Apple charging users for hardware they already have

You may or may not recall the non-announcement of Apple's first draft 802.11 n hardware last week, the new AirPort Extreme base station. To call that product Apple's first foray into 802.11 n, however, is somewhat inaccurate. As Apple rumormongers already know, the company has been shipping 802.11 n-capable wireless cards with its products for some time now--with the 802.11 n functionality disabled via software. With the announcement of the base station, Mac fans expected that their machines would be granted the functionality via Automatic Update. As it turns out, Apple (rather uncharacteristically, might I add) is planning on charging users $4.99 for the AirPort firmware update, citing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance as the reason. As AppleInsider notes, "Because of the Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn't finished delivering the product at that point." Hmm, sounds a bit tenuous, if you ask me.

For more on the great AirPort swindle:
- see this Ars Technica article