http://www.techradar.com/news/audio/app ... ch-1259081

Timely.

So Bose develop noise-cancelling tech. Beats uses it and Bose does nothing. Apple starts using it and now Bose wanna sue?

Well, since there are plenty of other companies that sell noise cancelling tech (pretty much any company that makes headphones in fact) what I suspect is actually happening is that Beats had a patent licence agreement with BOSE and Apple are arguing the terms of that agreement remain (whatever they may be) while BOSE want to renegotiate, probably on the basis that Apple have more money than Beats had so they can afford to pay more per unit licensing fee.

It could lead to an interesting bit of brinksmanship. The bare fact is if BOSE push though and stop Beats selling certain models of headphones Apple can just say 'fine'. The loss to Apple/Beats by not selling certain headphones is literally a rounding error on Apple's bottom line (in fact, writing off Beats as a company entirely is something Apple could actually do without blinking) whereas BOSE are a much smaller scale operation and therefore any licensing fees they were getting from Beats might actually represent worthwhile money for them.

In the realm of patent litigation, licensing etc it can take years of negotiation before a court case for one party becomes inevitable. This could have been on the table for years before Apple decided to buy beats but it has come public now.

So, I’m guessing that Apple knew about this before they bought. We may recall that there was a price drop before they bought it - and this was attributed to someone blowing off about the deal. I wonder if this is more likely to be the reason.

Possible. Something like this would certainly have been expected to be mentioned as part of the due diligence before the deal was done but might have been under NDA.

So maybe the theatrics surrounding the price drop was planned? Better than admitting buying a liability.