I never said Samsung didn't copy Apple. I said the design patent was bullshit. You're setting up convenient strawmen to knock down.

You reaffirmed this by quoting that "They sued samsung over a number of combined similarities:" and then listing design features that the iPhone copied from the LG Prada.

Not exactly a 'design pattern' (I'll find and report those cases here too), but these two examples should suffice to show you their unethically greedy intentions:

1) Apple tries to sue a small German coffee shop over logo: http://gawker.com/5853402/apple-threatens-to-sue-tiny-german... (Now tell me honestly, does the logo of the 'fruit' apple really look similar at all to Apple's logo? I mean, that poor lady running the coffee shop was not even in electronics business, just serving some coffee! What did they think, the fruit apple is their property now? This is inhuman to do that to a small coffee shop in my opinion.

2) Apple sues Polish Grocery store over name "a.pl": http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409669,00.asp - Apple said they are trying to use their 'reputation' by using a name similar to theirs. really? Come on, .pl is Poland's top level domain for god's sake. 'a' is the first letter of English alphabet. And they are in Grocery business! How would they snatch Apple's customers?

A company which can do the above, can sue anyone, for just anything. They have money, they are big. They're the electronics equivalent of Monsanto.

On the other hand, it's not that Apple doesn't copy blatantly. They stole Swiss railway's clock blatantly and 'exactly', without taking permission or paying. Finally Swiss railway sued and Apple had to pay $21 million for theft. Many, many other such examples.

The crux is, incremental evolution is the only way the industry learns and progresses. Suing others for getting inspiration (while doing the same yourself) is dangerous.

The most obvious example of trying to copy the design is the charge cable of the galaxy tab. Apple's charge cable was ridiculously and unnecessarily wide, as is evident by the fact that later on they switched to the new design of the lightning cable. Samsung made their cable plug also very wide, and very similar that I personally, on one occasion have grabbed an off brand white Samsung cable, tried to shove it into my iPad, and was rather surprised when it did not fit.

Rather then looking at weather or not Samsung copied apple, let's look at the motivations. Because I believe that imitating someones design because you think its the best and the most practical way to do something should be perfectly ok. However, it is wrong to copy a design of your competitors in the hopes that consumers will confuse your product for your competitors. For instance, I would call BS on Apple arguing that a black rounded rectangle with rounded corners is somehow their design. It's just the most obvious and straightforward way of making an glass touch tablet. But then look at the power / sync cord. Can you justify that choice? No, there is no practical reason to make your cord look like that other than to make your product look more like an iPad.

They do say that imitation is the sincerest from of flattery, and I do tend to believe it, as long as the motivation is right. A company can look at the fact that iPads are doing really well in the market and tell it's designers and engineers: "Let's get a few of those iPads, play with them, figure out why people love them, and than make better one our selves, incorporating some of the features that we thing people really love about the iPad." I think that's what ASUS did with their Transformer line. They observed that a lot of people liked the simple and clean look of the iPad, and they made it even cleaner by removing all buttons. They also decided that people really want a option to have a keyboard on a tablet, as evidenced by the abundance of the keyboard cases for the iPad, so they added that function as well.

On the other hand, Samsung told its engineers: "Here is an iPad, copy it! No, don't bother figuring out why people like it, use those ideas, build on them, and maybe come up with something better. Just copy it. You see that idiotic, unnecessarily wide connector that only made any kind of sense when it was first installed in the original iPod, and not even then really. Copy that too."

So, to finish my thought, yes Apple is a bit bitchy when people copy their stuff. In case of most manufacturers I think they are wrong. In case of Samsung, I can see it, they copied Apple, and they did it for all the wrong reasons.

I think the complete unabashed copying is specifically why Apple sued Samsung.

Companies have been getting design patents on generic looking devices for years, this one just got a lot of attention because it actually ended up in court. If Samsung's devices were simply the same shape as the iPad but weren't otherwise so similar, Apple would have had no case to argue, (and probably never filed the lawsuit) and no one would care about this patent.

For reference, the 30 pin connector wasn't actually on the first iPod - it was introduced with the 3rd gen. Previously they used a full sized Firewire 400 (1394A) port on top next to the headphone port.