I doubt that any average user has any idea of what is going on. I'm sure their concerns lie elsewhere. Anyone willing to pay attention to this is a minority within a minority.
True, I fully agree. But Apple is loved by a somewhat large contingent of developers, small software vendors, and tech enthusiasts. That relationship can quickly turn sour, which may harm them to some extend. Not directly, but tech people's hate of Microsoft 10-15 years ago also had an effect on the larger group. The NT branch of Windows has always been very stable, and supplanted 9x a long time ago, still for many people Windows is equivalent to instability and blue screens of death. There's a lot of parrotting.
I think that Apple's relationship with geeks/tech-enthusiasts has been sour since the beginning. The "I'm a Mac" advertisements make it pretty clear that they definitely don't want to be a "corporate brand" or a "geeky brand", even though they're mainly an engineering and industrial design company.
In fact, the more Apple distances itself from those kinds of geeks/tech-enthusiats, the more successful it is.
Actually, I saw this story on the general news. Major companies suing each other counts as somewhat newsworthy, and one of their products getting blocked like this definitely is.
I've seen the same but when those stories are next to the debt crisis, high unemployment and the London riots, they will most likely concentrate on those stories first.
To this day it surprises me how little the average person knows about technology. They know much more than a decade ago but it is still minute.
EDIT: As a personal example, I have a kid sister, 13 years younger, who is in her third year at Cornell studying law and just had intern job at Google this summer in which she wrote a Google student blog post (Yes, I am very proud). She didn't know how to right-click using her Macbook. She can type like the wind and knows the features of every phone but she wan't aware of tapping two fingers on her trackpad.
To me this is very representative of the average user today. They know enough to get by but don't have the depth of knowledge when it comes to the details. If they read a patent story I don't believe they would understand what they were reading unless there was a perceived gain to it.
How on earth do you expect somebody to know to operate something they have never seen before, when it doesn't work like anything else? I remember asking how to right-click on a Macbook before and I am feeling insulted... Unless it's her own Macbook that she uses to type like the wind, in that case, well I agree.
To be honest, I'm feel a little regret that I posted the edit but you're partly right. We didn't have a father and my mother worked close to 60 hours/week. So I treated her like she was my own child. I should've taught her but I didn't. In that regard I did a poor job.
In my situation, I explored what my computer could do. She did not because she wasn't interested in opening System Preferences to see the options. Most people won't. The computer is merely a means to an end. Further than that, they're no longer interested. This is why, I believe, that the iPad (or other tablets)is so important but that is another story for another day.
I dont know about average users in general, but non-tech-savvy people in my environment were aware of "Apple preventing some sort of GalaxyTab from being sold". They dont care about the underlying issue, but they know about the consequence and the free PR that the tablet received.
