8 ms·

That doesn't really match up with the ethos of Apple or why people buy their products though, so it doesn't make any sense for Apple to allow or endorse this.

MereInterest 6y ago
Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them. That's why it shouldn't be up to Apple to decide whether a device sold belongs to the buyer, or still belongs to Apple. If I buy it, it is mine, and I have the moral right to put whatever OS I what to on it, regardless of Apple's ethos.
- coldtea 6y ago
  "Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them." I've seen this argument again, but this is a redefinition of sell vs rent. Apple sells the device with specific capabilities. You might want it to have others, but that's not the same as renting. If you don't like it, buy something else. You do get to do "whatever you want" with the device AS provided. You can stomp on it, melt in in a fire, or whatever, and Apple wont ask you for the device back. That's a sale. "I wanted another version of the device, one that is unlocked, and Apple doesn't sell me one" doesn't mean Apple doesn't sell you what it says on the tin. They're selling iPhones, locks and all, not generic devices to have different OSes loaded.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8ytecoder 6y ago
    I think it's more akin to selling a coffeemaker that only works with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. It's a coffeemaker and it may not produce the same quality coffee with other beans but it's perfectly capable of producing coffee from any beans you feed it. That said, Apple has no incentive to work towards enabling this. Both Apple's profit and customer's expectation are in the vertical integration that Apple provides. (I'm not in anyway saying iOS is not restrictive or that they shouldn't do it. It's just that there's no pressing reason for them to work towards achieving it.)
    - spijdar 6y ago
      I'm not sure if the reference was intentional, but there are (or, were?) coffeemakers that only work with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. Keurig infamously added a protection mechanism that required "special" coffee-pods to function. This was, however, seen as outrageous, unlike the current state of smartphones, for better or for worse.
      - 8ytecoder 6y ago
        It is. At work some of us got a reusable pod to reduce waste. We were closely following it. It was also much easier to explain why that's bad to my non-engineer coworkers than explaining why iOS's complete lockdown is bad or even get them to care.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        It is outrageous in a very literal sense. The whole reason people are mad is because they know that Keurig is allowed to do it and have basically zero power to make them stop.
        spijdar 6y ago
        I agree -- I meant it in contrast with smartphones, where it's seen as totally normal to have no escape hatch to run your own software. Most "normal" people see that a coffeemaker putting "DRM" on your coffee is ridiculous, but that outrage never really extended to digital devices for some reason.
        dTal 6y ago
        >for some reason Ignorance. If people had no real idea how coffee was made either, you wouldn't see much outcry over locked-down coffee pods either. "You want to grind your own beans? What an eccentric nerd! My coffee maker works perfectly with the manufacturer pods, why would I ever switch?"
        vladvasiliu 6y ago
        I think that most common apps nowadays being "free" contributes to this. "How can there be an Apple tax if the app is free?" Whereas the coffee is something they can buy at other shops, and it's pretty easy to compare.
  - wayneftw 6y ago
    Yep and people buying Office and Windows in the 90s were absolutely fine with what Microsoft was doing back then. Most OEMs selling computers with Windows on it were also fine with agreeing to not also sell Linux PCs. Everything was going well for Microsoft until it wasn't. Apple's iPhone has a 90% market share among youths in the US and a 50% market share of active devices in the general market. Their general market share in the US isn't going to be shrinking anytime soon. As they get more and more popular, the rules will change for them.
    - johncolanduoni 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, where are you getting the 90% from? I hadn’t heard that statistic before.
      - wayneftw 6y ago
        https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+has+90%25+of+youth+market https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+has+90%25+of+youth+ma...
  - drieddust 6y ago
    Well last time I got angry down votes for saying this. But you are really renting if apple can lock you out. My non technical wife managed to lock herself out of her device and icloud with no recourse as I didn't preserve the reciept. So now we have a device but it is just an unusable brick. So are we the owner or renter?
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      I let an iPad sit on a shelf for a few years. In that time, Apple removed the account it was registered under, so I can't log in to it at all.
      - drieddust 6y ago
        Thanks a lot for the tip but my point still stands. I was never into Apple and after this my wife decided to move away too so we don't care anymore.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        That's a restriction on the account. For the device you can always erase and start from scratch.
        heavyset_go 6y ago
        I cannot unlock the device at all, and I cannot erase it and start from scratch.
        EvanAnderson 6y ago
        You can't if it's stuck in "Activation Lock" and you can't logon to the Apple ID. I have one of these situations. A perfectly good device is effectively bricked.
        coldtea 6y ago
        That means that they've lost both the iCloud (Apple ID) account AND the device password... Well, at some point, they device might as well be bricked. Otherwise device theft would be much higher (since they could use it, whereas now they can't), plus of course if lost/stolen people would have access to the data.
  - silly-silly 6y ago
    They definitely are selling generic devices.
  - NL807 6y ago
    The problem here is that if you want to modify those aforementioned locks, you will be subject to legal persecution. Companies like Apple have been lobbying to enact laws that makes device circumvention illegal. That is the problem.
- samatman 6y ago
  It's not correct to say that Apple doesn't make a profit on devices. In fact, Apple makes a robust profit on every mobile device they sell. This is in contrast to, e.g, gaming consoles, which are (at least were) sold below cost, with the profit coming from games. Apple also won't stop you from installing whatever on your gizmo, legally I mean. With mobile, they do several things which make it pointlessly difficult, and I would rather they didn't.
  - zepearl 6y ago
    In general, I kept reading in the past that Apple's sold HW (including MacBooks etc..., not just phones) has at least about 30% profit?
s_dev 6y ago
There is precedent -- e.g. Bootcamp -- Apple share price rose 10% or something when this was initially announced.
Technically 6y ago
I don't think anyone except consumers themselves can speak to why they buy their products. The prevailing dogma that users want Apple to think for them is trivially false.
mindslight 6y ago
Commoditize your complement. That's what Google is doing with Android itself - flooding the market with a gaggle of surveillance-ready web browsers. But Apple could push back at an even deeper level by supporting user-loaded OS's, taking the Free community's focus away from the Android ecosystem. The limited hardware combinations alone would be a boon to the Free community. Right now, I see Android as the Freer option, even though I've gone significantly out of my way to get there (Samsung Exynos + microG + fdroid). If I could do a similar amount of work on mainstream Apple hardware and end up with an OS that had no Google remnants, I can see my perspective changing quite readily. Perhaps we'll see such a development when there emerges a Free OS that's a viable/cult-popular daily driver.
SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
I'm not really sure how it would damage them though. Normal customers buy an iphone and it comes with the locked down ios as normal, now you just let people who know what they are doing mess around. We can see from android, letting people install custom ROMs didn't really have any effect on the average user who will never try it. The hurdle of having to factory reset your phone to unlock the bootloader keeps normal people away.

MereInterest 6y ago

Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them. That's why it shouldn't be up to Apple to decide whether a device sold belongs to the buyer, or still belongs to Apple. If I buy it, it is mine, and I have the moral right to put whatever OS I what to on it, regardless of Apple's ethos.

coldtea 6y ago
"Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them." I've seen this argument again, but this is a redefinition of sell vs rent. Apple sells the device with specific capabilities. You might want it to have others, but that's not the same as renting. If you don't like it, buy something else. You do get to do "whatever you want" with the device AS provided. You can stomp on it, melt in in a fire, or whatever, and Apple wont ask you for the device back. That's a sale. "I wanted another version of the device, one that is unlocked, and Apple doesn't sell me one" doesn't mean Apple doesn't sell you what it says on the tin. They're selling iPhones, locks and all, not generic devices to have different OSes loaded.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  I think it's more akin to selling a coffeemaker that only works with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. It's a coffeemaker and it may not produce the same quality coffee with other beans but it's perfectly capable of producing coffee from any beans you feed it. That said, Apple has no incentive to work towards enabling this. Both Apple's profit and customer's expectation are in the vertical integration that Apple provides. (I'm not in anyway saying iOS is not restrictive or that they shouldn't do it. It's just that there's no pressing reason for them to work towards achieving it.)
  - spijdar 6y ago
    I'm not sure if the reference was intentional, but there are (or, were?) coffeemakers that only work with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. Keurig infamously added a protection mechanism that required "special" coffee-pods to function. This was, however, seen as outrageous, unlike the current state of smartphones, for better or for worse.
    - 8ytecoder 6y ago
      It is. At work some of us got a reusable pod to reduce waste. We were closely following it. It was also much easier to explain why that's bad to my non-engineer coworkers than explaining why iOS's complete lockdown is bad or even get them to care.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      It is outrageous in a very literal sense. The whole reason people are mad is because they know that Keurig is allowed to do it and have basically zero power to make them stop.
      - spijdar 6y ago
        I agree -- I meant it in contrast with smartphones, where it's seen as totally normal to have no escape hatch to run your own software. Most "normal" people see that a coffeemaker putting "DRM" on your coffee is ridiculous, but that outrage never really extended to digital devices for some reason.
        dTal 6y ago
        >for some reason Ignorance. If people had no real idea how coffee was made either, you wouldn't see much outcry over locked-down coffee pods either. "You want to grind your own beans? What an eccentric nerd! My coffee maker works perfectly with the manufacturer pods, why would I ever switch?"
        vladvasiliu 6y ago
        I think that most common apps nowadays being "free" contributes to this. "How can there be an Apple tax if the app is free?" Whereas the coffee is something they can buy at other shops, and it's pretty easy to compare.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  Yep and people buying Office and Windows in the 90s were absolutely fine with what Microsoft was doing back then. Most OEMs selling computers with Windows on it were also fine with agreeing to not also sell Linux PCs. Everything was going well for Microsoft until it wasn't. Apple's iPhone has a 90% market share among youths in the US and a 50% market share of active devices in the general market. Their general market share in the US isn't going to be shrinking anytime soon. As they get more and more popular, the rules will change for them.
  - johncolanduoni 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, where are you getting the 90% from? I hadn’t heard that statistic before.
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+has+90%25+of+youth+market https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+has+90%25+of+youth+ma...
- drieddust 6y ago
  Well last time I got angry down votes for saying this. But you are really renting if apple can lock you out. My non technical wife managed to lock herself out of her device and icloud with no recourse as I didn't preserve the reciept. So now we have a device but it is just an unusable brick. So are we the owner or renter?
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    I let an iPad sit on a shelf for a few years. In that time, Apple removed the account it was registered under, so I can't log in to it at all.
    - drieddust 6y ago
      Thanks a lot for the tip but my point still stands. I was never into Apple and after this my wife decided to move away too so we don't care anymore.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      That's a restriction on the account. For the device you can always erase and start from scratch.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago
        I cannot unlock the device at all, and I cannot erase it and start from scratch.
      - EvanAnderson 6y ago
        You can't if it's stuck in "Activation Lock" and you can't logon to the Apple ID. I have one of these situations. A perfectly good device is effectively bricked.
        coldtea 6y ago
        That means that they've lost both the iCloud (Apple ID) account AND the device password... Well, at some point, they device might as well be bricked. Otherwise device theft would be much higher (since they could use it, whereas now they can't), plus of course if lost/stolen people would have access to the data.
- silly-silly 6y ago
  They definitely are selling generic devices.
- NL807 6y ago
  The problem here is that if you want to modify those aforementioned locks, you will be subject to legal persecution. Companies like Apple have been lobbying to enact laws that makes device circumvention illegal. That is the problem.
samatman 6y ago
It's not correct to say that Apple doesn't make a profit on devices. In fact, Apple makes a robust profit on every mobile device they sell. This is in contrast to, e.g, gaming consoles, which are (at least were) sold below cost, with the profit coming from games. Apple also won't stop you from installing whatever on your gizmo, legally I mean. With mobile, they do several things which make it pointlessly difficult, and I would rather they didn't.
- zepearl 6y ago
  In general, I kept reading in the past that Apple's sold HW (including MacBooks etc..., not just phones) has at least about 30% profit?

s_dev 6y ago

There is precedent -- e.g. Bootcamp -- Apple share price rose 10% or something when this was initially announced.

Technically 6y ago

I don't think anyone except consumers themselves can speak to why they buy their products. The prevailing dogma that users want Apple to think for them is trivially false.

mindslight 6y ago

Commoditize your complement. That's what Google is doing with Android itself - flooding the market with a gaggle of surveillance-ready web browsers. But Apple could push back at an even deeper level by supporting user-loaded OS's, taking the Free community's focus away from the Android ecosystem. The limited hardware combinations alone would be a boon to the Free community. Right now, I see Android as the Freer option, even though I've gone significantly out of my way to get there (Samsung Exynos + microG + fdroid). If I could do a similar amount of work on mainstream Apple hardware and end up with an OS that had no Google remnants, I can see my perspective changing quite readily. Perhaps we'll see such a development when there emerges a Free OS that's a viable/cult-popular daily driver.

SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago

I'm not really sure how it would damage them though. Normal customers buy an iphone and it comes with the locked down ios as normal, now you just let people who know what they are doing mess around. We can see from android, letting people install custom ROMs didn't really have any effect on the average user who will never try it. The hurdle of having to factory reset your phone to unlock the bootloader keeps normal people away.