Nonsense; I generally find that dismissive drive-by comments on Hacker News are better much thought through than actual court decisions made at the conclusion of a court trial. /s

Well, I think average HN'er has much better judgement over average Joe jury in Apple's hometown on technical design and patent issues. The role (or problem) of non-technical jury in highly technical patent litigation is also often debated in academia too.

> average Joe jury in Apple's hometown

Keep in mind that most of the people in Apple's hometown are have graduate degrees and work in the technology industry…though, it's likely that they wouldn't be selected for the jury at this trial.

I was surprised to find that only two of the first jury had any technical background at all. In that case however one such member helped to ignore the jury instruction and somewhat mislead the rest.

Actually Apple's design cases were thrown out everywhere, except Apple's hometown court.

The only difference is that Apple's hometown judge Koh and magistrate judge Grewal didn't allow prior arts in the courts.

They might have lost them in the end, but they were certainly not “thrown out” as would have happened if they simply patented a grid of icons with trivially-obvious prior art. Regardless of your belief in the overall merits of their case, it’s very obviously a much more nuanced issue than people here apparently believe.

?? Apple's claims were dismissed in summary judgements -- yes, their cases were "thrown out" elsewhere. Where there were actual trials, in the UK for instance, Apple not only lost and was even sanctioned by the court for disobeying the court decision. Your "belief" that Apple won by merit really has no reality outside Apple's hometown. Yes and only in Apple's home country, as other commenters have noted, do you have the chief executive Obama coming out reversing Samsung's win at ITC that would have ended all these unnecessary lawsuits years back.

Apple also had it's home-country's executive intervene when the Obama administration blocked the import ban Samsung won against Apple. Yet snarky HNers act like there were no fingers on the scale.