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and so the fight goes on.

Might as well settle down for the long haul on this one.

Looks like they are going to a Star Trek marathon. Though are they aware that pop corn is frowned upon in the cinema?

After you eat the popcorn, that's what your waistline is too.

I can't imagine Apple are all that bothered about not being able to sell an iPhone 5 in South Korea to be honest with you. I mean, they're only left with the entire world other than south Korea to sell to. Rough guess is they've sold about 2 million phones in S. Korea of about 80 million world wide. Samsung are basically banning Apple from selling phones in a region Apple are comparatively weak anyway.

Jon

Its the principal that once you can get a product banned in one country then it is easier in another. All this litigation is about gaining a bargaining chip for when they finally settle and to try and prevent the opponent from getting an entrenched market position.

Thing is, while Apple and Samsung bicker about these details, you’ll apparently find Samsung components in other Apple hardware offerings. Samsung could quite happily break Apple by refusing to supply any more, but that would cause them serious harm and loss of income. What’s interesting about all this is that some of Apple’s money will be going into Samsung’s legal costs.

The real winners here are the lawyers. Again.

There a quote from noted Manchester City fan Noel Gallagher, when the football club was bought by Sheikh Mansood, that the thing that made him most happy about the whole deal was that it meant from then on every time an Manchester United fan filled his car up with petrol he was contributing to the future growth of City as a club.

Of course Samsung sell components to Apple but I suspect there are few if any components they provide that are unique. Aside from the undoubted legal tornado that would erupt should someone like Samsung refuse to honour their existing contracts, Apple could probably find another supplier fairly quickly. Probably at a higher cost to them as whoever they were talking to would have a strong position in negotiations but Apple could take the hit. It would be very far from 'breaking' the company, especially given Apple have something like $40billion in the bank to ride the short term problem it would cause. These kinds of ideas are like the 'mutually assured destruction' of the business world. Yes they could do it but in fact in the end both sides would lose out so they both kind of know the other is never going to. So instead you get these kind of industrial brush wars where one side gets the other side's stuff stopped in one place and other than the US, China or 'the whole EU', there's pretty much no one trading area where blocking sales would have an actual significant consequence on the victim's bottom line.


Quite so. In reality they're just doing the same thing kids in the playground do, via the medium of lawyers.

And chances are that if someone really wanted one they could still get one anyway.