This week, we learned President Obama’s anti-trust chief pick said Google, and not usual suspect Microsoft, may be sent directly to jail for monopolistic behaviour. My oh my, how the tables have turned, eh?
Remember when Psystar turned their little hardware dalliance with Mac OS X into an ideological crusade against monopolies? Apple isn’t having any of it. The company has just filed to dismiss Psystar’s antitrust lawsuit, and, as if channeling John McCain from the last debate, seems pretty angry that Psystar just doesn’t understand:
EA has announced that nine new titles are currently in development for the iPhone: Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, SimCity, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09, Need for Speed Undercover, and The Sims 3. Many of these titles have been mentioned before, but I was pretty pumped to hear about SImCity and the Sims 3 being added to the list. EA has also revealed that they are shooting to release Spore Origins on September 7th—the same day it is released on the Mac and PC. Hit the jump for some new Spore screenshots and the official press release.
The EU antitrust investigation into Intel’s business practices has just got a little nastier for Intel. Three new charges are being levelled against the chip manufacturer, including charges that Intel paid a leading European retailer to sell only PCs powered by Intel, and also paid a “leading” OEM to delay the launch of an AMD-powered product line. Taken together, the charges indicate a “single overall anticompetitive strategy aimed at excluding AMD” according to the European Commission document. This may come as interesting news to AMD’s recently departed CEO. Intel has two weeks to respond. [EU Statement via Ars Technica]
In my mind, AMD and VIA comments can be summed up as, “No shit.” [NYTimes]
Psystar, who’s just announced that they’re going to sell a US$399.99 Mac clone called Open Mac, doesn’t care that Apple’s EULA prohibits using OS X on any machine not made by Apple. In fact, they say that Apple’s terms “violate U.S. monopoly laws“, posing the example of Microsoft theoretically saying you could only install Windows on Dell machines.
AMD has a new presser out declaring that between 1996 and 2006, Intel socked away over $60 billion of “monopoly profits” into its “monopoly coffers.” It also claims that if there was “full competition” in the processor market, we would save over $81 billion, which sounds awesome.
