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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (108979)	2/12/2011 2:16:05 PM
From: yofal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213184

You are, of course, wrong on both counts. AAPL charges a royalty to any manufacturer who wants to connect to the iPod. 10%, end of story. It seems it's a little more nuanced than that. The fee moved from the previous 10% charge to a flat $4/unit at the end of 2006 according to reports at that time. Reading elsewhere it appears there's a variety of technology licensing manufacturers can participate in depending on the patented ports they want to us, right up to the Made for iPod (MFi) program, which can net Apple as much as 25% of the retail price of the device. Given that these terms are officially hidden from public view by NDA, most of the info out there is hearsay at best.

To: i-node who wrote (108979)	2/12/2011 2:33:34 PM
From: Cogito	3 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213184

>>You are, of course, wrong on both counts. AAPL charges a royalty to any manufacturer who wants to connect to the iPod. 10%, end of story. Perhaps you are speculating. I am not.<< Really? And how do they do that if they have no business relationship with the manufacturer? Here's the scoop from Apple: developer.apple.com Apple has no mechanism for forcing anyone to participate in the program if they don't want to. And the program is good for consumers, since it's nice to know that if I buy a third-party charger, for example, it won't turn my iPhone into a brick by shorting it out. Meanwhile, on the USB thing, we're kind of both right. From Wikipedia: "Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a specification[1] to establish communication between devices and a host controller (usually a personal computer), developed and invented by Ajay Bhatt while working for Intel.[2][3] USB has effectively replaced a variety of interfaces such as serial and parallel ports." but from the same article: "The USB is a standard for peripheral devices. It began development in 1994 by a group of seven companies: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. USB was intended to make it fundamentally easier to connect external devices to PCs by replacing the multitude of connectors at the back of PCs, addressing the usability issues of existing interfaces, and simplifying software configuration of all devices connected to USB, as well as permitting greater bandwidths for external devices. The first silicon for USB was made by Intel in 1995.[5]" So what happened was that the consortium of companies (which did include Microsoft, but not Philips) got together to set the goal for the project, and agreed to support the standard once it had been developed. But the actual work of developing it was done at Intel. You could easily have looked this up yourself before casting aspersions on others. I looked it up before posting on the subject. Doing so shows respect for the people who read this thread.