darelrex

nubus said:

The corporate culture at Apple could be the reason why we get cases like "we have the right to do price fixing" with iBooks ...

When Kindle was the only e-book game in town, it set the price of every book, and if you didn't like it, get lost. Then Apple ruined it for them by launching iBooks with the policy "you choose the price of your book and we'll keep 30%". Only in an upside-down world could Apple, not Amazon, get charged with "price fixing" — but if you're the DOJ, you have to go after the deep pocket, not the dry hole of edge-of-profitability Amazon.

Just in case anyone was unclear, 10% of Apple's current global revenue is roughly equivalent to all the profits Apple has made from all of its products/services in the entire EU (not just France) from January 2007 when Jobs unveiled iPhone, to today. I'm sure Apple will fork over that much money just for the privilege of staying in France for another few months or years until they decide to hit Apple with another fine that big (or twice that big, per the EU's plan for repeat "offenses"). J'en suis tellement sûr.

danox said:

The whole purpose of doing a in house modem is to control your destiny by being able to design what you want and not be tied to some outside entity. Which is basically the same reason for designing Apple Silicon, having boat anchors like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, was as bad as having Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois and IBM. Long-term getting rid of Qualcomm will be a plus miniaturizing the Apple Vision to a pair of glasses or putting a modem into future Macs or any other Apple device in time requires it. How long will this take? As long as necessary that’s the way iteration/innovation works.

Totally agree. Also, this takes Apple's economy-of-scale benefit away from Apple's competitors, and gives it to Apple's C1 chips only. As Apple sells the great majority of high-priced phones, when Apple fully separates from Qualcomm, then Qualcomm will be selling modem chips to a much lower average-price-point set of products, from which it's impossible to juice the kind of money they were hitting Apple for, all these years — Qualcomm was using that money for ongoing development of its Snapdragon modems; now Apple will be using that money for ongoing development of C1, C2, etc.

Apple's probably doing more than any other tech company to not be complicit in child labor abuse — but you can't protest at the slick Dell store because, uh, it doesn't exist.

Does this lawsuit specify any (not to mention a sensible) dividing line between what features a company is allowed to reserve for itself, and what features must be turned into third-party flea markets or else be hit with multi-billion-dollar judgments? I seriously doubt it. The lawyers simply want a fat payday, and hope that a judge will allow it to proceed, and a jury will say, "duh, sounds good to me". They couldn't care less whether this will actually benefit — or harm — Apple's typical users.