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."

Comments

Re:might decrease the value of the warranty, thoug

[scubamage]

I ran into an issue with this as well. I lost a 500$ smart phone because they wouldn't replace it. At the time I worked for a beer distributor, which meant constantly going in and out of coolers all day. Condensation formed inside the phone because it wasn't sealed, and set off all of the water-spill stickers. However, the phone worked fine. It wasn't until the earpiece eventually failed because of poor soldering that I had to take it in. Then they wouldn't repair it. I can only imagine that going in and out of air conditioned environments would also wreak havoc on such systems.