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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."
Well I guess this could make sense, I know people that really abuse the vendors by returning products that have been used in non-warranty covered conditions and I have always known that I am indirectly paying for them when I buy a new product.
> however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting
> what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond
> the tinfoil-hat community.
The line is thin, but I guess if different agencies or companies want to spy on people, they won't tell us in advance anyway.
Problems could arise in case the "abuse detection" device malfunctions and falsely report abuse by the consumer.
As stated in TFA this is already done anyway, I don't see public pressure stopping this.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
... as the abused get smarter, the abusers also get smarter at an equal or quicker pace.
Please patent it, Apple. Then I can buy my cell phone from someone else and know that this technology isn't included.
Simple devices offer ways to tell if a package has been dropped or turned upside down, but how do they prove that the event didn't happen before the device was in the hands of the customer. If they tell people to check them when the receive the device, then people are more likely to try to defeat them.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
They can include whatever sensors they want. And I can buy whatever I want. There's no way I'll buy a smartphone that doesn't allow me to install software of my choice. This walled-garden crap is making me look to the HTC Hero, or whatever new Android phone is on the horizon.
recorded by liquid and thermal sensors
I can get those already. Common in the shipping industry.
detecting extreme environmental exposures
How is this different than a thermal sensor? Common in the shipping industry, but not everywhere depending on the environmental element they are testing for.
a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts
I can slap one of those inside any old box now. Apple puts it inside a laptop and it's a patent?
and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering
Now, this *really* has been done. Permanent adhesives on a holographic label? Anyone? anyone?
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Those "submersion detectors" it work really well, right up until the local weather calls for 100% relative humidity. I've seen RIM deny multiple replacement requests due to triggered sensors.
Apple would probably make money in the end through decreased support costs, but all the same I'd be a lot less inclined to get AppleCare if I felt that there was a significant risk of wear-and-tear getting interpreted by this sensor as "abuse."
"That's not what Apple thought, they are just allowing you to use it, as long as you give them money and don't use it in any way that they disapprove of." ... if you want to make a warranty claim.
It must be worth it, but it seems that it's a rare bit of abuse that hurts the internals but leaves the exterior shell and windows etc on the product free of teltale signs. That would rule out:
High-G impacts - which require a hard surface to stop the motion of the unit very quickly. This would leave a tell-tale blemish on the case.
Imersion in liquids - This would leave dried residue unless it's immersed in de-ionized water or other pure substance that wouldn't leave any residue. With no residue, the unit may not be damaged when it dries out.
Jailbreaking sensor - BINGO! This is the real money maker.
The only reason to include these things is to improve product reliability (nope), customer satisfaction (nope), profit (yup). And I don't see a whole lot of profit increase in anything but preventing jailbreaking.
Sheldon
Normally, shock sensors like this are placed on the outside of shipping crates or pallets. If I am going to shell out money for equipment that can tattle on me with hidden sensors, I will have to have them open the device and prove that none of the tattle-markers are already spoiled.
[
Apple gets forgiven for everything, but if Microsoft even hinted of this they'd get flamed.
Had Apple won the PC wars of the 80's they'd be a far greater satan than Microsoft ever tried to be.
Corporatism != Free Market
I can see the economic rationale for going this route but the "hip & cool" aspect of Apple stuff is going to be diminished by it. I want innovation and technical progress that lowers the price, increases the functionality, is ergonomic and looks cool as hell. It is for that reason I buy Apple products. This crap on the other hand doesn't help me that much if at all. It might lower the price a few pennies but it'll make it that much harder to make a warranty claim too and so there goes a big chunk of good will down the tubes. I hope the few pennies they save with this equals what stand to lose. Sheesh.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
The biggest problem I see with this is that these sensors won't be 100% accurate. Very few things in this world are.
But manufacturers will almost certainly treat them as if they are.
So let's say you have a faulty moisture sensor in your laptop and the laptop fails through no fault of your own - it goes back and you get a rude email a week later saying "You let it get wet. Go away."
Obviously you can take the "sue the bastards" approach, but let's be real here, they're going to stand up in court and say "There is a moisture sensor in this unit which was triggered, therefore it got wet". How do you prove that in your case the moisture sensor was faulty without spending a small fortune?
Is it just me, or is Apple more Evil than Microsoft these days?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Customer> I'd like to return my powerbook. It keeps overheating, I think the fan stopped working and burned itself out
Apple> Let's take a look.... I'm sorry, your warranty has been voided
Customer> Why?
Apple> Our sensors show you've subjected your powerbook to extreme temperatures outside of those covered by our warranty.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Jailbreaking sensor - BINGO! This is the real money maker.
The only reason to include these things is to improve product reliability (nope), customer satisfaction (nope), profit (yup). And I don't see a whole lot of profit increase in anything but preventing jailbreaking.
No, the summary is wrong (as usual). The tamper detection circuitry is for physical tampering - adding or remove chips, etc. Software jailbreaking won't trip it.
When my headphone jack started failing I investigated the issue on-line. I found several similar cases on line and thought this would be a breeze to get fixed on my warranty. It was a well known issue with the sensor inside the iPhone detecting whether the headphone was plugged in. So I sent in the phone for repairs but apparently the water sensor on the docking connector was slightly "not white" (translated: they believe that the water sensor is triggered) thus rendering the warranty void. The repair service log showed me that the repairman used less than 2 seconds deciding that my warranty was void, even though the phone was working perfectly - except for this error with the headphone jack. This "2 second job" gave 3 alternatives for me online: 1) scrap the phone, price: free 2) return the phone unrepaired, £70 service fee 3) repair phone (new phone £550) I chose alternative 2, it was the only real option for me. Adding more sensors/detectors is probably great for Apple. But they need to inform and disclose this in their user manuals, clearly visibly in your warranty. I didn't find out about the water sensors until after it was repaired. The problem with these sensors is if they are triggered without you doing anything wrong to the phone, and this mean that if a sensor is triggered and you get a hardware error not at all related to the sensor being triggered you will not be able to have your device fixed because the warranty is void. Another important aspect is that any sensor could also be triggered BEFORE you even open the box. WTH are you supposed to do if the phone is pre-broken. How can you check your sensors is not triggered?
I'm skeptical their products would get any cheaper no matter how much money they save. People have shown how much they're willing to pay, why charge less?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
... wait until the Face Crime app is part of the standard install. That will bake your noodle.
Pretty much unless you live in the American Southwest or the Sahara (or a similar extremely dry enviroment), there is significant risk.
Even moderate climates such as upstate New York have enough humidity in the summer to indicate a false positive on the LIS after a year or two - it happened to a friend with her Samsung phone. Never submerged, but the LIS was red anyway.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Don't buy Apple products?
I'm a bit surprised at the negativity towards Apple, lately. Every day for weeks, there seems to be a story about how Apple is screwing its customers or developers. That's fine; I really don't like them or their products. But I wonder if there is now a buzz-driven backlash against the company?
I suppose that a company that lives on trendiness, is particularly vulnerable to trends, as well. I would have thought that corporate management at apple would understand that the moment Apple begins being viewed as 'corporate' by American hopsters, their rapid ascension would come to a screeching halt. They need to loosen up a bit... or at least SEEM to loosen up. I know they won't ever open up their hardware, but they need to do something to stop the flood of stories portraying Apple as a vicious, tyrannical censorer of applications and information. The easiest way would be to STOP being a vicious, tyrannical censorer of applications and information.
however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community.
IMHO, as long as devices don't "phone home" and the data is kept in the device until the *owner* submits it for warranty repairs there is no foul. If we get lower prices (or a delay in a price increases) and/or longer warranties then the tradeoff seems reasonable. Of course I'm biased, I worked in tech support long ago and I am a bit familiar with the -- hmm how shall I put this -- the "opportunistic" nature of a non-trivial number of consumers. :-) To be fair I think that owners should be able to see the current sensor logs, Settings | General | About on an iPhone for example, if for no other reason than to verify the devices state at the time of purchase. While in a manufacturing facility I've seen s person spill a box of hard drives onto the floor and perform a couple of did-anyone-see-that head swivels as they picked up the drives.
I provide AppleCare service and normal wear-and-tear don't even catch my attention. I don't kick a repair for scuffs, scratches, dents, or dings. But I've been brought:
--A MacBook that was "dropped a little." The hard drive had impacted so hard that you can hear the parts rattling around in it (I still have it);
--An iMac (Aluminum) with display problems. I opened it, found evidence of a liquid spill, and the customer's daughter confessed that her boyfriend threw a beer at it;
--A MacBook whose "case had cracked"... someone to remove the top case without referring to a manual and ripped the bottom case from its fasteners on the frame;
--A wireless keyboard that "wouldn't work." Turned it in for testing and, as it heated, water came oozing out of the battery bay.
All these people expected these incidents to be covered under the AppleCare warranty. If I'm brought a machine that isn't working due to a defect in manufacturing or the failure of an Apple- covered part, I'll do everything that needs to be done to get it fixed and the customer doesn't pay a dime (but if you've installed third-party drives or memory to which a problem is attributable, tough luck, Chuck).
But if it's drowned, dropped, or ripped apart, Apple is under no obligation to pay for user carelessness. Period.
(but if you've installed third-party drives or memory to which a problem is attributable, tough luck, Chuck).
Do you use the Nintendo policy of "if it's there it's at fault" or do you actually check if it was at fault?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
It's also not a commodity, which makes a big difference. Direct competition is impossible due to copyright, hardware and software patents, etc.
But even with loose competition, it could make a difference to price, depending on the cost savings, unit price, unit sales, etc.
Consider this example:
A: Cost to produce $WIDGET is $900. Cost of warranty service is $100/unit. Total cost here is $1000.
B: Now reduce cost of warranty service to $25/unit, but increase production cost to $905/unit. Total cost is now $930/unit.
Now, let's make an arbitrary demand curve, with price points at ($1500, 1000) and ($1450, 1100) [axes are price and unit sales).
For A, total profit is $495,000 when selling at $1450, and $500,000 when selling at $1500. So the seller will price at $1500.
For B, total profit is $570,000 at price of $1500, but $572,000 at a price of $1450. So the seller will price at $1450.
Note that if the new unit cost is now $950, the seller is still better off selling at $1500... the change in total profit is dependent on the shape of the demand curve (the price-sales relationship), the change in cost, and the price.
I'm making up the figures, of course... but even for a company like Apple, with a very strange demand curve that may be somewhat inelastic wrt price, there are price points where Apple will make more money if they can reduce both their costs and their prices. It's not so simple as I've described, but even for Apple, who has pricing experts on their staff (or as contractors), there are places where reduced unit costs result in greater profitability at a lower price.
As for strategy, minimizing MSRP doesn't always yield maximum prices. All the marketing, branding, advertising, etc, is to change the shape of the demand curve so that Apple will sell more units in addition to the price impact on units sold. Even with all that stuff, if Apple can raise unit profits by lowering prices (without long-term negative impact), they'll do it. Lowering unit costs is one way they can increase profits at lower price points depending on the shape of the demand curve.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What you are missing is that Apple is not selling steak, it's selling sizzle. When you can walk into an Apple Store and all you see are monitors, with wires running into holes in the counter where the mysterious computers are hidden, you begin to understand that the standard Apple consumer has no idea what a computer is beyond some kind of fancy interactive TV set.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
In a simplified world without brand names (luxery goods whose selling point is exclusivity), with infinte access to infinitly patient capital (otherwise many businesses cannot be started), without any fixed costs (otherwise selling units at marginal production cost is a money loser... and this implies no recouping/paying off of startup costs, hence no startup loans either, which means see point two), intellectual property protection (without which good luck getting R and D funding), perfectly rational actors, etc.
Your ad here. Ask me how!