Comment by bsullivan01

13 years ago

I always felt they could take what ever the damages award ended up to be

Like the other poster said, prices are almost certainly fixed--or else they'd face extortion as iPhone got more popular--but does anyone even dare calculate how much damages (including punitive) you have to pay Apple that's shipping some 100 million iPhones a year? Samsung and every corporation on earth would be bankrupt, not to mention that their stock would crash the minute word got out, almost certainly face DOJ, EU anti-trust and other issues etc etc.

Samsung singed the contract and they have to abide by it or else...

Not to start a war or anything, but Samsung decided to compete with their customer, not the other way around. Do we already need a reminder of pre-iPhone phones?

At NetApp, when I had visibility into the hardware building side of things we negotiated with Intel (our CPU supplier) on prices pretty much every year, and every time we added a new SKU to the mix. And when it became clear we were going to build systems with AMD parts those negotiations got a lot testier. And I don't doubt for a femptosecond that NetApp ended up having to pay more for their mid-range chips while they were shipping AMD chips in their high end filer.

I have no idea what goes on in the Samsung Microelectronics board room when Apple comes to call, but I would be astonished if the patent suits haven't changed Samsung's willingness to negotiate on price, and the base price they negotiate.

  • I thought Intel's prices went down whenever you mentioned AMD (or now IBM). Do the prices go back up if you actually buy from AMD?

    • They go down when you are trying to decide, if you decide against Intel[1], and still have to buy Intel stuff, the price on that other stuff goes up.

      [1] They were really pushing Itanium as their 64 bit solution to keep it out of the x86 line. But that was never going to work for NetApp.