Why Apple is evil: Liquid sensors that throw false positives

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This is hardly news, nor is it specific to Apple, but here we go.

The iPhone uses liquid sensors that, whenever they’re exposed to liquid, notify a service technician that the device has been exposed to liquid. This is generally a good idea, that reduces warranty fraud.

However, independent studies appear to have shown that these sensors sometimes produce false positives, while in the normal operating conditions for the phone. Obviously, this could cause major issues for owners of devices that have failed, after a false positive.

A class action lawsuit against Apple has been filed.

Source: CNET

Why Apple is evil: Firing engineers for showing your co-founder (who you still pay) a prototype

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I’ll keep this one short, there’s not much to say.

Apple engineer gets iPad 3G. Apple engineer waits until wifi launch date to show Woz, and shows Woz. Apple engineer gets fired for that.

Great job, you just fired someone for showing a prototype to a person who is so critical to your company, it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for his hardware designs. I think you can let THAT particular NDA violation slide. Or just not make it a violation in the first place.

Source: Gizmodo

Why Apple is evil: They utterly fail to understand the Streisand effect

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I’ve avoided covering anything involving the lost iPhone 4G story, because so far, Apple’s actions in this case hadn’t been evil. The phone was their property, and it should be returned to them. Fair enough.

You can even argue for charges to be filed against those that participated in the checkbook journalism, as they knowingly purchased property that wasn’t theirs. However, allegedly, the seller contacted Apple, and they said it wasn’t theirs, that it was a Chinese knockoff.

But, now, it’s gone from perfectly sane to ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY ABSURD.

Apple has gotten the San Mateo police department to raid Jason Chen’s home, apparently against both California law, and federal law, due to their protection of journalists and their sources.

Presumably, Apple’s trying to get the cat back into the bag.

WAY TOO FUCKING LATE, APPLE.

Source: Gizmodo

Why Apple is evil: Why compete with your competition when you can just sue?

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Some more old news, but Apple’s going for the patent suit method of killing its competitors, now.

And, rather than go against Google, they’re going against an OEM of Android hardware, HTC. This is likely an attempt to scare OEMs away from using Android – “use it, and you’ll get sued by Apple.”

Apple: Compete with Android on merit, not on suing manufacturers of Android hardware.

Source: BusinessWeek

Why Apple is evil: Lifetime bans from buying iPads, for buying too many

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Honestly, this is just ridiculous – turning away paying customers because they’ve bought too much of your product.

I’m not joking. “Protocol Snow” was buying iPads and reselling them outside of the US, and apparently reached a lifetime limit on iPads. So, he has a lifetime ban from ever buying another iPad.

There’ll be another post later today, to make up for yesterday’s lack of a post.

Source: The Register

MIPS preparing to take ARM on in the smartphone market

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Looks like things are about to get interesting. ARM has owned the phone market for quite a few years now, with very little competition.

Sandeep Vij, CEO of MIPS Technologies, has said that penetration of the cellular market is his top priority, and there are two customers of MIPS that are working on chips for the cellular market.

In addition, MIPS has released a port of Android to their CPUs. Android is a good choice, as almost all Android apps are compiled to run on the Dalvik VM… recompile Dalvik for MIPS, and all of those apps will run, unmodified, with no emulation penalty (well, no additional penalty over the VM penalty.)

So, now we’ve got MIPS and Intel both aiming at smartphones, Renesas has a SuperH chip that has the processing power for a mid-range smartphone (although it has on-board RAM, and not much of it,) and the rumor mill is saying that Apple wants to buy ARM (although, admittedly, that one’s not likely.) Interesting times indeed, and this time around, we won’t have the pain of having to know what CPU’s in your phone to run an app, unless it’s Windows Phone (and Microsoft will likely require ARM for the foreseeable future, there,) iPhone OS (and Apple will stick with ARM, I suspect,) or Symbian.

Why Apple is evil: App search tools banned due to screen scraping

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I’ll admit that this one’s grey area, but Apple posts data (about apps on the iPhone) on the public Internet. A user may wish to use that data in a more efficient manner, so they install an app to do it for them.

Oh, wait, they can’t, because that app is banned, because it uses that data that Apple has posted on the public Internet.

As the App Rejections blog points out, this is kinda screwy. Apple can’t stop screen scraping on the public Internet (robots.txt is voluntary, too,) but they own the iPhone platform, and can control anything that goes on on it.

Screen scraping is a valuable tool for getting at data when a site gives it to you in a form that’s not really usable to filter on that data. Sure, it’s sometimes abused, but in this case, it can only benefit users, and can’t harm Apple.

Source: App Rejections

Why Apple is evil: They think they’re the moral police

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I’ve already mentioned Apple’s insane censorship before, but I’ll mention it again.

It seems to me that Steve Jobs wants to be the moral police of the app store, not allowing anything remotely titillating (unless it’s from major, reputable sources that make Apple a lot of money, of course) on the iPhone.

To his credit, he did suggest going to Android to view porn on a phone, but still.

The thing is, there’s parental controls on the iPhone. So, use them to lock the porn away from those who you don’t want to see it – don’t block porn altogether.

Source: Wired

Why Apple may be evil: Rumors say they’re planning on buying ARM

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First thing is, I’d like to stress that this is all extremely speculative, hence the title change for today.

However, the rumor mill is claiming that Apple is going to buy ARM.

This would, obviously, give Apple control of the ARM architecture – and it means that Apple could use that control to shut its competitors out of the smartphone market, or turn to Intel’s latest attempts at smartphone chips.

Some may compare this to Google’s purchase of Agnilux today. However, that’s a very different thing, with Agnilux being a company consisting of engineers with ARM experience, and having no control over the ARM architecture and who can use it. Not only that, but Google may not even be intending this for phones –

If Apple were to buy ARM, the smartphone market could be set back by a couple years, as it may have to switch CPU architectures. The most popular smartphone platforms in the US, outside of the iPhone and Windows Mobile, are mostly architecture independent (BlackBerry using Java, Android using Dalvik,) but there’s not much in the way of good non-ARM smartphone hardware. Intel’s certainly trying, but their attempts look to be slow and power-hungry.

Keep in mind, this may very well be BS. If it’s true, then things are about to get really bad. It may well be false, however.

Source: The Register

Why Apple is evil: Their business model is contagious

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This isn’t news either, but I’m posting it anyway.

Many have made the argument that it’s OK if Apple makes a walled garden, because there’s always other choices.

The problem is when Apple’s walled garden is wildly successful, competing platforms may switch to a walled garden model. And, Microsoft, which is quite often accused of copying Apple at every opportunity, well, they’re copying Apple on this one.

Windows Phone 7 will be a walled garden, too. Sure, there’s some Windows Mobile 6.5 devices out there, and they’ll continue past Windows Phone 7’s release, but let’s face it – 6.5 is crap.

And, AT&T’s first Android device, the Motorola Backflip, requires some hacking to get apps from outside of the Android Market installed. Granted, they didn’t do a good job of securing it, but they did try.

Arguably, this is more of a “why Microsoft and AT&T evil,” but this points out why Apple’s walled garden is dangerous for everyone, even if you’re not an Apple customer.

Source: Engadget