Apple Working On Tech To Detect Purchasers' "Abuse" 539
Toe, The writes "Apple has submitted a patent application for technologies which would detect device-abuse by consumers. The intent presumably being to aid in determining the validity of warranty claims. 'Consumer abuse events' would be recorded by liquid and thermal sensors detecting extreme environmental exposures, a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts, and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering. The article also notes that liquid submersion detectors are already deployed in MacBook Pros, iPhones and iPods. It does seem reasonable that a corporation would wish to protect itself from fraudulent warranty claims; however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community."
I guess this could make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I guess this could make sense, I know people that really abuse the vendors by returning products that have been used in non-warranty covered conditions and I have always known that I am indirectly paying for them when I buy a new product.
> however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting
> what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond
> the tinfoil-hat community.
The line is thin, but I guess if different agencies or companies want to spy on people, they won't tell us in advance anyway.
Problems could arise in case the "abuse detection" device malfunctions and falsely report abuse by the consumer.
As stated in TFA this is already done anyway, I don't see public pressure stopping this.
I believe that ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about (Score:1, Insightful)
What about companies that abuse their customers with unrealistic and draconian EULAs?
Please patent it (Score:5, Insightful)
Please patent it, Apple. Then I can buy my cell phone from someone else and know that this technology isn't included.
Time of event (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem solved by Free Market Supply/Demand (Score:5, Insightful)
It works really well (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "submersion detectors" it work really well, right up until the local weather calls for 100% relative humidity. I've seen RIM deny multiple replacement requests due to triggered sensors.
might decrease the value of the warranty, though (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These aren't your devices (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's not what Apple thought, they are just allowing you to use it, as long as you give them money and don't use it in any way that they disapprove of." ... if you want to make a warranty claim.
Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
It must be worth it, but it seems that it's a rare bit of abuse that hurts the internals but leaves the exterior shell and windows etc on the product free of teltale signs. That would rule out:
High-G impacts - which require a hard surface to stop the motion of the unit very quickly. This would leave a tell-tale blemish on the case.
Imersion in liquids - This would leave dried residue unless it's immersed in de-ionized water or other pure substance that wouldn't leave any residue. With no residue, the unit may not be damaged when it dries out.
Jailbreaking sensor - BINGO! This is the real money maker.
The only reason to include these things is to improve product reliability (nope), customer satisfaction (nope), profit (yup). And I don't see a whole lot of profit increase in anything but preventing jailbreaking.
Sheldon
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
My iPod explodes/catches fire [timesonline.co.uk]. Apple's sensors indicate a severe temperature spike and a sharp jolt.
So here's the question, what exactly does this indicate? Cars have even more sophisticated black boxes and even then they rarely are able to piece together what actually happened using just that data. Does anyone actually think that these sensors are going to be used in any other way than blanket warranty denials?
prove it to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It works really well (Score:1, Insightful)
If a company's product cannot work in the environments you plan to use it in, don't buy the product... and don't blame the company if their warranties are voided by using the device in that environment.
Yes, but it's Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple gets forgiven for everything, but if Microsoft even hinted of this they'd get flamed.
Had Apple won the PC wars of the 80's they'd be a far greater satan than Microsoft ever tried to be.
Its harder and harder to be an Apple fanboy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good and bad points (Score:4, Insightful)
The biggest problem I see with this is that these sensors won't be 100% accurate. Very few things in this world are.
But manufacturers will almost certainly treat them as if they are.
So let's say you have a faulty moisture sensor in your laptop and the laptop fails through no fault of your own - it goes back and you get a rude email a week later saying "You let it get wet. Go away."
Obviously you can take the "sue the bastards" approach, but let's be real here, they're going to stand up in court and say "There is a moisture sensor in this unit which was triggered, therefore it got wet". How do you prove that in your case the moisture sensor was faulty without spending a small fortune?
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
and I have always known that I am indirectly paying for them when I buy a new product.
Do you honestly think that the company (any company, not just Apple) would charge you less if people did not do this? The difference is going to boost their profit margin, and since people already have no problems overpaying for a product, they will see no need to lower the price at all.
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't worry, the terms of use will be altered by Apple's megalomaniacal support team that there'll be no legal way to contest any judgement that any failure in the iPod is due to Apple's own engineering flaws. What's more, when people bitch on Slashdot about it, a bunch of pathetic Apple fanbois will come in droves to defend the whole scheme. Isn't that how it's worked with everything Apple has done so far?
Re:I believe that ... (Score:5, Insightful)
except the abusers are generally morons who dropped their cell phone in a toilet then dried it with a hairdryer and returned it saying 'it just stopped working'.
One of my former co-workers was tasked with setting up a wireless network for our academic department, but our boss didn't want to spend money on an enterprise-grade deployment. So my co-worker went out and bought consumer-grade APs, then hacked them to run at higher power using instructions he found on the net. Of course this meant components were being used out-of-spec, and a significant number of the units failed within the first year - at which point my co-worker - with our boss' full knowledge - returned them for warranty replacement.
So while I'm sure there are plenty of "morons who dropped their cell phone in a toilet", I suspect a fair number of the people that abuse equipment (and costs us consumers money in terms of higher prices) are right here on Slashdot - they're just better at not getting caught.
Re:It works really well (Score:5, Insightful)
So as much as these measures protect the company from fraud, they open the consumer up to fraud because the company now has more reasons to deny warranty repairs even if the supposed incident never happened.
Re:A patent for combining Retail products (Score:5, Insightful)
recorded by liquid and thermal sensors I can get those already. Common in the shipping industry. detecting extreme environmental exposures How is this different than a thermal sensor? Common in the shipping industry, but not everywhere depending on the environmental element they are testing for. a shock sensor detecting drops or other impacts I can slap one of those inside any old box now. Apple puts it inside a laptop and it's a patent? and a continuity sensor to detect jailbreaking or other tampering Now, this *really* has been done. Permanent adhesives on a holographic label? Anyone? anyone?
You're right. Obviously, the Slashdot Article Summary is not worthy of being patented.
However, that has very little to do with the limitations of this application, which include:
1. A system for detecting consumer abuse in an electronic device, the system comprising:one or more sensors configured to detect an occurrence of an abuse event;abuse detection circuitry configured to receive indication of the occurrence of the abuse event from the one or more sensors and to generate a record corresponding to the occurrence of the abuse event upon receiving the indication;a memory device configured to store the record; andan interface configured to facilitate communication between the electronic device and an external device.
That rules out the holographic stickers, at least.
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Even cheap cell phones have submersion detectors these days to prevent people from turning in phones that got dropped into water.
If enough people drop their phones in water to warrant sticking sensors in to void the warranty claims, I would have thought that demonstrates a consumer demand for waterproof devices rather than a demand for warranty voiding sensors...
In any case, I think all the phones I've ever had have got wet one way or another (2 of them soaked in sea water more than once). They all survived surprisingly well, coming back to life after being dismantled, soaked in deionised water and a couple of days drying out. The only device I've drowned which hasn't done so well is my "waterproof, nitrogen filled" Garmin eTrex Venture GPS, which turned out to not be so waterproof - it has mostly recovered, but the screen goes crazy every so often (percussive maintenance fixes it) so I think I need to dismantle it and soak it again. Oh, and a cheap waterproof Casio watch which survived many windsurfing sessions only to fill with water when I washed the car.
Pre-broken sensors void your warranty, then what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty, thoug (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm skeptical their products would get any cheaper no matter how much money they save. People have shown how much they're willing to pay, why charge less?
all fine and dandy but... (Score:1, Insightful)
I hope these dont work like the submersion detection on my ipod touch does..
live in mississippi, walked outside with it in my front pen pocket and broke a sweat, it went red. Of course the ipod still works, but the warranty is now void because it was somewhere with the temperature above 80 degrees.
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately, they have good reason (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't work for Apple, but the company I do work for also has manufactured laptops in the past. Not so long ago I took a call from an individual that wanted to complain that his unit was now under warranty, and a third repair would not be covered. He'd already had the motherboard and hard drive repaired under warranty. The kicker is that *all* of the problems started only after he dropped the unit off a table, which "would never cause this kind of problem!". So at the time I took the call, he had already received free repairs twice by lying about damage he caused, and then had the audacity to complain about not receiving further repairs for failures resulting from the same drop incident, and threatening never to buy products from the company again because of it. There's nothing you can do about bad word-of-mouth negative advertising from an idiot like that, but Apple's plan may at least prevent wasting money on unwarranted repairs that a parasitic individual lied about.
If you think that is bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as devices don't "phone home" (Score:3, Insightful)
however the idea of sensors inside your portable devices detecting what you do with them might raise eyebrows even beyond the tinfoil-hat community.
IMHO, as long as devices don't "phone home" and the data is kept in the device until the *owner* submits it for warranty repairs there is no foul. If we get lower prices (or a delay in a price increases) and/or longer warranties then the tradeoff seems reasonable. Of course I'm biased, I worked in tech support long ago and I am a bit familiar with the -- hmm how shall I put this -- the "opportunistic" nature of a non-trivial number of consumers. :-) To be fair I think that owners should be able to see the current sensor logs, Settings | General | About on an iPhone for example, if for no other reason than to verify the devices state at the time of purchase. While in a manufacturing facility I've seen s person spill a box of hard drives onto the floor and perform a couple of did-anyone-see-that head swivels as they picked up the drives.
Re:I believe that ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
The first thing I do when I get a phone is put sticky tape over the fucking water sensors.
They've been known to go off if you leave them on the counter while you take a shower.
Realistically, the dots are just there so when you take your phone in saying "It's broken" they can take it in the back to do some bullshit "test" that actually involves an eyedropper full of water. "Oh, water damage, no warranty, sorry. Buy a new phone!"
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty, thoug (Score:3, Insightful)
Competition.
If your product costs (including warranty fulfillment) are lower than your competitor's, you can sell at a lower price while still maintaining profitability. This means that you can underprice your competitors, thus getting a larger market share == more sales == more profit.
Keep in mind that in the long term, for an ideal free market, sale price approaches marginal production cost.
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty, thoug (Score:3, Insightful)
You're probably right, but the money saved won't go to waste. It will probably materialize as an extra $1/hour for some lucky engineers or managers, or extra health benefits. That's one of the advantages of competition over government - the constant pressure to reduce costs and thereby inprove efficiency which benefits not just that company, but also society as a whole.
My only concern is that these sensors might be abused.
For example I have some Lights of America CFLs that died after only one year of use. If these sensors were inside the base, I could easily imagine the LoA company refusing to replace the bulbs because "you had them in a hot area" even though I did not. Yes they died of excesive heat, but I used them in a prescribed manner - in my dining room. They died due to manaufacturer error not user error, but I can easily foresee the manufacturer blaming the user anyway.
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty (Score:5, Insightful)
What you are missing is that Apple is not selling steak, it's selling sizzle. When you can walk into an Apple Store and all you see are monitors, with wires running into holes in the counter where the mysterious computers are hidden, you begin to understand that the standard Apple consumer has no idea what a computer is beyond some kind of fancy interactive TV set.
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty, thoug (Score:4, Insightful)
In a simplified world without brand names (luxery goods whose selling point is exclusivity), with infinte access to infinitly patient capital (otherwise many businesses cannot be started), without any fixed costs (otherwise selling units at marginal production cost is a money loser... and this implies no recouping/paying off of startup costs, hence no startup loans either, which means see point two), intellectual property protection (without which good luck getting R and D funding), perfectly rational actors, etc.
Re:might decrease the value of the warranty (Score:3, Insightful)
Most economic theory assumes people in the marketplace are rational.
With Apple customers, that assumption, and the economic theory that depends on it, goes out the window!
Re:Its harder and harder to be an Apple fanboy... (Score:3, Insightful)
How?
When a mac fanboy's ipod dies and cant get it fixed under warranty they'll go out and buy another ipod. The fanboy wont even consider alternate devices like an iriver nor even think about considering that Apple products have a high rate of failure.
Apple does not do this. It's difficult for a mac fan to see but they are well and truly behind the bell curve with technology.
This is what Apple sells, the image. This is why fanboys will keep buying Apple no matter what abuses it requires the user to undergo.
No it wont. Apple products are made with the same off the shelf components as Dell, they are made in similar factories to Dell. Apple could already sell their products at a far lower cost, seeing as they don't suffer the windows tax they could undercut Dell. The simple fact is by buying Apple you've already proven that you're willing to overpay.
Hey, how about... (Score:3, Insightful)
... making the products more durable, rather than adding the "fuck you" sensors?
Apple Inc. is one evil bastardization of a once great company.
Re:I guess this could make sense (Score:3, Insightful)
If the device is CE certified (most cell phones are, unless it's a model they don't plan on selling in Europe), the device needs to withstand an environmental test, part of which (IIRC) two days spent in an environmental chamber where the temp is held at 40C and 95% humidity. The device doesn't need to be powered on while in the chamber, but once removed from the chamber it still needs to operate. Such conditions would surely turn the sticker red - I wonder if these companies are able to get away with this kind of stuff in the EU?
Re:It works really well (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but it's Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
yes, and you will get all the trollbait and redundant modifiers that apple fan-boys can dish out, since they don't seem to know how to properly mod a comment! :D