The 'Apple Tax' on accessories

My latest column for Popular Mechanics went online this morning. It's about Apple's licensing fees for third-party accessories — the so-called "Apple Tax." It short, Apple is extracting extra money out of vendors in trade for official certification, even though that certification doesn't really seem to make the products like cables and iPod docks any better.

I consider it less of a "how dare they!" piece and more of a look into the way a company with a hugely popular product can maximize their profits and how that affects product quality.

However, analog cables with security chips in them — like the ones required to get video out of the latest iPhones and iPods — is just crap.

How the "Apple Tax" Boosts Prices on iPod & iPhone Accessories [PopularMechanics.com]

[#1 posted by cayton , July 10, 2008 5:36 AM]

Sounds like the equivalent of a 'sin tax'. They know they have something that people will pay for, so why not capitalize a little?

I don't really like that.

[#2 posted by Skep , July 10, 2008 6:24 AM]

In the article Joel discusses how accessories that interface with the Apple dock connector have to use authentication chips from Apple and that manufacturers not only raise the price of products to pay for the chip and Apple licensing fees but also lower the quality of the materials used to make up for the margins.

For those of us with older iPods that don't need chipped accessories it means we are paying extra for nothing when we buy new dock connector compatible accessories like cables and speaker docs. (Well, technically, new iPod owners are paying extra for nothing, since the authentication chip provides no consumer value what so ever.) Sure, we can buy older accesories if we can find them, but because Apple does such a remarkably bad job of versioning their iPod line it is hard to know which products are which.

[#3 posted by Zebra05 , July 10, 2008 7:58 AM]

Everyone has a choice, and I have exercised mine. Don't buy it. I have been wondering how supposedly well informed people get sucked into buying this drm infected stuff.

[#4 posted by Anonymous , July 10, 2008 5:44 PM]

Has anybody done a teardown of a device with an authentication chip inside and had a look at how the chip works? It would be quite interesting to see what strategy Apple followed in designing the chips, and how clonable they might be. At least if the precedents from the Lexmark case are anything to go by, it would probably be legal to manufacture interoperable chips.