Apple has been found guilty of willfully infringing on a “predictive snooping” patent awarded to Opti Inc. in 2002. The company has been ordered to pay just over million in compensation, despite its attempts to have the patent thrown out.
Hugh Pickens writes “Saul Hansell of the NY Times has an interesting post analyzing AT&T’s earnings report and highlighting the enormous stakes involved in the renewal of its exclusive contract to distribute Apple’s iPhone in the United States. Hansell does some rough calculations: ‘If the average iPhone customer brings in a month, or ,080 a year in revenue, and the operating profit margin stays constant at 26 percent, that means an iPhone customer represents at least 1 in operating profit over a two-year contract,’ says Hansell. ‘Put another way, if the company gets 2.5 million new customers a year because of its iPhone exclusivity, the deal represents at least 0 million a year in operating profits — profits that it could lose if Verizon sold the iPhone, too.’ With those sort of numbers, AT&T has every reason to make Apple an offer it can’t refuse to keep its exclusive deal for another few years. Of course, the incentives for Verizon are presumably the mirror image, so expect Verizon to come to Cupertino, checkbook in hand, to see what sort of deal they can make. ‘The benefit of somewhat more iPhone sales from wide distribution is likely to be swamped by a huge bid from AT&T to keep exclusivity, and an equally high bid from Verizon to win some (or maybe even all) of the business for itself.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Shortly before 2 p.m. PDT (1:52 p.m.), the iTunes App Store hit 1,000,000,000 apps sold since it originally just nine months ago. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s still a significant milestone for the store, the iPhone (and iPod Touch) and Apple.
The sheer depth of Final Cut Pro features can intimidate new users. In order to shake Avid from its high horse, Apple had to cram an unbelievable amount of features in there. We’ve assembled ten features that will help you master FCP and create the next
Although it appeared that Apple was close to wrapping up development of Mac OS X 10.5.7 late last week, a new pre-release distribution of the software was dropped on developers Wednesday afternoon with a handful of additional tweaks added to mix.
It seems unthinkable today — but more than two decades ago, when personal computers were still new and everybody listened to music on a Walkman, Steve Jobs was cast out of Apple. The year was 1985. IBM and Microsoft dominated the world of computing. The revolutionary Macintosh, launched with such fanfare just a year earlier, appeared to be…
Apple Inc. yanked a disturbing iPhone application called “Baby Shaker” – which allowed users to silence a screaming infant by shaking their phone – from its online store today.
Apple today announced its earnings for its most recent quarter, and smashed through expectations, reporting EPS of .33 a share on revenue of .16 Billion. The general consensus among analysts hinted at an EPS of .08 a share on revenue of Billion.
If you needed any further proof that Apple’s App Store approval process is horrifyingly out of whack, consider one of the latest additions to the App Store: Baby Shaker.
The next version of the Bluetooth short-range wireless protocol officially launched this week, promising an eightfold speed increase that could help device makers like Apple offer true wireless syncing on their handheld products in about a year’s time.
