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You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

nytimes.com

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Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#151

Post by jbverschoor »

160Marks wrote: post #130
jbverschoor wrote: post #127

You paid 4M for your home of land, but are still subject to regulations of the country. It’s your home, but you’re not even allowed to run a nuclear reactor in your garden.

But that depends on where you buy the house. It doesn't matter what service you use an iPhone on, Apple still tells you what you can and can't do. It's not the house builder telling you what you can and can't do; these things are not the same.

> It's not the house builder telling you what you can and can't do; these things are not the same.

The house builder is the app developer The gov/municipality is Apple

The gov/municipality tells you what you can and can't do. The builder would do it, if you take all the risks and acknowledge that your new building in your garden is not allowed by the gov/municipality.

There really is no difference

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#153

Post by pierat »

swasheck wrote: post #129
pierat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, such a ridiculous HN take. A top notch restaurant does not keep or retain ownership of your stomach, bowels, or shit after eating at their restaurant. Apple "sells" hardware in a completely fraudulent way, by retaining control as a rental or lease, but advertises it as a sale. You can play whatever word games and bad analogies, and they're not even wrong.

it’s more appropriate than you’re allowing it to be. your extension of the metaphor loses sight of the topic. the duration of the controlled experience of a meal is definitely shorter than the duration of phone ownership and so if you want to attack the metaphor based on duration and utility of the experience then that would be far more congruent

No, again some garbage analogy is not even wrong.

I buy hardware and pay money for a purchase.

This purchase has remote control software that obeys the company, and not me, the owner.

I cannot remove this remote control garbage.

This makes the device a rental on the approval of Apple, and not myself, the legal owner.

If I were to do this, I would be charged with felony hacking under CFAA and similar statutes.... But Apple sycophants defend these egregious behaviors.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#154

Post by paulcole »

JadeNB wrote: post #75
paulcole wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPhone works really well and I generally trust Apple. So I’m 100% fine with someone else controlling it.

> I generally trust Apple. Why? I can't imagine any kind of real trust relationship except with individual developers or small shops who can be responsive to individual customers. I certainly trust Apple more than Microsoft, but I can't imagine any situation in which I'd say I trusted them (or any other megacorp) in an unqualified sense.

Why not? I’ve been using their products and services with essentially no issues for 20+ years.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#155

Post by chongli »

dotnet00 wrote: post #149
chongli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proper comparison is not with Android phones, it’s with iPhones before Apple introduced this feature. The news reported a global drop in iPhone thefts at the time [1]. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/1...

I disagree that the point of comparison should be iPhones from before this functionality, the point is that the negative effects of locking all parts are not worth the amount of theft, not that they don't reduce theft. After all, you could massively reduce burglaries too by allowing home security systems to have automated lethal turrets to shoot burglars, but that's considered way too far in terms of social cost by p…

The point of my reply was to illustrate the true effect on iPhone theft from this change. Do you have a more accurate way to measure that?

Whether you think the tradeoff is worth it or not is beside the point. I made no claim for or against the tradeoff, so you have nothing to disagree with there.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#156

Post by mindslight »

jwells89 wrote: post #123
sigmar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this partly by Apple's own making? Apple shreds devices to prevent people from salvaging parts for repairs[1], even phones that were usable[2]. and hasn't sold genuine components until very recently. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

Use of knockoff parts will occur no matter what Apple does because those parts are always going to be cheaper. That said, I think maybe the solution may be closer to something like allowing fake parts to function when placed in iPhones, with a couple of caveats: - A prominent top level section in Settings appears listing all non-genuine parts - When the phone has been factory reset, an alert appears at the bottom of…

The auto repair industry has been getting along just fine with aftermarket parts in the mix. As a customer you have a choice, and need to be aware that the choice exists to competently engage with the market. Being slightly informed about the high level aspects of an industry you're interacting with is just part of being an adult. If you don't want to have a frank conversation with a repair shop about which aftermarket parts are adequate and which are less than ideal, then you can always overpay for the whole job at a dealership to avoid breaking the illusion.

From what I understand, getting to this point has been a long fought battle of pushing manufacturers to open up parts availability and basic documentation (which continues to this day with Automotive Right to Repair and whatnot), Magnuson-Moss on the legal front, etc. Apple is at the early stages of its industry, and due to the power of digital restrictions technology has delusions of completely shutting out the third party ecosystem. But in a free society there's only one way for this topic to evolve, and so the authoritarian arguments about the guarantees of centralized control aren't particularly compelling.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#157

Post by NoboruWataya »

harph wrote: post #150
NoboruWataya wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone use an iPhone without an Apple account? If Apple were to lock or ban a user's Apple account, what could the user do about it? > Can someone run arbitrary software of their choice on an iPhone? These are not restrictions that are likely to be relevant to the people I am talking about. You will ask me how I know. The statement is forward looking so obviously I can't prove it, but I know people who have ha…

> using iPhones for 20+ years You probably meant Apple devices in general? The iPhone is not yet 20 years old.

Sorry, that's right. For the iPhone probably about 15 years (ie, since not long after it first came out). Edited my previous comment.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#158

Post by JumpinJack_Cash »

daft_pink wrote: post #113

The reason I think users don't mind Apple's control of their devices is that the reality is that users don't control devices, programmers do. Also, security requires constant updates and updates cost money, so it's not realistic to use a device for a decade, because you won't have security updates from any company at that point. Apple has better updates over time, which is reflected in it's higher resale values. So o…

> > I feel that Apple protects us from bad programmers for the most part

Oh poor thing. They protect themselves and software houses from torrent-esque and crack-esque like solutions which can be easily found for everything that runs on Windows, including Office, not to mention the Windows OS itself and everything Android.

That's also the reason why Apple dominates the US market whereas Android has the majority of devices elsewhere in the world.

Americans will fight between each other with hordes of lawyers at the cost of thousands of dollars for the stupidest things, but won't spend 30 seconds torrenting in order fuck Hollywood,Amazon, Netflix and Microsoft in the ass.

When you ask the reason why, their reply is : 'convenience'

When you ask why they fight for the stupidest things against fellow citizens using hordes of lawyers at the cost of thousands of dollars the reply is: 'To prove a point'

Bizzarre

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#159

Post by jwells89 »

mindslight wrote: post #156
jwells89 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use of knockoff parts will occur no matter what Apple does because those parts are always going to be cheaper. That said, I think maybe the solution may be closer to something like allowing fake parts to function when placed in iPhones, with a couple of caveats: - A prominent top level section in Settings appears listing all non-genuine parts - When the phone has been factory reset, an alert appears at the bottom of…

The auto repair industry has been getting along just fine with aftermarket parts in the mix. As a customer you have a choice, and need to be aware that the choice exists to competently engage with the market. Being slightly informed about the high level aspects of an industry you're interacting with is just part of being an adult. If you don't want to have a frank conversation with a repair shop about which aftermark…

The question is, how do we go about making sure that the general public as a whole is aware of the choice? For phones it seems like more of an uphill battle because people generally don’t think a whole lot about the quality of the parts going into their electronics repairs and the quality of the repair work itself until they’ve had some kind of disaster (phone catching on fire or something), whereas it’s more of a consideration for cars (perhaps due to the price difference or obvious mechanical nature of cars).

At the very least though, I do think that buyers of used phones deserve to know what kind of parts were used in repairs. On cars this can be verified by looking up the car’s service records and taking it to a trusted mechanic prior to purchase but it’s not so simple with phones, which is where I think it could be useful for the OS to indicate use of aftermarket parts.

Re: You Paid $1k for an iPhone, but Apple Still Controls It

#160

Post by theshrike79 »

mindslight wrote: post #156
jwells89 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use of knockoff parts will occur no matter what Apple does because those parts are always going to be cheaper. That said, I think maybe the solution may be closer to something like allowing fake parts to function when placed in iPhones, with a couple of caveats: - A prominent top level section in Settings appears listing all non-genuine parts - When the phone has been factory reset, an alert appears at the bottom of…

The auto repair industry has been getting along just fine with aftermarket parts in the mix. As a customer you have a choice, and need to be aware that the choice exists to competently engage with the market. Being slightly informed about the high level aspects of an industry you're interacting with is just part of being an adult. If you don't want to have a frank conversation with a repair shop about which aftermark…

The scale of operation you need to steal and sell cars for parts or sell stolen cars is in a different order of magnitude in difficulty than doing the same for phones.

We are at a stage where the only ones stealing Apple devices are the ones too stupid to know they’re next to impossible to resell and the ones that are really good and know exactly what they’re doing.

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