Comment by TomVDB
7 years ago
$0.25 is very, very high.
I don't know who was supposed to pay the $0.25, but gizmos like external hard drives is a commodity market with razor thin gross margins.
Whoever decided that $0.25 was reasonable for that kind of market (Apple?) essentially killed the protocol right there.
Edit: here's the story: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/the-rise-and-fall-of...
Steve Jobs changed royalty model from a flat licensing fee to a $1 fee per port (insane!), Intel walked away and cancelled all FireWire development, Jobs lowered it then to $0.25 but Intel didn't come back.
I remember PC and laptops equipped with a single fireware port well into the late 2000s even though peripherals are pretty much extinct by that time. Even Apple themselves appeared to have given up by removing them from newer ipods.