Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

HP and Apple Separate; Apple gets Custody

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the can't-buy-me-love dept.

Kasracer writes "Yesterday, The Register reported that HP separated from Apple's iPod selling agreement. 'Doing its best to erase Carly Fiorina's mistakes, HP has culled an iPod reselling agreement in place with Apple since January of 2004.' It is unclear whether or not HP will create an mp3 player or partner with another computer to fill the void."

6 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. No wonder they split. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Out of the $1.2billion from iPod sales made by Apple, HP contributed $15million.

    That's not much in the scheme of things, and even less when you consider the size of most of HP's other markets.

  2. They have to wait until 2006 by IIDX · · Score: 5, Informative

    As far as I know, their contract stated that HP has to wait until 2006 before they can release their own MP3 player.

  3. Non-Competition agreement by moo083 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unlike what the article says, at least for a while (a year I think), HP cannot make its own MP3 player or sell another one, because of a Non-Competition agreement they made with Apple at the beginning of their iPod selling. I mean, it is possible that they decided this period of time without an MP3 player for sale was worth it for what they would do after, but who knows what will happen at that point.

  4. HFS+ is the default file system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    For an iPod out of the box. They are all HFS+, but if you install the PC software before connecting the iPod it will prompt you to restore it to be FAT32. If you connect the iPod before installing the software, things get all confused, the OS will prompt you to reformat it, and it'll cease to play music until you restore it.

    There used to be FAT32 iPods and HFS+ iPods from the factory, but not any more.

    iPods don't journal their HFS+. I'm honestly not quite sure what good journalling HFS+ is anyway, I've seen many friends have their drive go corrupt even with journalling on, and it does slow things down a skosh too.

  5. Why does everyone misunderstand journaling? by Some+Random+Username · · Score: 5, Informative

    Journaling is 100% purely a way to repair the filesystem quicker than doing an fsck. It does not prevent any corruption on a drive ever, and it does not identify or correct problems when they occur. The journal is just a log, and instead of an fsck you replay the operations in the log file to ensure that every operation that was supposed to happen actually finished happening.

  6. Re:Do you think... by Nugget · · Score: 4, Informative
    Only if "like some 40%" means "an insignificant amount"

    In 1997 Microsoft bought $150 million of special, non-voting Apple stock. $150 million bucks might sound like a lot of money, but remember that at the time Apple had over a billion dollars of cash on hand and a market cap in the 8 billion dollar range.

    Microsoft's holdings in Apple today don't even make the top ten institutional holders. You are completely wrong, in other words.