14 DAY TRIAL // At this year's Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and the Apple TV, everybody was thrilled, and the shares got sky high in no time. Unfortunately, what gets hot must cool down sooner or later, and this is exactly what happened with Apple.
First of all, it was the iPhone issue. No, it's not about the lack of any tactile keyboard, but about the name. Well, I can't see anything wrong with the "iPhone" name, apart from the fact that this name is shared with a VoIP phone from Cisco, and even worse, this problem was not solved outside the court, so we have a lawsuit going on. Despite the fact that this is a hot issue for the press, unfortunately it's not the only one that involves Apple at this time...
A touch sensor chip maker from UK, called Quantum Research Group, filed a formal complaint against Apple in December 2005 concerning patent infringements based on the iPod's scroll wheel. But why do we find out about this so late? Obviously, this lawsuit remained in the shadows until Monday, when everybody find out that Apple denied "all material allegations" involving its interface, also filing a countersuit claiming the invalidity of the patent.
All this trouble happened because the first and second generation iPod nanos and the video iPod use Cypress programmable system-on-chip controllers that Quantum claims to infringe on a patent his company holds for touch sensors, while earlier iPods that use wheels from Synaptics are not affected.
Leaving this behind, it seems that OPTi is suing Apple, claiming that they violated patents for "Predictive Snooping of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses". This is another problem that adds up, but the worst part of this is that - since the patent covers a common technique of cutting overhead from data transfers performed by the CPU and other components - almost any CPU or system builder could become a victim of OPTi's legal initiative, and since they also filed a suit against AMD, I could say that they are more into the "lawsuit business" than chip making...
At last, it should be interesting to see what happens with Apple's shares, since today they are way down at 85.70$/share, and I don't know if this is related to the fact that Steve Jobs was questioned by federal investigators last week regarding the backdating issue, according to more published reports, but no details about this were to be seen anywhere yet.
I really hope that things are going to end up well for everybody, but I am waiting for Steve to say something. After all, we have seen the iPhone, Apple Computers became only "Apple", so why not a more transparent policy regarding information about what's really going on?