$890m in fine...
...and who gets the money? Betcha it's not the consumers who ended up paying the extra costs.
Yet another seller of LCD panels has copped to international price-fixing that bilked Apple, Dell, and HP, among others. Taiwan-based HannStar Display Corporation has agreed to pay a $30m criminal fine for its role in a global conspiracy to fix prices of monitors that use TFT-LCD, or thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display …
A. How many panels were sold.
B. How much extra money did the perps make.
C. How much extra profit did Apple, HP, etc make, on magin.
D. How much did it cost us, the customers.
LCD Make sells to PC builder, sells to Hardware Vendor, sells to wholesaler, sells to retailer, sells to us.
Go on Reg. we have a right to know.
Don't most (if not *all*) LCD mfg's have to be involved.
Pull a list and start sending the letters out. I'll guess one copped to the charge first for a lighter sentence.
The trouble with high tech is the investments are so large (How many billions for a new wafer fab now?) and the number of suppliers so small that they would try *anything* to keep margins up and competition down. Only *big* fines for this sort of thing are going to make companies think twice.
This push for all laptops to be 720i/p resolutions is a big PITA for thos of us who value vertical screen real estate. My aged & slighlty iffy Dell 8600 (6+ yrs old) has a 1920x1200 screen as does my MacBook Pro. With the advances in technology these days, you would have thought that screens this size would be commonplace these days. Sadly they are not.
The push downward in specs of laptops is all too noticeable. Intel have not helped with their crazy CPU naming system these days.
Do I really have to do to the Intel website just to see how this i3/xxx compares to an i5/yyyy? Pah. I thought the web was going to make things easier for us. Now many manutacturers go out of their way to hide the true specs from us.
don't even get me started on mobile phones. I bought one unlocked phone as the advert said 'will work on any network'. Like hell it will. And now I'm having to go to court to get my money back.
When will the authorities cop on to the real LCD scam - that the manufacturers could remove one bezel and allow people to stick two cheap LCDs together to make one big one ? They won't produce them like that because that would decimate their profits, on the big screens.
Novatech do a 28" widescreen with 1920x1280 resolution for quite cheap at http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/Monitors/26inchplusMonitors/Novatech/HZ281HPB.html
Also, ebuyer have the Samsung 2343NW 2048x1152 for £165.33 at http://www.ebuyer.com/product/174411?utm_source=google&utm_medium=products so for desktops you probably no longer need to remove the bezel