There's a citation link for every single quotation, fireman.
Many, if not a majority of your quotes have come from sources of questionable veracity. But, I am not going to claim that mine have been a great deal better. This conversation has gone completely off the rails. And I am sorry to have wasted so much of our time by keeping it going.
I have learned a great deal from you from our past exchanges. There is no one who is more knowledgeable of Apple products that I am aware of on this forum. Obviously Apple is a trendsetter in the electronic gizmo and computer sector.
One of my hobbies is restoring old cars. My wife and I are currently working on a rare 1942 Cadillac. We also are helping to set up a display at the Lemay Car Museum in Tacoma. Both my wife and I are familiar enough with vintage and antique cars that if we do not recognize a particular automobile we can at least identify fairly closely the year it was manufactured. Cars from the early 1900s look similar; cars from the teens look similar; cars from the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies and etc., etc., tend to be fairly easy to identify.
Car manufacturers spend massive amounts coming up with new designs. Strangely, the designs often seem to look fairly similar. Part of this is because of new and evolving technologies becoming available to all manufacturers around the same time. But have you ever heard of the largest car manufacturer suing their competitors claiming that they were the first to come up with say... headlights in front fenders, or tail fins or other cosmetic innovations that have little to do with new technology?
Having owned cell phones since the 1980s; it also is fairly easy to identify within a few years when a cell phone was manufactured. They do tend to look similar and I suppose that when a company comes out with a phone that looks like it is going to sell well... the rest of the manufacturers start making phones that look similar. The features implemented tend to come out about the same time also. Part of this is because the companies try to copy the market leader, but as with cars part of it is because the technologies that each cell phone designer has available tend to be similar.
To me the original iPhone doesn't look a great deal different from some other phones that were developed before it was. The feature set seems to me to be completely evolutionary as well. After it became a success there were a lot of other phones that started looking similar to it. However, after what I have seen with vintage cars this seems to be what one would expect in any competitive enterprise.
Apple was the first to market with a commercially successful cell phone with a multi-touch capacitive screen. How great an accomplishment was that really? As this type of screen became available one would expect that other manufacturers would start using them as well regardless of Apple's implementation. It is kind of a no brainer and this actually is the case. The same can be said of improved cell data technologies. It is hard to prove that phones coming out with evolutionary improvements are copies of one another.
The complicating factor is that unlike automobile manufacturers Apple has established a history of using its money and influence to manipulate the patent system. And they have a history of using teams of hired goon lawyers to intimidate other companies and stifle innovation. I do not have a problem with Apple's products. They are well engineered, quality consumer friendly products. I do have a problem with Apple's predatory abuse of our legal and patent system. I also have a problem with people like you who make excuses and justify this type of behavior.