6 ms·

$1 per port was not “substantial”, https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-fee/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a

$1 per port was not “substantial”, https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-fee/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...

foobiekr 3y ago
$1 cogs per port is indeed substantial.
- scarface74 3y ago
  And this is why people who care enough to afford higher end products shouldn’t be burden by commodity product vendors like PC makers and Android manufacturers. FireWire was better. Apple and high end PCs had them. If Apple created a better connector than USB C that cost more to include, it would never be accepted by Android manufacturers who want to sell shitty $60 phones.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    Apple and high end PCs had them. Even Apple's consumer-grade basic computers had them. I was introduced to FireWire when my wife bought a MacBook in 2006.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      But even those cost more than cheap PCs at the time.
  - foobiekr 3y ago
    Exactly. Margin control is the main thing. People who don’t think burning an extra 1% of your ASP on something that doesn’t dramatically move the needle isn’t a massive negative have never built products.
HideousKojima 3y ago
That's pretty big, especially if you're selling an external hard drive with two FireWire ports (for daisy chaining). I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price.
- scarface74 3y ago
  The first link I could find for contemporary prices was this one from 2012 - in pounds. https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/03/14/ten_firewire_hard_drives/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/03/14/ten_firewire_ha...
- reaperducer 3y ago
  I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price. $2 for two ports would have been a tiny percent of the final retail price 15 years ago. Today we're used to portable 4GB drives for $99. But back then, drives were more expensive. According to the Wayback Machine†, a 1TB FireWire drive was almost $400. So those two ports would have been ½% of the retail price. † https://web.archive.org/web/20080128203022/http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10033 https://web.archive.org/web/20080128203022/http://www.lacie....
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    How familiar are you with how manufacturing works? A BOM (bill of materials)/COG (cost of goods) cost !== the retail price. You have things like NRE costs (i.e. what it costs to pay people to design and bring the thing to mass production, machines you have to buy/manufacture to support your assembly lines, marketing, legal, etc etc) and profit margins to factor in. Apple's 20-30% is rare and PC margins are closer to 2-5% (often even negative for Android phone manufacturers as they try to recoup that through revenue sharing on the software side with Google). Basically, BOM/COG is things you pay for that you pass on directly to the consumer. However, the retail price has to cover a bunch more than that so you can't compare the two directly. A good rule of thumb is ~2-20x markup depending on the profit margin you are targeting. A $2 licensing fee in the BOM is thus probably closer to ~$14-40 retail. Considering how thin profit margins are, 3% of retail going to nothing but marketing is not nothing especially considering that Apple doesn't have to pay this fee and also getting a cut of every product you sell to boot. Think about it this way - frequently towards the end of the development cycle as you're heading towards mass manufacturing, companies will look to shave tens of dollars and be trying to find 10-20c here & there to add up to that. $3 is massive. You see similar dynamics with MFI. It requires a special chip (space within the product, battery costs) and licensing fees (Apple gets a cut of every sale you make making your competitor product more expensive or less profitable). It's why none of the major tech companies have MFI in their products AFAIK. It cripples any competitor product you try to make (not to mention that you're further at Apple's whims around licensing agreements changing if you build your product around MFI).
Xorakios 3y ago
Firewire drives in 2002 were a minimum of $400 and generally closer to $1000 for 10GB range. Licensing fees were $1 for historical legal reasons per SKU, for the first unit sold, and then 14 cents for each subsequent unit. Still stupid, but nothing like what a lot of this thread is condemning. .07 percent is not remotely close to "several" percent We old people remember $5000 for first generation IBM PC. So get off my lawn ;)
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Can you source the 14 cents per subsequent unit? Every article I found has Apple charging $1 / port (e.g. [1]). There was also apparently a 50k upfront fee to get the technical documentation. Also, since Apple was the primary PC with a Firewire interface (modulo Sony using it in their cameras & thus putting it in their own laptops), the overall market to cell Firewire-enabled accessories was quite small, which artificially inflated the price. If this was a more common standard, you'd see the licensing fee becoming a larger and larger problem and Apple was small enough then that vendors just avoided getting fully locked into Apple's ecosystem (whereas with iPhone the market is just too compelling to avoid this for most players). [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-fee/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...
  - scarface74 3y ago
    FireWire wasn’t “Apple’s” standard. There were nine companies in the patent pool and Apple wasn’t even the largest one - Sony was.

$1 per port was not “substantial”, https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-fee/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...

foobiekr 3y ago

$1 cogs per port is indeed substantial.

scarface74 3y ago
And this is why people who care enough to afford higher end products shouldn’t be burden by commodity product vendors like PC makers and Android manufacturers. FireWire was better. Apple and high end PCs had them. If Apple created a better connector than USB C that cost more to include, it would never be accepted by Android manufacturers who want to sell shitty $60 phones.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Apple and high end PCs had them. Even Apple's consumer-grade basic computers had them. I was introduced to FireWire when my wife bought a MacBook in 2006.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    But even those cost more than cheap PCs at the time.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  Exactly. Margin control is the main thing. People who don’t think burning an extra 1% of your ASP on something that doesn’t dramatically move the needle isn’t a massive negative have never built products.

HideousKojima 3y ago

That's pretty big, especially if you're selling an external hard drive with two FireWire ports (for daisy chaining). I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price.

scarface74 3y ago
The first link I could find for contemporary prices was this one from 2012 - in pounds. https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/03/14/ten_firewire_hard_drives/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/03/14/ten_firewire_ha...
reaperducer 3y ago
I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price. $2 for two ports would have been a tiny percent of the final retail price 15 years ago. Today we're used to portable 4GB drives for $99. But back then, drives were more expensive. According to the Wayback Machine†, a 1TB FireWire drive was almost $400. So those two ports would have been ½% of the retail price. † https://web.archive.org/web/20080128203022/http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10033 https://web.archive.org/web/20080128203022/http://www.lacie....
- vlovich123 3y ago
  How familiar are you with how manufacturing works? A BOM (bill of materials)/COG (cost of goods) cost !== the retail price. You have things like NRE costs (i.e. what it costs to pay people to design and bring the thing to mass production, machines you have to buy/manufacture to support your assembly lines, marketing, legal, etc etc) and profit margins to factor in. Apple's 20-30% is rare and PC margins are closer to 2-5% (often even negative for Android phone manufacturers as they try to recoup that through revenue sharing on the software side with Google). Basically, BOM/COG is things you pay for that you pass on directly to the consumer. However, the retail price has to cover a bunch more than that so you can't compare the two directly. A good rule of thumb is ~2-20x markup depending on the profit margin you are targeting. A $2 licensing fee in the BOM is thus probably closer to ~$14-40 retail. Considering how thin profit margins are, 3% of retail going to nothing but marketing is not nothing especially considering that Apple doesn't have to pay this fee and also getting a cut of every product you sell to boot. Think about it this way - frequently towards the end of the development cycle as you're heading towards mass manufacturing, companies will look to shave tens of dollars and be trying to find 10-20c here & there to add up to that. $3 is massive. You see similar dynamics with MFI. It requires a special chip (space within the product, battery costs) and licensing fees (Apple gets a cut of every sale you make making your competitor product more expensive or less profitable). It's why none of the major tech companies have MFI in their products AFAIK. It cripples any competitor product you try to make (not to mention that you're further at Apple's whims around licensing agreements changing if you build your product around MFI).

Xorakios 3y ago

Firewire drives in 2002 were a minimum of $400 and generally closer to $1000 for 10GB range. Licensing fees were $1 for historical legal reasons per SKU, for the first unit sold, and then 14 cents for each subsequent unit. Still stupid, but nothing like what a lot of this thread is condemning. .07 percent is not remotely close to "several" percent We old people remember $5000 for first generation IBM PC. So get off my lawn ;)

vlovich123 3y ago
Can you source the 14 cents per subsequent unit? Every article I found has Apple charging $1 / port (e.g. [1]). There was also apparently a 50k upfront fee to get the technical documentation. Also, since Apple was the primary PC with a Firewire interface (modulo Sony using it in their cameras & thus putting it in their own laptops), the overall market to cell Firewire-enabled accessories was quite small, which artificially inflated the price. If this was a more common standard, you'd see the licensing fee becoming a larger and larger problem and Apple was small enough then that vendors just avoided getting fully locked into Apple's ecosystem (whereas with iPhone the market is just too compelling to avoid this for most players). [1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-fee/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...
- scarface74 3y ago
  FireWire wasn’t “Apple’s” standard. There were nine companies in the patent pool and Apple wasn’t even the largest one - Sony was.