IIRC it was $1 per 'Firewire' port in licensing costs alone, which might make a big difference on a less expensive device with smaller margins, especially when there are other options that are cheaper or free. I think they settled on $0.25 per port or something, but not before the 1394b standard got rolling to provide the same functionality in a different and unrestricted way. Anyone with more hard info? The above is just unreliable rememberance.

Troy

"These strokes aren't so bad. I clearly remember things now that I know I never did."
   - Roy Johnson

>>> dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu 04/27/01 11:34AM >>>
It has somehting to do with licensing.  Apple makes people pay them a
dollar ($1) to license USB.  Apple's intent was to make it _really_ cheap,
which they did, but I think many people took it as an insult.  They wonder
why Apple would charge a dollar when they could just give it away for free,
since that $1/license adds .000000000000000000000000000000001% to there
revenue...

Gabe

> Just a random thought: Why has USB (12 Mbps) been so successful while
> FireWire (400+ Mbps) has been very slowly adopted?  Heck, I never even
> heard of USB until I saw it on a motherboard, while FireWire had been
> discussed in the trade press for years beforehand.  Was there something to
> do with licensing?  Standards?  Just the fact that Apple was a principal
> character in FireWire?
> 

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gabe Turner				       |  	   X-President,
UNIX Systems Administrator,		       | Assoc. for Computing Machinery
U of M Supercomputing Institute for	       |    University of Minnesohta
Digital Simulation and Advanced Computation    |       dopp at acm.cs.umn.edu 

"Get out of my trash!  I'm telling you for the last time!  A man works
 hard for his filth, just to have vagrants steal it.
 It's a cryin' shame."
			- George Liquor in "The Boy Who Cried Rat!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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