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Apple boss Tim Cook said, “I’d highly prefer to settle versus battle”, signalling a possible truce in the iPhone and iPad maker’s legal warfare with Samsung and other Android phone and tablet manufacturers.
Apple’s CEO continued that he’d “always hated litigation”. Nonetheless, he couldn’t resist adding, “we need people to invent their own stuff”.
Cook made his pacifist statement while announcing another quarter of record profits for the fruit-flavoured phone fabricator. In the last three months, Apple has sold 35 million iPhones, nearly 12m iPads, 4m Mac computers and nearly 8m iPods. Apple took in a total of £24.3 billion, of which £7bn is all profit. And the company’s pile of cash now stands at £110bn.
Apple has been locked in a legal war with Android manufacturers ever since co-founder Steve Jobs declared “thermonuclear war” on the rival software.
Jobs, who died last year, vowed to, “spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40bn in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android.” On the subject of settling, he told Google boss Eric Schmidt, “I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5bn, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.”
Apple’s war on Android is being fought in legal skirmishes across the globe with Samsung, Motorola and others. This very week, Cook’s company challenges HTC in court here in Britain.
But Cook has been ordered by a US court to meet face-to-face with his opposite number at Samsung to have a go at resolving the two tech giants’ ongoing legal spat.
Patent disputes are the latest must-have accessory in the technology industry. Just this week, a US judge ruled in favour of Motorola against Microsoft in a fight over the Xbox 360.
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Should Apple and its Android rivals look to put an end to the kicking and hair pulling, or are they right to assert themselves in court? Can Cook’s comments usher in a new dawn of everybody just getting on with making fab phones? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
