The cat and mouse game between Apple, Samsung, and the UK court continues today. Apple has tweaked its website to reveal the apology letter to Samsung. Until this point, Apple’s gone to great lengths to bury the apology, publishing the link well below the typical screen’s scroll point on its website. In order to see the court ordered apology link, Apple.com visitors had to scroll their mouse beyond the initial load screen. The average customer would never need to scroll on Apple’s homepage to find the information they were looking for, making it unlikely that the majority of people would never actually see the court ordered apology.
According to CNET, Apple has once again updated its website to bring the footer into the view of the majority of the website’s visitors. There’s no mention of whether Apple was ordered to fix the layout by the courts, or if Apple intentionally buried the link at the bottom of a long page to minimize the likelihood that people would see the apology.
At this point, it’s entirely possible that both actually occurred. Apple has been going back and forth with the courts after continued attempts to minimize the impact of an apology statement. At first, Apple published an apology that was more tongue in cheek than the courts intended. Of course, the courts got annoyed and demanded that it be changed. Then Apple took out an add in a UK newspaper issuing an apology in a basic font, buried deep in the publication.
At this point, the apology is visible on Apple’s UK website before the scroll, and where people can actually see it. How long it stays around though is another thing entirely.
