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Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like. We mandate lots of consumer protections. This seems no different to me.

doteka 6y ago
You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.
  - doteka 6y ago
    I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them. If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      I'm well aware of jailbreaks. I've jailbroken a number of Apple devices and some consoles. In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention. re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    But you can cooperate with others to figure out to defeat those protections, or not buy into the Apple ecosystem in the first place. I agree they make it very difficult to fully personalize their products and share your dislike, but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      >but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access. Both of those are fairly valid complaints though. Intentionally making a device hard to access or repair is almost as bad as not allowing it at all. That shows an actual concerted effort to stop or make it as difficult for consumers as possible. That's basically the definition of anti-consumer practices. It in no way benefits me to not be able to use a standard screw driver to open something and have to either purchase an expensive proprietary tool or at worst take it to an 'authorized' repair shop that has the license to use the proprietary tool.
      - anigbrowl 6y ago
        OK, but that's when you make the decision not to buy it in the first place. I've managed to go my whole life without buying an Apple product because I always thought their products were kinda user-hostile and unfriendly to hacking/customization. On the other hand, I don't feel that Apple has any obligation to deliver the sort of product I want, when they have so many customers that actively prefer their walled garden/black box approach. Occasionally I find myself thinking I'd like to own an Apple product, eg when I run across a cool iPad app or something, but this rarely persists longer than the few minutes it takes me to remember that I don't want to reorient around the Apple ecosystem.
mrzimmerman 6y ago
Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me. I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software. I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Even with an iPhone, you have the right to flash whatever firmware you feel like. This has been upheld in US Supreme Court cases. Apple simply is under no obligation for it to be easy for you to do so. Jailbroken iPhones aren't illegal. Apple treats them as a security risk, since mechanisms for jailbreaking iPhones exploit security flaws in order to get root-level code execution. I can't say they're wrong to do so! It's no secret that they do. Or that Apple doesn't ship anything but iOS to an iPhone, or that you won't be able to install apps from outside the App Store. These are marketed as features. Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.
ravi-delia 6y ago
I mean if I sell you a brick, it's not gonna connect to wifi. I'm not advertising it as connecting to wifi, so if you buy it than it's really your fault for thinking it will. Similarly, Apple doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want with an I-Phone. You can (if you so choose) saw it in half, open it up and try to figure it out, and interact with it in any way you please. If those interactions don't yield results you want, you really can't blame Apple since they pretty much told you what you were getting. Now there are some real scummy practices that Apple uses, and those should be regulated. Software that detects tampering and shuts down the device? Sure, get rid of it. Some vital service they can (and do) shut down at any time, bricking the device? Regulate it to nothing. But ultimately 'do what you want with your property' is completely different from 'sell whatever I personally want in a device regardless of how others feel'. Apple sells a walled garden by design, and buying one of their devices pretty much entails realizing that.

doteka 6y ago

You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.
- doteka 6y ago
  I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them. If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    I'm well aware of jailbreaks. I've jailbroken a number of Apple devices and some consoles. In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention. re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  But you can cooperate with others to figure out to defeat those protections, or not buy into the Apple ecosystem in the first place. I agree they make it very difficult to fully personalize their products and share your dislike, but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    >but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access. Both of those are fairly valid complaints though. Intentionally making a device hard to access or repair is almost as bad as not allowing it at all. That shows an actual concerted effort to stop or make it as difficult for consumers as possible. That's basically the definition of anti-consumer practices. It in no way benefits me to not be able to use a standard screw driver to open something and have to either purchase an expensive proprietary tool or at worst take it to an 'authorized' repair shop that has the license to use the proprietary tool.
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      OK, but that's when you make the decision not to buy it in the first place. I've managed to go my whole life without buying an Apple product because I always thought their products were kinda user-hostile and unfriendly to hacking/customization. On the other hand, I don't feel that Apple has any obligation to deliver the sort of product I want, when they have so many customers that actively prefer their walled garden/black box approach. Occasionally I find myself thinking I'd like to own an Apple product, eg when I run across a cool iPad app or something, but this rarely persists longer than the few minutes it takes me to remember that I don't want to reorient around the Apple ecosystem.

mrzimmerman 6y ago

Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me. I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software. I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Even with an iPhone, you have the right to flash whatever firmware you feel like. This has been upheld in US Supreme Court cases. Apple simply is under no obligation for it to be easy for you to do so. Jailbroken iPhones aren't illegal. Apple treats them as a security risk, since mechanisms for jailbreaking iPhones exploit security flaws in order to get root-level code execution. I can't say they're wrong to do so! It's no secret that they do. Or that Apple doesn't ship anything but iOS to an iPhone, or that you won't be able to install apps from outside the App Store. These are marketed as features. Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.

ravi-delia 6y ago

I mean if I sell you a brick, it's not gonna connect to wifi. I'm not advertising it as connecting to wifi, so if you buy it than it's really your fault for thinking it will. Similarly, Apple doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want with an I-Phone. You can (if you so choose) saw it in half, open it up and try to figure it out, and interact with it in any way you please. If those interactions don't yield results you want, you really can't blame Apple since they pretty much told you what you were getting. Now there are some real scummy practices that Apple uses, and those should be regulated. Software that detects tampering and shuts down the device? Sure, get rid of it. Some vital service they can (and do) shut down at any time, bricking the device? Regulate it to nothing. But ultimately 'do what you want with your property' is completely different from 'sell whatever I personally want in a device regardless of how others feel'. Apple sells a walled garden by design, and buying one of their devices pretty much entails realizing that.