dreyfus2

lmagoo said:

It kills me how Apple can be so greedy!! Really it costs NO DIFFERENCE to work on a Aluminum watch Stainless or pure Gold...Why should the case material determine the repair costs are??? Because they can and people are stupid enough to pay them!!!!

Most of these repairs are actually replacements for items damaged by the user, Care+ is a mix of insurance and warranty extension. And the insurance part is calculated based on the item price. Pretty normal. And in many parts of the world, those with mandatory 24 months implied warranty, you really do not need either unless you damage things all the time.

I was able to connect my iPad Pro (12.9") to our wired corporate network using the new adapter and Apple's USB to Ethernet adapter. I could also (using GoodReader) access files on our network from SMB shares and transfer them at pretty good speeds. While this helps a lot, it is, for now, configuration free and only seems to work where there is DHCP available, as there is no mean to configure network settings (I could find). Unfortunately also no way to configure dedicated proxy settings for such a connection... Wonder where they are going with this.

phone-ui-guy said:

So an app developer posts something they probably know nothing about (except for whatever they have read on rumor sites) and gets free publicity for their app? Hmmm... 

Um,no. If they were able to add this support using public APIs, the beta and the SDK they have access to obviously support it. Since the Astropad developers are former Apple engineers and Astropad is the poster app for Apple Pencil, this makes perfect sense. Just seems that Apple released it a few days too early.

radarthekat said:

Point is, by whatever factors pricing is determined, those must be applied fairly to all.  That's just part of anti-trust law.  So Apple will get a price it can afford if it needs to license the patents by virtue of the fact others, with far less financial wherewithal, have been able to license those patents and still remain viable businesses.  

Well, at least as far as German patent laws go, there is no such provision – and our anti-trust laws deal with anti-trust issues, not patent licensing. The patent fee can, within the established range per industry, be freely negotiated for each non-exclusive license covering the same patent – there is no obligation for fairness, non-discrimination etc. (And actually, because there are none, there are special provisions for SEPs – if this would apply to all patents, FRAND terms would not be necessary at all.) Even more important: if the fee is calculated based on the revenue for an entire product, or just a component implementing the patent, is freely negotiated. So, in case of an iPhone we could talk about anything from .4 percent of a component costing $10, or 4-5% of the entire product. That is quite some margin, and the court will normally not set the price or review other existing licensees when there is no SEP involved.

(Not saying the patent is any good, that is a different question entirely.)

radarthekat said:

Apple will just need to pay license fees, which can't be prejudicial, meaning if others can afford the costs, it won't be a burden to Apple.  It's good to have $60 billion+ in annual cash flows.  Next problem!

What you say applies to SEPs (standards-essential patents), like those used in 3G/4G. This is a common requirement by standards bodies, not the law. Other patent licenses can be negotiated freely – there is no general requirement to issue those on FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms. If the patents in question can be considered SEPs, I do not know, but the article makes no mention of that. (Well, it actually contains no reasoning from Apple's side at all.)