If you have ever been inside a Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart or any other store that sells Apple products you might notice something very unusual. They are ALWAYS segregated from other products. Apple has exceptionally strict rules about the displays for their products. They require a certain distance from their devices and any competing device.  They also require large logos and information in their displays to clearly indicate that this is an Apple product. In most Best Buy stores Apple products are at the front of the store and everyone else’s tablets are at the back with the PCs. The idea that someone would pick up a Samsung, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, or any other non-Apple tablet on their own by mistake is ludicrous. Even in a Wal-Mart or Target the iPads are completely separated from everything else in their own display case marked clearly with the Apple name and logo. It is beyond comprehension that Apple’s lawyers want anyone to believe that someone mistakenly picked up a competing product by mistake.

So how are people getting them and then returning them? Apple has data after all and is showing it. Well here is the simple way this happens. Back in the K6 days I can remember shopping for things at best buy and I heard multiple Best Buy employees make statements like “AMD CPUs are just Intel CPUs that didn’t make QC (Quality Control), you don’t want one of them”.  When I was in a Best Buy looking for a new Canon Vixia Camcorder I was told that Canon bought their lenses from Sony. The sales person wanted me to buy Sony. Later while I was in a different Best Buy looking at the Asus Transformer Prime a Best Buy employee told my wife that the Acer Tablet she was playing around with was “just like an iPad only less expensive”.

One the same side we would be willing to bet quite a bit of money that if some of the people that returned a competing product were deposed we would find out they were pushed toward the products they bought. Also the return reasons are most likely misstated by Apple as well. When the Netbook first hit, most of them were Linux. These Linux based models were returns because they “were not Windows” again they were often sold as “just as good as” especially when the big pushes by Best Buy started where you got a printer and a ton of other items just for getting a netbook.  Our guess is that the real reasons was something along the lines of; we originally wanted an iPad, but went with this instead because it was cheaper and it is just not an iPad. In fact we have heard that from a couple of people that did buy an Android based product due to price when they really wanted an iPad or iPhone.

We are expecting to see Apple really ramp up the spin and PR attempts. Remember they are the masters of putting on a show and no matter how you want to slice it a jury trial is a show. It is up to the Judge to insure that the information presented by both sides is accurate and not misleading in any way. We are very concerned that Judge Lucy Koh is not up to the task, but we hope  that with the eyes of the world on her she might be forced to do the right thing and keep the theatrics to a minimum and reduce Apple’s show to just the facts.