Apple holds 802.11n capabilities hostage
By Paul Miller 
posted January 15th 2007 5:42PM
posted January 15th 2007 5:42PM
It was odd enough for Apple to slip 802.11n chips into its recent Core 2 Duo systems without really letting on about it, but now they've gone full-out loony by charging $4.99 to download the 802.11n enabler patch on your system. If you purchase one of those new 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Stations with your hard-earned $179, Apple will throw in the enabler software for free, but if you happen to already own an 802.11n base station or just wanted to feel like a big kid with an 802.11n wireless card of your very own without buying the Airport Extreme Base Station, you'll have to fork over the annoying 5 buck fee. The folks at iLounge dug into the story a bit, and it appears Apple is blaming accounting for the odd fee: "the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn't finished delivering the product at that point." Yeah, crazy. We know. Until we get a better explanation than that bookkeeping hogwash, we're going to go with our first impression of the situation: this is just that tried and true "wear them down with micropayments" part of Steve Jobs' inevitable path to world dominion.Read - AppleInsider
Read - iLounge
Ok enough already, engadget isn't biased against apple, thats such a ridiculous statement I wish you could hear yourself. Is this your first time reading this site?
Notice how apple is not charging you the 5 bucks if you buy their airport router? But if you buy a Linksys or another one forget it – nice to see apple doesn’t miss a beat on making a few extra bucks, even now that they are rolling in cash with all the ipod sales.
You can be a fan of apple and still criticize them, its not against the law (I don’t think so anyway, maybe in some parts of california it is) Charging for a firmware or driver update is just wrong plain and simple. Doesn’t matter who is doing it dell, hp, microsoft, apple, doesn’t matter – its just a pathetic move on their part to make you pull out your credit card for a firmware update.
Instead of bait and switch this is switch and bait and dangle the damn carrot infront of me. Oh, well, if we hadn't figured out we actually had those N chips in our machines and then Apple said, for only $5bucks we are gonn give you a 5x boost in speed if you can get it, hell it would be christmas in January for me.
The Evil Applepire Strikes Again
BTW Why is that damn iphone link still up. Mac world ended weeks ago, I dont see anything up for CES, what gives?
All those who want to know what Sarbanes-Oxley has to do with enabling a capability within a product after the product has been sold, RTFA.
>> Another Apple representative has added details
>> on the Sarbanes situation: it’s about
>> accounting. Because of the Act, the company
>> believes that if it sells a product, then later
>> adds a feature to that product, it can be held
>> liable for improper accounting if it recognizes
>> revenue from the product at the time of sale,
>> given that it hasn’t finished delivering the
>> product at that point.
Typical Apple, bend the customer over and rape them for some more money. How nice of them...
"BTW Why is that damn iphone link still up. Mac world ended weeks ago, I dont see anything up for CES, what gives?"
Oh yeah.. CES! Cool.. innovative new announcements.. when is that happening, btw? Can't wait to see it..
Finally, something I actually know something about.
As a "big-four" partner with plenty of Sarbanes-Oxley experience I can say pretty conclusively that this is complete bullshit. There's always a chance that Apple's auditors are giving them crap about some aspect of this, but it's much more likely that the company is 1.) looking for someone to take the heat for an unpopular decision, or 2.) there is a grossly misinformed IR rep who handled the question.
Remember, this is also the company who cleared their CEO on the "options backdating" issue using some pretty shakey logic.
First of all if this ia major feature upgrade, then why didn't Microsoft charge for XP SP2? It didn't just repair but enabled new features and security tools.
Second, you Apple fanbois claim that Apple shipped and sold a G device, that is incorrect, they have shipped a device that is 100% N capable and just needs new firmware or a "key" to unlock it. It is dishonest to the consumer, and people shouldn't have to pay twice for their hardware. Don't think Apple charged G prices, but charged N prices since N hardware is probably more expensive to manafucture (given they must handle more bandwidth and its new tech). You see you can't compare Apple computers like you could compare Dell to HP, so you don't know what the true costs per feature is...
I have enjoyed reading the comments here.
First, $5 x a few thousand is like $15,000. Roughly equivalent to 10 minutes of breathing time for Steve Jobs. (That's the actual number, his $775M/year translates to $1474/minute of breath, if you want to go working hours it's under 3 minutes) So even the guy who thinks a hundred thousand people are going to pay this $5, still thinks Steve is trying to cut out on an hour and a half of work. If the 10 million people he hopes buy an iPhone all paid the $5 for this, now we're talking he could take like a 3 week vacation.
I imagine that the revenue this generates is somewhere along the lines of what the negative publicity from having charged it at all will cost. Maybe less. In my experience the only time large companies cause themselves negative press without realize any significant revenue is because some dumbass bean counter or politician has told them they have to. A lawyer looked at this and figured the downside to this was much smaller than the downside to getting attacked over the law.
Can I pay $5 to have my first gen Core Duo Macbook updated? Of course not ... early adopters get screwed again.
Two Comments...
First, Torrent anyone?
Second when is Engadget going to remove that iPhone "ad" at the top of the pages...
If you are getting paid to put it up please tell us, otherwise take it down... It was okay when the news first came out, but now it is kinda old news... Its been up long enough... We all get the idea, trust me.
IBM does this with some of their servers...they come fully stocked with RAM, but you have to pay IBM to unlock the RAM.
It wouldn't be so bad if the G implementation in the Core 2 Duo iMacs was stable but it's very flakey and I'm sure people will look on this update as a method of resolving the issues.
Seems far more likely that the cost is to cover licensing the -n radio firmware off whoever actually owns it. (Just like why I've always understood the charge for "Quicktime Pro" exists: to cover all the parties that own a piece of the video codecs, and want to be paid more for any that are used to create content.)
man i love austen powers, im still expecting another movie to come out.