carnegie

franklinjackcon said:

paul turner said:

Anilu_777 said:

I hope the bastard gets worse than life. I support law enforcement gaining access to child abusers’ devices so they can put them away. 

Next you will be telling us if you have nothing to hide then you dont mind the cops accessing your phone?

Didn't they have a warrant? This wasn't some case of them stopping a random guy on the street and looking for something to charge him with. Nor is it mass surveillance. Nor did they ask Apple for a risky backdoor. They had grounds for search. They searched. Where is your problem with this?

The issue isn't whether this amounted to an illegal search. Presumably the government was in compliance with the Fourth Amendment in this case and had the right to conduct a search of the iPhone.

The issue is whether the government can, in conducting that (presumably legal) search, compel a suspect to assist in the recreation of potential evidence by facilitating the decryption of contents of the iPhone. That's more a Fifth Amendment issue than a Fourth Amendment issue. The government shouldn't be allowed to compel that assistance; unfortunately it may ultimately be decided that the government is allowed to.

applecider said:

I second Tychos comments about clickbait and also despise qcom’s business practices.

A problem is that FRAND licensing has not been well defined by either courts or regulatory agencies responsible for adopting standards and their essential patents.

For instance the smallest unit upon which royalty should be based the radio chip or the entire phone is not agreed upon.

For those who don’t follow these issues QCOM has licensed patents to chip makers, but in some instances eg iphone wants patents based upon the final product rather than the part that uses the patent.  Of course by this logic a high end BMW with Qualcomm’s chip would owe a royalty based on the cost of the car. QCOM has also wanted a royalty from chip makers and the final product so called double dipping.

What I find amazing is that their stock QCOM has risen despite the apple disputes and movement to INTL modem chips.

You're right that the terms allowed under FRAND obligations aren't precisely specified (or legally settled). But in the regard you refer to, in the U.S., we have case law to guide us. Holders of FRAND patents aren't entitled to royalties based on the entire market value of devices which incorporate those patents, except under certain circumstances which wouldn't apply with, e.g., iPhones. (Parties can, of course, agree to royalties based on the entire market value if they want to. But a would-be licensor can't unilaterally impose such terms. And a would-be licensee that refuses to agree to such terms wouldn't be what is considered an unwilling licensee.)

Also, the issue with Qualcomm's alleged double dipping isn't about it trying to collect royalties on consumer devices after having already collected royalties from the other chip makers (whose chips are used in those devices). Indeed, one of the things that Qualcomm is accused of (by Intel and others) is refusing to license FRAND patents to competitors such as Intel. That's a pretty clear FRAND violation.

The alleged double dipping is about Qualcomm imposing licensing fees on companies even though those companies have bought chips from Qualcomm. Qualcomm has allegedly been double dipping by selling chipsets to companies and also requiring those companies to pay licensing fees for the IP which is incorporated in those chipsets. That was part of a scheme that Qualcomm allegedly employed, using a number of contract violative and illegal actions that worked together, to inhibit competition and extract improperly inflated licensing fees.

I won't get lost in the various aspects of Qualcomm's alleged behavior, but if the numerous government regulators and other market participants (e.g. Apple, Intel, Samsung) are correct with regard to what Qualcomm has been doing, then its actions are egregious. They're not only clear violations of the contractual obligations which Qualcomm made (and in return for which Qualcomm got considerable benefit), but in many jurisdictions they're illegal.

boltsfan17 said:

bbh said:

I hope she prevails. I don't think we are a "police state". Yet.

The Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement doesn't apply at the border. 

Yes, there is a recognized border search exception to the warrant requirement. But whether forensic searches of smartphones fall within that exception is an open question. Federal circuits are split on whether some degree of individualized suspicion is required in order to justify forensic searches of smartphones at borders (or their functional equivalents). See, e.g., U.S. v Kolsuz (2018, Fourth Circuit), U.S. v Touset (2018, Eleventh Circuit).

anantksundaram said:

rotateleftbyte said:

This--> <i>The company currently holds $244 billion in cash reserves overseas and $155 billion in total debt (the lowest debt it has reported across the last four quarters). </i>

confused me.
Does this mean that Apple has not brought any of that offshore cash back into the USA despite Trump's virtual tax holiday?
If this is true then why hasn't it?

I am not sure about the claim that it's still overseas. A few months ago, Apple said that it was bringing a vast majority of its cash back to the US, and was pre-paying the US Treasury $38B, which would presumably be at the special one-time cash transfer rate of 15.5% under the Trump tax plan (lower than the new statutory corporate tax rate of 21% under the tax plan): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/technology/apple-tax-bill-repatriate-cash.html

(38B)/(0.155) = $245B, so it would seem that Apple has either brought back or will soon bring back virtually all of its cash to the US.

How much (U.S. federal) income tax Apple will owe (or owes) on those previously not-repatriated earnings won't (or doesn't) depend on whether Apple repatriates those earnings. Those earnings are, under the recent tax law changes, deemed repatriated and taxes have to be paid on them whether they are actually repatriated or not. So we can't look at what Apple says it is going to have to pay in taxes (on those earnings) and conclude that it is going to repatriate them.

That said, Apple surely will repatriate the great majority of those earnings as there isn't much reason not to. Repatriating need not affect how those earnings are held (while they are still held), it's only an issue of which corporation technically holds those earnings. As it was, much of the foreign earnings that hadn't been repatriated was held in U.S.-based instruments. Those earnings are in corporate bonds, and U.S. Treasuries, and MBSs, and several other kinds of investment / savings instruments. Such funds being held "overseas" doesn't mean that they weren't, e.g., in U.S. banks. It just means that the foreign subsidiary hadn't actually remitted the earnings to the domestic parent corporation. Remitting those earnings to the parent corporation opens up more options for what can be done with them, so absent a strong reason not to remit them (e.g., having to pay substantially more in taxes if you do), in most cases it would make sense to remit (at lost a lot of) them.

mjtomlin said:

Have share buy backs in the previous quarter been posted yet? if not, it will cause the market cap to drop $20 billion.

A new outstanding share count will be released (in Apple’s 10-Q) later today. As of the last reported share count, the share price needed was $203.46.

But some of that $20 billion worth of buy backs (in the just passed quarter) would have been accounted for in the old share count, as that count was as of April 20th. And the share count used for the diluted EPS (which is an average) suggested that the ending share count for the quarter wasn’t 100 million or so (i.e. $20 billion worth) less than the last reported share count. So, unless Apple bought back a good bit of stock in early July, I wouldn’t expect the updated share count to fall by 100 million shares.