Slashdot Mirror
Apple Censors Consumer Report iPhone4 Discussions
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has done it again. All threads about Consumer Report's iPhone4 non-recommendation are removed or deleted.
If it happened once, maybe you'd say it was a glitch. But what if it happened twice? Three times? Four times, five, six?"
It's hard to know if this is censorship or if they just violated the terms of service and hatebois are flying off the handle. There are still lots of posts about the consumer reports unrecommendation on discussions.apple.com:
http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?search=Go&q=consumer+reports
Still, if it's true it wouldn't be the first time Apple flew off the handle with the censorship (remember the Ulysses app flap?).
Try it some time. I picketed a computer store that took a $300 deposit on a $3,000 computer, with a promised delivery date, missed the date, then admitted they couldn't deliver it and wanted to make substitutions, and wouldn't refund the money. I handed out flyers to every customer who walked in the door. They called the cops. I told the cops I was exercising my constitutional right to free speech and wasn't impeding people from entering or exiting. They called their supervisor - who turned out to have had a similar bad experience with that store. Got the refund within the hour.
Moral of the story - don't treat your customers like filth and they won't have cause to display YOUR filth in front of your store.
Naturally, as soon as I read the Slashdot summary, I read the original at TUAW. The TUAW posting was as represented by the Slashdot summary: Apple is said to have killed all mention of the CR article in its forums. Being an Apple support forum member, I logged in. Yes, the particular posts were indeed labelled "you do not have permission...". EVIL, I thought. But then I poked around -- there are massive threads discussing the antenna in the Apple Support Forum, many dumping vile on the antenna engineering. So what was so offensive to Apple in the handful of posts that they did censor? TUAW helpfully pointed out that Bing had cached the offensive posts. Well, let's have a look there. The deleted posts were less about the antenna issue, and more about the quality and accuracy of CR testing. Expressed in highly emotional fan-boy terms. It would seem that Apple has not touched the real ongoing discussions of the antenna issue, but just taken down the threads that strayed into CR bashing. BTW, as a CR subscriber, I read the original article there, too. Yes, after giving good marks to most iPhone 4 features, it considers the antenna issue to be a fatal flaw. But it does not discuss the claims that the signal must be marginal in the first place, for the hand grip to make a difference. Nor discusses the possible smokescreen of bar generation algorithms.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
In the Wiki article you cited:
I RTFBingCache of the removed posts, and there was nothing useful there. Yes, it pointed to the consumer reports article, but after that there was nothing but trolling.