Some shareholders want to sue Apple to force them to pay out more of Apple's cash to shareholders. This is a fairly legitimate claim, as companies are meant to pay out excess profits back to shareholders in the form of dividends/preference shares, and Apple is earning more money every quarter than they can use or are paying back. They are also sueing over a special term that allows Apple to create preference shares... not a big deal.

This press release states that Apple is making plans to pay out more cash to shareholders, and that the special term does not exclude the board of directors from doing other things with preference shares in addition.

Apple shares are likely to rise on this news in the short term, but may be a signal that Apple has no new healthy investments, and may lower share price in the long term. Nobody knows, share markets are volatile.

Greenlight (an investment fund) wants to push Apple to issue preferred stock. Why? Because, among other things, preferred stock, compared to ordinary issued shares, will receive a perpetual dividend (very much like a bond), but with no maturity.

Pros for the investor: if you are corporation/qualified investor, rather than paying 35% capital gains tax in the U.S. they will pay 15%. Preferred also tends to be senior to ordinary equity.

Cons for the investor: they will probably have little or no voting rights as preferred equity holders. Little decision making at the shareholders' meeting. Additionally, given that preferred equity does not participate in the growth of the company, the preferred shares and dividends will most certainly remain/trade like a bond, with little volatility compared to traditional equities (if Apple's revenues/cash continue to grow like crazy, preferred equity investor will not have that much an upside).

Cons for Apple: preferred dividends are not tax-deductible (unlike debt). In theory, Apple's cost of capital will increase. They will also issue an instrument with no redemption date.

Pros for Apple: they might be able to avoid paying any repatriation on cash held internationally. Preferred equity is great for defending a company from hostile takeovers (but this is rare in Apple's case given its size).

In some ways this is a negative. Issuing dividends means a company thinks that an investor can get a higher return on the cash elsewhere. I.e. there is a lack of profitable opportunities for the company to invest their cash pile.

Apple is sitting on somewhere close to $200,000,000,000 in _cash_ (or whatever equivalent billions of dollars are stored in). Seems Apple is getting sued by [a] stockholder(s) for hoarding cash to the tune of >$140/stock.