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What galls me about this model is not that it exists, but that companies are allowed to use the words "buy" and "own" in their marketing and contracts around th

What galls me about this model is not that it exists, but that companies are allowed to use the words "buy" and "own" in their marketing and contracts around this. The distinction between buying and renting a house, or buying and leasing a car, is well understood. But when it comes to renting a console or a license to a piece of music, we use the same words as for ownership. Maybe we need a new word to describe the "lump sum up front but not for ownership" model.

yholio 5y ago
Maybe someone can mount a legal challenge and establish case law. Document the whole buying process, copious advertising where Apple says you can purchase the device, then request the unlock code from Apple to run custom software. If they refuse to provide it for purely commercial reasons despite having full technical ability to do so, you might have a case that you were misled into purchasing a subscription service. Ideally, you would find some advertised capability that is only enabled for apps sold though the App Store, a hidden subscription fee especially considering its onerous value.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Currently in progress: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399008/apple-lawsuit-over-buy-and-rent-labels-for-digital-content-can-continue-rules-federal-judge https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399008/apple-lawsuit-ov... As much as I want the court to decide that “buy” cannot mean anything less than “indefinite and irrevocable license” I’m expecting the judge to decide the case in Apple’s favour on the basis that consumer expectations have changed over the past 15 and that no “reasonable person” would expect a $15 impulse-buy of an intangible product to _last_. After all, you may have your VHS tapes from K-Mart you bought 30 years ago, but can you actually watch them? And you are “buying” a license to DRM’d content after-all and “buy” isn’t legally defined that way (Yes, I recognise it’s a terrible argument, just playing Devils’ advocate) …or Apple will just change “Buy” to “Get” and it won’t make a difference to their bottom-line at all. I’ll bet that Apple’s profits - or even revenues - from purchases on iTMS for movies and TV shows are a rounding error compared to AppleTV+ subscriptions - and iPhone hardware sales, of course.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    My guess is that Apple will say: “You’re free to root it and do what you want, but we don’t cover that with a warranty.” In that sense, you do own an Apple product. But if you want to stay in their nice little walled garden, that ownership is more like buying a house that comes with a benevolent dictatorship HSA.
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      Apple will never publicly admit to the possibility of rooting their devices, especially not to allow bypassing DRM: they'd lose all their friends in Hollywood overnight.
      - iso1210 5y ago
        Disney is an enormous company, owning pretty much everything in the media world, dwarfing other hollywood companies. It has a Market Cap of $320b, way bigger than Sony, Time Warner, Viacom and MGM put together. Apple on the other hand is worth about 7 times as much as Disney.
        hermitdev 5y ago
        Yes, but a non-insignificant portion of their revenue comes from content from third-party media companies. They very much have an incentive to play ball with the likes of Disney & Sony, despite having the upper hand in terms of market cap.
        iso1210 5y ago
        Or they could buy Disney and a couple of others
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    > After all, you may have your VHS tapes from K-Mart you bought 30 years ago, but can you actually watch them I can't tell if this is sarcasm or just a bad example. Yes, you can still watch VHS tapes, since they're physical media that can be decoded by a VHS playback device. You might have trouble finding the hardware, but if you have the hardware, it will still run – it's not going to require a software update.
iso1210 5y ago
> The distinction between buying and renting a house, or buying and leasing a car In the UK you can buy a freehold house for £250k and that's it. Or you can rent one for £800 a month, although that confers certain rights. But between those two, you can buy a leasehold house, which has obligations to pay a ground rent. You can buy a freehold house where you are obligated to pay a management company to maintain common areas. "Buy" and "Rent" are certainly not clear cut. With a car, I can rent a car from Hertz, or I can buy one for cash, or I can lease one, or I can buy one with a loan payment secured against the car, again there's no clear line between "buy" and "rent"
- zabatuvajdka 5y ago
  I think there is because “rent” and “lease” implies your intent is to stay there short-term. “Buy” says you literally are buying the home whether it’s with your money or someone else’s via some mortgage terms. With an Apple device it certainly is muddy waters because you purchase hardware while simultaneously in some weird lease agreement for the software. I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association. You can purchase the house but if you want to put a new door on it you gotta go through the motions to ultimately get denied the color you want, etc. And if Apple was the association they’d have a neighborhood watch ensuring 8PM curfews.
  - IanCal 5y ago
    > . “Buy” says you literally are buying the home As they said, with leasehold or some things with freehold it's not quite so simple. I used to have a leasehold house, which I "bought" but also sort of rented, or at least rented-ish the land while owning-ish what was within the bricks. I have a freehold house now, but there are restrictive covenants which technically govern what I am allowed to do to my own property (these are not council/etc permissions but private ones).
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Indeed, until recently I lived in a freehold house which had a covenant saying my hedge could be no higher than 4' high, couldn't change the colour of my front door, couldn't park a van on my drive, that I had to pay a specified private company money each year to do various things, with no say over that company. The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.
HPsquared 5y ago
Houses are similar really - you need permission to make changes, and are restricted in what you're allowed to do with them. Only difference is it's not a private company with that control.
- smichel17 5y ago
  It's not just "a" private company, it's the private company which sold you the device.
- acomjean 5y ago
  However houses don’t become essentially unsupported and obsolete at the whim of some other entity. A locked down phone without software updates will soon become not practical to keep using.
  - jounker 5y ago
    I’m looking at spending 100k to bring a property up to fire code, and possibly rebuilding the floor. Until that happens, I won’t be able to move in. So, yes, buildings do become obsolete at the whim of some other entity.
    - acomjean 5y ago
      Usually (at least where I live) properties that were at code in maintain that status through "grandfathering" even if the code changes. We have an old elevator in my building. It gets inspected year to year. If replaced it has to be up to code. A new up to code elevator, won't physically fit in the space the old one is). We're also in a "historic" district which is another entity of denial. You are right that upgrades can become a nightmare of codes/regulations. At least in the US these entities are controlled by a government we in theory elect so its at least partially our fault. Also at least in the US, when the government "takes" or changes a rule that destroys value, there is always the threat of a lawsuit for the value destroyed.
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      Good point, but at least with a government, if you pay taxes there's usually at least some recourse and a potential to get things changed. With a private company, you're almost always told to go pound sand.
pulse7 5y ago
In reality they are misusing the words "buy" and "own" to make sales... If they would talk about "rents" in marketing, sales would drop... So they are "bending the truth" to make sales...
jameshart 5y ago
This is based on a nonsensical idea of what ‘ownership’ allows you to do. When you buy a phone, you definitely own all the atoms in it. You can take it apart and use the bits to make jewelry. You can take all the phones you have and assemble them into a piece of wall art. Apple has no say in what you do with the object. But your belief that physical ownership of the object should mean you can make it do anything you want is… bounded by your actual capability to do so. You can probably extract some of the parts of your phone and reuse them - maybe with care and patience you could figure out how to use the screen, or the battery, or the camera as part of another device. Again, not something Apple can stop you doing. But expecting to be able to use a device to do something you want to merely because you know the potential to do so is inside is an unrealistic expectation. A cotton t-shirt might contain enough thread to be able to be woven into a pair of shorts, but you can’t complain to the manufacturer that the way they made the t-shirt makes it hard for you to turn it into shorts. They sold it to you in a useful, valuable configuration. They’re not obligated to make it easy for you to reconfigure it to your will.
- Hackbraten 5y ago
  That t-shirt analogy feels a little stretchy to me. The configuration option used to exist. All iPhone developers were able to use it. Now Apple is revoking that permission. That’s hardly “reconfiguring to our will.”
- judge2020 5y ago
  Messing with the software, to this day, is also allowed as you own the device. The only thing stopping OP is their own technical skills/the publicly available tools that allow modification of the code in the right way (as in: jailbreaking is still legal, but Apple has the right to put barriers in the way of it for security reasons).
  - jameshart 5y ago
    Right - if you ripped the ROM chip off and replaced it with your own ROM containing your own OS and drivers for all the hardware you could make the hardware do anything it’s physically capable of accomplishing. And Apple would have no legal recourse. The fact that that is an extremely complicated thing to do is not apple’s problem.
microtherion 5y ago
Would you object to the use of the word "buy" for the purchase of a house if there is a homeowner's association around that can restrict how you paint your house, how often you mow your lawn, or whether you can hang laundry outside?
- lostcolony 5y ago
  If my Apple purchase gives me an equal level of control in Apple's policies as every other holder of an Apple device, such that it only requires a majority of votes cast to change any of those policies, then no. If my purchase of a home meant I had no participatory rights in the HoA, and they can still change the rules at any time on me, and didn't have to disclose in plain language the existing ones upfront, then yes.
cryptonector 5y ago
If that's all that bothers you, they can simply never use those words. "The NEW XphoneY is just $699!" -- doesn't say "buy".

yholio 5y ago

Maybe someone can mount a legal challenge and establish case law. Document the whole buying process, copious advertising where Apple says you can purchase the device, then request the unlock code from Apple to run custom software. If they refuse to provide it for purely commercial reasons despite having full technical ability to do so, you might have a case that you were misled into purchasing a subscription service. Ideally, you would find some advertised capability that is only enabled for apps sold though the App Store, a hidden subscription fee especially considering its onerous value.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Currently in progress: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399008/apple-lawsuit-over-buy-and-rent-labels-for-digital-content-can-continue-rules-federal-judge https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399008/apple-lawsuit-ov... As much as I want the court to decide that “buy” cannot mean anything less than “indefinite and irrevocable license” I’m expecting the judge to decide the case in Apple’s favour on the basis that consumer expectations have changed over the past 15 and that no “reasonable person” would expect a $15 impulse-buy of an intangible product to _last_. After all, you may have your VHS tapes from K-Mart you bought 30 years ago, but can you actually watch them? And you are “buying” a license to DRM’d content after-all and “buy” isn’t legally defined that way (Yes, I recognise it’s a terrible argument, just playing Devils’ advocate) …or Apple will just change “Buy” to “Get” and it won’t make a difference to their bottom-line at all. I’ll bet that Apple’s profits - or even revenues - from purchases on iTMS for movies and TV shows are a rounding error compared to AppleTV+ subscriptions - and iPhone hardware sales, of course.
- christophilus 5y ago
  My guess is that Apple will say: “You’re free to root it and do what you want, but we don’t cover that with a warranty.” In that sense, you do own an Apple product. But if you want to stay in their nice little walled garden, that ownership is more like buying a house that comes with a benevolent dictatorship HSA.
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Apple will never publicly admit to the possibility of rooting their devices, especially not to allow bypassing DRM: they'd lose all their friends in Hollywood overnight.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Disney is an enormous company, owning pretty much everything in the media world, dwarfing other hollywood companies. It has a Market Cap of $320b, way bigger than Sony, Time Warner, Viacom and MGM put together. Apple on the other hand is worth about 7 times as much as Disney.
      - hermitdev 5y ago
        Yes, but a non-insignificant portion of their revenue comes from content from third-party media companies. They very much have an incentive to play ball with the likes of Disney & Sony, despite having the upper hand in terms of market cap.
        iso1210 5y ago
        Or they could buy Disney and a couple of others
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  > After all, you may have your VHS tapes from K-Mart you bought 30 years ago, but can you actually watch them I can't tell if this is sarcasm or just a bad example. Yes, you can still watch VHS tapes, since they're physical media that can be decoded by a VHS playback device. You might have trouble finding the hardware, but if you have the hardware, it will still run – it's not going to require a software update.

iso1210 5y ago

> The distinction between buying and renting a house, or buying and leasing a car In the UK you can buy a freehold house for £250k and that's it. Or you can rent one for £800 a month, although that confers certain rights. But between those two, you can buy a leasehold house, which has obligations to pay a ground rent. You can buy a freehold house where you are obligated to pay a management company to maintain common areas. "Buy" and "Rent" are certainly not clear cut. With a car, I can rent a car from Hertz, or I can buy one for cash, or I can lease one, or I can buy one with a loan payment secured against the car, again there's no clear line between "buy" and "rent"

zabatuvajdka 5y ago
I think there is because “rent” and “lease” implies your intent is to stay there short-term. “Buy” says you literally are buying the home whether it’s with your money or someone else’s via some mortgage terms. With an Apple device it certainly is muddy waters because you purchase hardware while simultaneously in some weird lease agreement for the software. I guess it’s like buying a house in a gated community with very strict home owners association. You can purchase the house but if you want to put a new door on it you gotta go through the motions to ultimately get denied the color you want, etc. And if Apple was the association they’d have a neighborhood watch ensuring 8PM curfews.
- IanCal 5y ago
  > . “Buy” says you literally are buying the home As they said, with leasehold or some things with freehold it's not quite so simple. I used to have a leasehold house, which I "bought" but also sort of rented, or at least rented-ish the land while owning-ish what was within the bricks. I have a freehold house now, but there are restrictive covenants which technically govern what I am allowed to do to my own property (these are not council/etc permissions but private ones).
  - iso1210 5y ago
    Indeed, until recently I lived in a freehold house which had a covenant saying my hedge could be no higher than 4' high, couldn't change the colour of my front door, couldn't park a van on my drive, that I had to pay a specified private company money each year to do various things, with no say over that company. The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.

HPsquared 5y ago

Houses are similar really - you need permission to make changes, and are restricted in what you're allowed to do with them. Only difference is it's not a private company with that control.

smichel17 5y ago
It's not just "a" private company, it's the private company which sold you the device.
acomjean 5y ago
However houses don’t become essentially unsupported and obsolete at the whim of some other entity. A locked down phone without software updates will soon become not practical to keep using.
- jounker 5y ago
  I’m looking at spending 100k to bring a property up to fire code, and possibly rebuilding the floor. Until that happens, I won’t be able to move in. So, yes, buildings do become obsolete at the whim of some other entity.
  - acomjean 5y ago
    Usually (at least where I live) properties that were at code in maintain that status through "grandfathering" even if the code changes. We have an old elevator in my building. It gets inspected year to year. If replaced it has to be up to code. A new up to code elevator, won't physically fit in the space the old one is). We're also in a "historic" district which is another entity of denial. You are right that upgrades can become a nightmare of codes/regulations. At least in the US these entities are controlled by a government we in theory elect so its at least partially our fault. Also at least in the US, when the government "takes" or changes a rule that destroys value, there is always the threat of a lawsuit for the value destroyed.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Good point, but at least with a government, if you pay taxes there's usually at least some recourse and a potential to get things changed. With a private company, you're almost always told to go pound sand.

pulse7 5y ago

In reality they are misusing the words "buy" and "own" to make sales... If they would talk about "rents" in marketing, sales would drop... So they are "bending the truth" to make sales...

jameshart 5y ago

This is based on a nonsensical idea of what ‘ownership’ allows you to do. When you buy a phone, you definitely own all the atoms in it. You can take it apart and use the bits to make jewelry. You can take all the phones you have and assemble them into a piece of wall art. Apple has no say in what you do with the object. But your belief that physical ownership of the object should mean you can make it do anything you want is… bounded by your actual capability to do so. You can probably extract some of the parts of your phone and reuse them - maybe with care and patience you could figure out how to use the screen, or the battery, or the camera as part of another device. Again, not something Apple can stop you doing. But expecting to be able to use a device to do something you want to merely because you know the potential to do so is inside is an unrealistic expectation. A cotton t-shirt might contain enough thread to be able to be woven into a pair of shorts, but you can’t complain to the manufacturer that the way they made the t-shirt makes it hard for you to turn it into shorts. They sold it to you in a useful, valuable configuration. They’re not obligated to make it easy for you to reconfigure it to your will.

Hackbraten 5y ago
That t-shirt analogy feels a little stretchy to me. The configuration option used to exist. All iPhone developers were able to use it. Now Apple is revoking that permission. That’s hardly “reconfiguring to our will.”
judge2020 5y ago
Messing with the software, to this day, is also allowed as you own the device. The only thing stopping OP is their own technical skills/the publicly available tools that allow modification of the code in the right way (as in: jailbreaking is still legal, but Apple has the right to put barriers in the way of it for security reasons).
- jameshart 5y ago
  Right - if you ripped the ROM chip off and replaced it with your own ROM containing your own OS and drivers for all the hardware you could make the hardware do anything it’s physically capable of accomplishing. And Apple would have no legal recourse. The fact that that is an extremely complicated thing to do is not apple’s problem.

microtherion 5y ago

Would you object to the use of the word "buy" for the purchase of a house if there is a homeowner's association around that can restrict how you paint your house, how often you mow your lawn, or whether you can hang laundry outside?

lostcolony 5y ago
If my Apple purchase gives me an equal level of control in Apple's policies as every other holder of an Apple device, such that it only requires a majority of votes cast to change any of those policies, then no. If my purchase of a home meant I had no participatory rights in the HoA, and they can still change the rules at any time on me, and didn't have to disclose in plain language the existing ones upfront, then yes.

cryptonector 5y ago

If that's all that bothers you, they can simply never use those words. "The NEW XphoneY is just $699!" -- doesn't say "buy".