Dan Lyons is a troll. Ever since he was outed as the fake steve jobs any gloss he once had has faded fast.

Next to pro sport stars, lawyers are most valued by US.

Dan Lyons’ disdain for Steve Jobs and Apple is so obvious I don’t know why people attach any credibility at all to anything he says about Apple.  “A person tells me there’s a rumor”— that’s hearsay about a rumor.  He’s so eager to say anything negative about Apple that he would disregard the basic tenets of journalism just to feed his animus.

And I don’t think there is a law office on earth that makes a $100 million except as their cut on a settlement or damages award.

That $100 million would have amounted to less than half a percent of profits. I think that whatever Apple is spending on legal fees is likely forcing other companies to spend an order of magnitude or more in terms of percentage of profits.

Put another way, legal fees by themselves are an additional cost that Apple imposes on other companies while having almost zero effect on their own bottom line.

Watching Apple force infringers to waste money on legal fees is way better than watching the Superbowl.

You’re right on jfbiii. With $97 billion in the bank, they can pay for a lot more lawyers than the other guys without feeling it.

Haha JD good one

If Dan Lyons told me the sky was blue, I’d have to look outside to be sure it wasn’t cloudy!

jfbiii, that is exactly where I was going to go when I had some time to post. This reminds me of a high stakes Texas Hold ‘em poker game. When you are the chip leader, you can do things that you can’t do when you are just getting by. Sure, Samsung and HTC are huge conglomerations, but they have divisions and business units and product lines, each of which have to perform or die. And, when Apple spends their pennies suing the phone product lines and tablet product lines of these corporations, these companies spend dollars fighting the lawsuits, which (as relates to their specific product lines) is a serious drain on earnings for them. Given the competition on the hardware side of these android phones, margins are already thin, and margins are probably non-existent on the android tablet side (given how much, say, Samsung had to invest in capital and engineering to get a mere pittance of tablet sales thus far, not to mention Motorola with their dead-on-arrival Xoom). Trust me, I know how the corporate executive mind works, and even if Apple doesn’t win the lawsuits, Samsung, Motorola, and HTC executives are seeing the costs related to the lawsuits and the relative sales and profits of these product lines and wondering if it makes sense to stay in the game. Apple is playing a high stakes game, and can easily afford to do so.