attorney: Instead of innovating, Samsung chose to copy iPhone and iPad – July 31, 2012
Apple: Google warned Samsung against slavishly copying our products – July 25, 2012
Now Samsung slavishly copies Apple’s Mac mini – June 1, 2012
Samsung Mobile chief ‘designer’ denies that Samsung’s instinct is to slavishly copy Apple – March 23, 2012
Slavish copier Samsung shamelessly steals Apple’s iPhone 3G design – again – January 3, 2012
Slavish copier Samsung uses girl actress from iPhone 4S ad for Galaxy Tab 8.9 spot (with video) – January 2, 2012
Now Samsung’s slavishly copying Apple’s iPad television ads (with videos) – December 30, 2011
Judge: Can you tell me which is iPad and which is yours? Samsung lawyer: ‘Not at this distance your honor’ – October 14, 2011
Why are Apple’s icons on the wall of Samsung’s store? – September 24, 2011
Apple to Samsung: ‘Blatant copying is wrong’ – April 18, 2011
Apple sues Samsung for attempting to copy look and feel of iPhone, iPad – April 18, 2011
Samsung’s ‘Instinct’ is obviously to make Apple iPhone knockoffs – April 1, 2008
Wow… So because he doesn’t like the cases, you guys have to burn him down, say he is a idiot, spoiled kid and probably went insane due to the plane crash? Bunch of backstabbers the lot of you. Without Woz, no Apple. Assclowns.
Hmm seems like quite a biased article.
I think that Apple needs to learn how to play nice. They are bashing SAMSUNG that just so happens to make the devices for them then why dont they make them here in America? Apple does not want to play in the sand box but they want to make sure they take your money with another prodcut that will be replaced in a year with the IPHONE6, quit drinking the koolaid you apple lovers can’t you see they have you over a barrel. It is a joke and I agree with WOZ.
The anger directed at Woz seems totally disproportionate to (a) what he actually said and (b) reality.
Taking (b) first: how many of Apple’s innovative, creative, and remarkable products were produced with the benefit of the sort of broad-brush design patents that Apple is now citing as being “necessary” for innovation?
The answer is… none. Absolutely everything that Apple has produced has been done without the protections created by the Samsung verdict. So it’s a bit hard (read: impossible) to claim — as Apple repeatedly has claimed — that those patent protections are _necessary_ for innovation. Or at least not without also saying that products such as the iMac and iPhone and iPod were not innovative, which seems an unlikely statement for them to make.
As to point (a): look what Woz actually said: the things that the jury found infringing Woz, as an engineer, believes were “very small things I don’t really call that innovative”. That is a perfectly fair comment, and one supported by Apple’s own documents: not much of the iPhone was innovative, beyond the over-reaching reality that the iPhone DID EVERYTHING BETTER than the various products that had innovated before (e.g. the LG Prada phone, which was cool but basically useless). But making a better mousetrap (as Apple regularly does) is not the same as inventing a new form of rodent control!
After that, all Woz stated was that we wished that companies would exchange patents, presumably because he’d like to see what Apple+Google+Microsoft+Nokia+Samsung+Sharp+Qualcomm+everyone could do if they worked together.
And you what? I would like to see that too. I don’t think it will happen (and I doubt Woz does either), but the history of Apple is a history of a company that took ideas from everywhere and made them better.
In many ways, the history of the Internet parallels what seems to be happening: in the beginning, cooperation was the name of the game. But eventually you end with AOL and then Facebook and, yes, iTunes that are walled off from others, such that only people “within” their infrastructure can play.
Is it legal? Sure. Does it foster the environment that lead to it being possible? No.
To close: think about this: where would Apple be if they hadn’t had to make those great leaps with e.g. the iMac? They’d be like IBM: once brilliant, now largely irrelevant.
You guys ever wonder where we’d be if the people who invented the TV or the remote control were as gung-ho as Apple or Samsung when it comes to patents? I understand what Woz is trying to say
Can anyone not see by now that Woz is biased against Apple? Apparently he has found quite an audience for his remarks. The windows crowd laps it up and Woz is happy to deliver it. Its not hard to see how this would happen considering the past dealings with Apple as explained by Walter Isaacson in his book on Steve Jobs.