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Apple Working On Tech To Detect Purchasers' "Abuse"
Toe, The writes "Apple has submitted a patent application for technologies which would detect device-abuse by consumers. The intent presumably being to aid in determining the validity of warranty claims. 'Consumer abuse events' would be recorded by liquid and thermal sensors detecting extreme environmental exposures, a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts, and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering. The article also notes that liquid submersion detectors are already deployed in MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPods. It does seem reasonable that a corporation would wish to protect itself from fraudulent warranty claims; however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community."
Corporate bodies do whatever they can get away with to make money, they're not bound by some kind of moral calling. It's hardly their fault that there are fairly few efforts being made to regulate them.
Well if morons would stop trying to rip companies off with fraudulent warranty claims maybe these measures wouldn't be necessary.
Bollocks. Apple has a near monopoly on the iPod market, and has not abused it to enter other markets. You haven't seen Apple force iTunes to only run on Macs, have you? And yet, that's exactly what Microsoft does with every single one of their products: force Windows lock-in.
You can hypothesize that they would be more evil than Microsoft, but face facts, I'd rather have a monopoly that "just works" and doesn't abuse other markets than a monopoly that has shitty products and abuses their monopoly to gain other monopolies.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
You're probably right, but the money saved won't go to waste. It will probably materialize as an extra $1/hour for some lucky engineers or managers, or extra health benefits. That's one of the advantages of competition over government - the constant pressure to reduce costs and thereby inprove efficiency which benefits not just that company, but also society as a whole.
Dream on, little one.
Most economic theory assumes people in the marketplace are rational.
With Apple customers, that assumption, and the economic theory that depends on it, goes out the window!
Really? This got modded up as "Insightful"? Maybe some people just looked at their earnings, looked at their market and realized that paying a couple hundred bucks premium every 2-4 years was worth not dealing with the virus/trojan/spyware breeding ground that is Windows, or the usability clusterfuck that is any other desktop Unix-alike? My time has value, time spent fixing my computer, installing anti-virus software or googling for some obscure condition just so some hardware will work or fonts are smooth is time wasted.
You might enjoy it, that's fine.
I also fail to recognize how buying a premium product is "irrational". All of us buy premium products in some area, most of us buy them at all time. Food, furniture, toiletries, etc - not much of what I buy is bottom of the barrel cheapest. Why should my computer be any different? Why should I go for an ugly box with dozens of cables coming out of it, I didn't buy an ugly couch or an ugly shirt, just because it was a couple bucks cheaper.
As much as I am loath to use this term, I'll do it: grow the fuck up, already.