I’m in France. I’ve been off the beaten track a bit - towards the border with Belgium. Today I looked at the rows of tablets for sale in a provincial supermarket. Has ‘tablet’ as in electronic device replaced ‘tablet’ as in pill in our general vocabulary yet?. Anyway, there were at least 12, of various sizes. Samsung and Asus were dominating there. Now of course they were all rounded rectangles with a black surround and usually some kind of metallic bezel. I couldn’t really pick them apart, and I had to look hard to be sure that the iPad wasn’t hidden amongst them. It wasn’t.

Now, I wondered, why would I encounter the biggest selection of tablets I’ve ever seen at a supermarket in Saint Quentin? Obviously they are profitable to sell.

“WHO THE FUCK BUYS THESE?” I raged. They were virtually all priced at €399 or higher. Basically iPad money. But what else are customers going to buy? There’s no iPad to be found. Now of that €399, I reckon €100 is going to the supermarket - maybe more. That’s why they’re giving up valuable baguette space. And so I made the leap from patent-infringing rectangles to distribution channels.

Here’s what I realised - the patent lawsuits aren’t about Apple keeping the Galaxy Tab out of Best Buy in San Francisco. Or PC World in the UK. It’s the vast, vast majority of the world that’s beyond driving distance to an Apple store that they are worried about. The places where Apple don’t ship. The people who don’t shop online. The patents are being used as a weapon because Apple’s direct retail model isn’t delivering the mass-market share that they need.

Don’t forget, the iPhone was sold using network operators. But the iPad doesn’t have much network support - and when you get 100 miles from an Apple store it starts to look mighty tempting to buy that identical looking tablet, even if it’s the same price. And look at what tablets have become - stepping stone devices onto the internet. By default their target market isn’t going to be ordering and comparing prices online.

So what does that mean? Apple are using their patents to try to slow down the sales of competing devices. But this can only ever be a temporary measure. In the long term they need to either: drop prices to prevent Samsung offering €100 margins to retailers, massively expand the Apple stores presence, or start giving giving retailers a similar margin to Samsung.

As a shareholder I don’t like any of these options. As a customer I prefer reduced prices.