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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 t
by 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 agoCan 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 agoFireWire wasn’t “Apple’s” standard. There were nine companies in the patent pool and Apple wasn’t even the largest one - Sony was.