Soon, if you go out to buy an iPhone or an iPod, you might want to take a lawyer along with you to go over the legal paperwork. Apple has just patented a technology that not only strips you of any warranty claims you would probably need, but lets the company disable the device if you tamper with it.
The technology claims to detect, time-stamp, and remember “whether consumer abuse has occurred in an electronic device”.
It is primarily designed to let Apple know when an iPhone or an iPod has been “abused” by the consumer. The reasoning is that consumers try to claim warranty after damaging their device, which sounds about right to us; if we owned a company and a product, we would want to cover our bases too!
And there’s a benefit to the consumer too. If the device is faulty to being with, it will not have detected any such consumer abuse. So when you take it back to the store, there won’t be any accusatory questions of “Did you do something you shouldn’t have?” It’s all black and white.
But here’s where things get tricky. As the company puts it: “Consumer abuse may include exposing an electronic device to liquids, extreme temperatures, or excessive shock (e.g., the resulting impact from dropping the device). Consumer abuse may also result from tampering which may include any interaction with the device that is not related to operating the device in a normal manner (e.g., opening the casing or housing of a device and adding, removing, or altering the internal components).”
Halt! Back up a bit! Opening the casing? Name one techie who can resist opening up a device as soon as he gets his hands on it. Why should opening the device’s case void our warranty? Fiddling around with the insides, agreed, but this is just an extreme step. Still, that isn’t the scary part.
Apple notes in the patent that any such “tampering” could send an alert that could then disable the device. Wow. We understand the need to protect oneself from warranty claims by a consumer who “abuses” his device, but to not let him do what he wants to with a phone that he legitimately bought is just unbelievable.
To draw a slightly crazy analogy, this is like Parle-G biscuits coming with a disclaimer that says: “You have to dunk it in tea twice and eat it. If you dunk it in a way that it was not intended to by a normal user, we will find out and the little girl on the wrapping will jump up, snatch the biscuit from your hand and forbid you from eating any more!”
More and more, it seems that Apple’s links with George Orwell’s 1984 aren’t restricted to the famous
Macintosh commercial alone.