If you were worried, rest assured that the Apple vs. Samsung verdict has not done anything to magically cure the many ills of Apple coverage.
Seo Ji-eun of Korea’s JoongAng Daily says that “Even Apple’s fans think its going too far in court.”
Really? Which ones?
Now, because you are a smart, sophisticated, and devastatingly attractive reader of the Macalope, you will not be surprised to find that Seo does not manage to quote even one person who can be identified as an “Apple fan” in the piece. It’s possible Seo is the victim of an overzealous headline writer. Overzealous and possibly illiterate.
“The complacency engendered by legal protection will kill it [Apple],” wrote Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, in a contribution to Forbes Magazine Aug. 31. Worstall repeats a claim from the tech community that “Apple’s win over Samsung is the beginning of the end for the company.”
Worstall and a number of other people apparently believe that because Apple has pursued this suit, the company’s now just a patent troll and is done innovating. As if the company had never filed a patent suit before. This theory is often dovetailed with Steve Jobs’s death, as if Jobs—who, as we all are told, was the only person at Apple capable of innovating—wasn’t the one who really wanted the suit in the first place. The fact that this line of argument makes no sense seems not to occur to them.
Companies that sue never innovate! You can’t argue with binary logic like that, friends! In all the history of the Earth, this rule has never been disproven, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!
A fake Samsung ad on the Internet, whose creator is unknown, mocks Apple for its litigiousness.
Those fake ads posted anonymously on the Internet are killers.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Einstein assures a reader that “Android will thrive, dominate iPhone.”
Well, it probably will, as long as we’re just talking about market share.
Einstein doesn’t quite have all his facts straight, though:
The patents that Samsung was ruled to have violated include things like the “pinch and zoom” feature for resizing display contents, and rounded corners on the phones – things that Samsung and other Android phone makers will remedy in future phones.
Uh … no. Yes, Apple won on the look and feel of the iPhone, but it did not win on pinch-to-zoom for one very simple reason: It didn’t assert its patent on pinch-to-zoom.
As Steve Wildstrom notes, lots of people in the media got this wrong. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but how about 27?
No, they still don’t make a right.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]