Apple squashes unauthorized MacBook battery maker
HyperMac powered off
Apple's legal team has succeeded in forcing the only company to offer external MacBook batteries and chargers — HyperMac, a division of China's Sanho Digital Electronics — to cease selling said products.
"As part of our ongoing comprehensive licensing negotiations with Apple regarding a wide array of technologies and issues," reads a "Dear Valued Customers" message on the Cupertino-quashed company's home page on Monday, "we have decided to cease the sale of the MacBook charging cables and car charger on November 2, 2010."
HyperMac's Apple-angering transgression was that their devices use Apple's patented MagSafe power connector — an offense that prompted Jobs & Co. to slap them with a patent-infringement lawsuit late last month.
There's a wee bit of irony here, in that Apple is currently involved in legal wrangling over a lawsuit filed against it in May of last year by a trio of plaintiffs who claimed that their MagSafe connecters may have been mag, but certainly weren't safe. Their suit alleges "flawed and dangerous Adapters which prematurely fail and present fire hazards."
In any case, HyperMac won't find its own MagSafe-equipped adapters causing any such problems in the future: "On November 2, 2010 00:00 U.S. Pacific Time," HyperMac notes on their website, "they will gone for good." ®
COMMENTS
Once again...
A company with $20bn profits wins out and Joe Public loses out.
One more example of how Apple has, in reality, a rotten core.
New Car
I've just bought a new car. It's a nice car. Shiny. Comfortable. Sleek, some would say sexy. Lots of people look at it and want one.
Trouble is the petrol filler is fitted with a special device that stops you using normal petrol pumps. I have to go to a main dealer to buy my petrol, as they are the only place with the required nozzle to fill the tank. And there's only 10 dealers in the UK. Can't even use http://www.petroldirect.com/
Want one of these cars now ?
Yeah, you're a fanbois, you probably do.
Jobs couldn't copy Chinese tablets or even copy Japanese rice cooker connectors, either
Funny how millions of these connectors have been successfully manufactured for use on water boiling units, rice cookers, etc. - all with minimal problems.
Yet Apple has had nothing but problems including frayed cords, burned contacts, shorted contacts, etc. Once again Jobs tried to make something unique with a single source supplier, aka monopoly, but failed.
Surely...
you mean FEWER options? - Or is it that you have the same number of options, but each one is smaller, somehow?
Difference beteween patent and copyright?
In the UK there was a lawsuit which established the right to manufacture replacement exhaust pipes which appeared to be exact copies of the manufacturer's original. The ruling was that if the shape of the car body dictated the shape of the exhaust pipe leaving no free choices, then the "copy" did not breach copyright. Minor differences such as the position of welded joints and the internal structure of the baffles proved that it was not a copy, just a re-implemetation.
However, exhaust pipe connectors are not patented. Maybe it's different for a patented electrical connector - the owner of the patent has a monopoly on its manufacture, and is not obliged to sell the connector to anyone else at a reasonable price or even at any price? That obligation or lack thereof would be addressed under monopoly regulation.
Personally I'd have thought a magnetic electrical connector trivial, and therefore unpatentable. But you'd have to pay so much to lawyers to bust the patent, it wouldn't be worth trying. There's a market opportunity here for a small start-up limited company. Just sell the things and pay yourself and your workers a salary. (Preferably, by mail order from, say, China). If Apple sue and you go bust, you've lost nothing much. Let them play whack-a-mole!
