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> Does anyone have a cite that Apple knowingly created the issue they were dealing with here? No, because if someone did the case likely would have gone to tri
by ajross 3y ago
> Does anyone have a cite that Apple knowingly created the issue they were dealing with here?
No, because if someone did the case likely would have gone to trial and Apple would have lost more than they settled for. The general assumption in situations like this is that they settled because they knew evidence would show up in discovery that would lose the case.
I mean, I agree in principle: this is just an engineering decision to deal with pretty routine hardware failures. As a matter of software, this is an eminently reasonable workaround. But as a matter of business ethics, you gotta tell people what you're doing with their devices.
Basically, if this was an open source project that did exactly the same thing nothing would have happened. Apple got burned because they tried to hide it.
- smoldesu 3y ago> Basically, if this was an open source project that did exactly the same thing nothing would have happened. Because users would have been able to control their software's behavior in the first place? Or because Open Source projects don't hide their behavior, and would have informed their users of the change?
- fjni 3y ago> But as a matter of business ethics, you gotta tell people what you're doing with their devices. I'm curious about this from a legal perspective. Apple has and (probably is still) extending unpublished entitlements to developers that allow for behavior that is not publicly documented.
- ajross 3y ago> Apple has and (probably is still) extending unpublished entitlements to developers that allow for behavior that is not publicly documented. Sure, but that's fine. You bought a product that the manufacturer claims does "X", but someone else with the same device has access to feature "Y" because they paid more or whatever. Totally legal market segmentation, no different for a phone than a dishwasher or car or whatever. Apple got in trouble here because they secretly modified phones (that it turned out couldn't do "X" without crashing) to do "Z" instead, which was slightly inferior, and didn't tell the owners (presumably to avoid having to compensate them). Can't do that with a dishwasher or car either.