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Tim Cook rejects Apple's old business model of suing everyone

CEO just wants to settle and get back to rebranding Foxconn kit

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Apple head honcho Tim Cook has indicated that he'd be willing to settle the wide-ranging, ongoing patent disputes raging over smartphones and fondleslabs - provided of course that his adversaries admit everything and pay up.

When asked about the fruity firm's Great Patent Wars during last night's earnings call, Cook said that he didn't like litigation, but Apple would carry on with it as long as it saw the need.

"I've always hated litigation and I continue to hate it - we just want people to invent their own stuff," he said.

"So if we could get to some arrangement where we could be assured that's the case and a fair settlement on the stuff that's occurred, I would highly prefer to settle than to battle," he said, not so much extending the olive branch as acknowledging that he had one at home somewhere and he might be willing to dig it out of the attic if only everyone would just behave.

Cook was taking questions after announcing that Apple had once more pulled it out of the bag in its second quarter, increasing net income by 94 per cent to $11.6bn.

The fruity firm had once more managed to shift a shedload of iDevices, including its iPhone smartphones and the "new" iPad, the latest iteration of its fondleslab.

Cook also talked about the tablet market and the still-in-its-gestation Ultrabook sector, saying he couldn't really see the need for a "ultratablet" hybrid device that could be thin, light, have a keyboard as well as a touchscreen as well as the ability to fold up into a neat bundle that also happens to protect the screen.

"You can converge a toaster and refrigerator but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user," he deadpanned.

"I think anything can be forced to converge but the problem is that the products are about trade-offs and you begin to make trade-offs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn't please anyone."

He added that Apple still reckoned the tablet market, and of course its very own fondleslab, had plenty of room to grow still more and become even more ubiquitous.

"Our view is that the tablet market is huge – we've said that since day one... we were using them here and it was already clear to us that there were so much you could do and the reasons that people would use those would be so broad.

"And that's precisely what we've seen; the iPad has taken off not just in consumer but in education and in enterprise, it's everywhere you look now." ®

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""we just want people to invent their own stuff"

Just like Apple do, eh?

Ha ha ha ha ha, I needed a lunchtime giggle.

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Inventing

Soooooo what did Apple invent in smartphones...

Not the touchscreen, that was Samsung, LG, etc

Not 3G, that had been around for ages before it finally made it into the 3GS

Not phone cameras, Nokia had those for yonks

Not recording videos on your phone cameras, Nokia again

Not GPS

Not Wifi

Not CDMA

Not GPRS

Not HSPA

Not 4G

Not Siri (came from Nuance)

So, yeah if everyone stops being sued and gets back to inventing stuff they'll have something new they can put into the iphone5. Invented by people they stopped suing who could finally get back to working on cool shit (tm).

Oh hang they reckon they did invent something... Slide to unlock. (Though I still reckon the bolt on my garden gate, etc....) and possibly litigation as a method of screwing over your competitors when their shit starts to be perceived as better/cooler/slicker than yours (till you realise you need them to do all that inventing for you and you should 'settle').

Oh and that awful bloody connector iThings use so you have to pay 25 quid for a cable if you lose it.

Yeah. Inflammatory, also, but hey that's what the troll icon's for...

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Re: ""we just want people to invent their own stuff"

How dare you denigrate the creativity of Apple! Don't you know how long and hard their engineers struggled to perfect the rectangle?

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