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Apple Sued Over iPhone Bricking
An anonymous reader writes "The week's debate over the iPhone 1.1.1 has finally resulted in legal action. InfoWeek reports that on Friday, California resident Timothy Smith sued Apple in a class-action case in Santa Clara County Superior court. The suit was filed by Damian Fernandez, the lawyer who's been soliciting plaintiffs all week for a case against Apple. The suit doesn't ask for a specific dollar amount, but seeks an injunction against Apple, which prevents it from selling the iPhone with any software lock. It also asks that Apple be enjoined from denying warranty service to users of unlocked iPhone, and from requiring iPhone users to get their phone service through AT&T."
a)Apple deliberately made the update brick the phone if third party applications were installed. There is no technical reason for this, other than to prevent people from unlocking their phone. It is not a matter of the customer doing something incompatible, it is a matter of Apple releasing a patch that deliberately destroys the devices of people who have done something they didn't like.
b)While I can agree that they can make their warranty subject to what you do with the phone, this doesn't absolve them from responsibility if there are unrelated defects. As an example, if touch-screen is made from an inferior material and scratches easily, saying "well you modified the software, so tough luck" is not acceptable.
Bad car analogy: If you send your car in for an oil-change and the mechanic notes you have used tieres from a competitor, then it is not acceptable for the mechanic to disable your engine to punish you. Also, if the fuel tank suffers from a design flaw causing it to catch fires in the case of a crash, then saying "you changed the tires, no warranty" is not an acceptable excuse.
Basically this lawyer is throwing up a lot of stuff to see what sticks, in my opinion some of it should.
To all the apple fanboys in this thread :).
If I buy an iPhone, and proceed to insert it in my anus (say, I dont use the phone as directed) do they have the right to deny me my warranty if, say, the battery runs out too fast?
The law as it stands today says that the vendor must either fix everything or prove that what you did caused the fault and is not something that a reasonable person would expect to be able to do with the car. If they cannot prove both of those things to the satisfaction of the court, it is assumed that the fault was with the car's design.
A vendor is not able to arbitrarily declare that certain actions are "unsupported" in order to evade responsibility. They do not get to choose which actions are and are not reasonable. Their job, as a vendor, is to predict all the reasonable actions and design a system that supports them; if they do not do this, the law says that's the vendor's failure and they have to make good on it.
They know what to test for. The unlock software is publicly available. So I blame Apple for that.
Subsidy is when the price DROPS, not when it stays the same because Apple found another way to guarantee excessive profits. In other words, subsidy has nothing to do with Apples ability to make profit, and the cost of the iPhone is BELOW sale price, not above.