As Apple's closing legal attacks on Samsung are increasingly meeting obstacles, Reuters reports that Apple's current CEO, Tim Cook, never wanted any of this.
Apple filed a lawsuit against Samsung in April 2011, months before Jobs died, after the South Korean company released the Galaxy Tab and Steve Jobs felt it was just like the iPad. That was the last straw: time to go "thermal-nuclear" in the courts against Samsung.
But it turns out that future-CEO Tim Cook was against the idea of a lawsuit from the start. And his reasons complicate the binary "Apple vs. Samsung" relationship so often seen on the surface of the relationship between these two companies, at least recently.
Cook didn't want to sue Samsung because he didn't want a lawsuit leveled against one of Apple's long-time components suppliers. Ever since 2005, Samsung and Apple have been working together.
At the time, Apple was shifting away from hard disc drives in their iPod series, in favor of the new (and now ubiquitous) iPod nano and iPod shuffle line which required flash memory, or solid state drives, to meet the smaller design requirements. iPhones, introduced two years later, would also use solid state drives.
Samsung was the obvious choice, because it held about 50 percent of the market for those components. Later, Samsung also helped Apple design processor chips for Apple's mobile devices.
Of course, being that close to the breakout success of the iPhone must have given Samsung some ideas, and the rest, as they say, is civil court history. Samsung was naturally in Apple's intellectual property crosshairs, with a similar product line-up and having become the biggest mobile device rivals of Apple, not to mention running an operating system that Steve Jobs also thought was a thinly-veiled rip-off of Apple's.
But now that Apple has won the billion-dollar case against Samsung in August, further action, like a fight to ban Samsung products from U.S. markets, is grinding to a slow halt because Apple has a new problem, and it's not actionable in court, though it's an issue that never occurred with Jobs at the helm: Samsung is quickly becoming cooler than Apple in tech-savvy Asian markets.