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.
Apple actively design their products to not allow you to reconfigure them even if you have the tooling. The shirt manufacturers do not prevent me from taking a old shirt and making oil rags from the fabric.
That doesn’t seem quite so evil, does it?
Yes, a device manufacturer putting locks on my device that I can only open by "apply[ing] through a form on their website" does seem pretty evil to me.
"I sold him the car, officer! I just refuse to give him the keys to actually start it."
I understand the risks of allowing local network access, I'd like to unlock the lock.
Why does apple still have control to say no?
> Note: You can test your app using the iOS and iPadOS simulators without an active entitlement, but using multicast and broadcast networking on physical hardware requires the entitlement.
You’re free to access that functionality of your device, using software that uses it responsibly.
So using it solely in ways Apple approves of - Since they're the arbiter of "responsible" here.
So how do I own this device again?
Who the fuck is Apple to tell me what responsible use looks like on a device that I own, on a network that I own, in my own damn home.
Similarly, I own a car. Can I take off the seat belts? Physically, yes. But legally, a vehicle without a seat belts is no longer a car and I lose the right to enjoy driving it on public roads.
Ownership was never about physical possession. It's about gaining some rights.
Back to phones, the challenge is to demarcate what rights does an owner get when they buy a phone. To side with Epic Games, the discussion is even more complicated by Apple's (purposeful) confusion of owning a phone with having access to an ecosystem of apps for that phone. I can do whatever I am capable of with my iPhone, but I may lose access to the ecosystem of apps.
You not being allowed to drive a car without seat belts has nothing to do with the car, and everything to do with the road.
You own the car. You share the road.
You can drive that car anywhere you want with permission from the owners, you just can't share the road we all paid for together unless you put on a god-damned seat belt so that John the EMT doesn't have to see the 4th smeared human body on the shared road this week when you crash it.
(You might own some networks. But you also might own some roads. We'd stretch the analogy to your home WiFi being akin to your driveway, I guess.)
The fact that that is an extremely complicated thing to do is not apple’s problem.
My issue is that Apple (and many other manufacturers, this isn't really Apple specific) add complexity solely to act as digital locks on what is otherwise a fairly obvious and achievable task.
Take your ROM example - Why should I even need to rip it off and replace it? I know damn well how to flash ROM. I have the software tools available. I have the image file with all the drivers I need/want. The only thing stopping me is digital locks in the device.
Are the locks themselves evil? No, clearly not - I lock my house when I leave, and I'll probably leave my phone locked most times too.
Are the locks evil if I don't own a key? Pretty clearly yes.
Can I rip the whole device apart, interface directly with the ROM, and flash it? Probably - assuming I buy some much more expensive hardware. But that sorta defeats the point of having the device, yes?
Just like it's not reasonable to sell me a car without a key.
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- Congratulations - you own this brand new car you just bought!
- Great! Thank you so much, can I have the keys to drive it now?
- No, no... of course not. When you want to drive it, you phone us up, and we come unlock and start it for you
- Wait... what? That's bullshit - I just bought this car!
- Well, you're welcome to break a window and hotwire it to drive it. But do be aware we'll report this as theft to the police, and depending on what you tinker with we might also throw the DMCA at you
- I just want to be able to drive MY car as fast as I like!
- okay, but the trouble is the way this car works, if we give you the ability to disable the speed limiter, there's literally no way we can do that that doesn't also open up the possibility that when you turn on the radio, the radio station might broadcast an ad that causes an uncontrolled acceleration.
- that's a stupid way to design a car
- well yes, but this is an analogy car, not a real car. The real system in question is a turing-complete networked device designed to run arbitrary third-party software, so... the analogy is going to be slightly flawed.
And no, Apple isn't going to report a theft if you physically damage your phone, nor are they going to have a DMCA complaint if you hack your own phone in ways that let you change the way the software on it behaves (you might run into DMCS issues if you try to distribute tools to help other people do that, which is... definitely dubious, but that's what the law says; it doesn't have a great deal to do with this case of the Apple restrictions on which software the OS trusts to use its multicast API, though.)
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This - this piece here is the fallacy in your argument. There absolutely are ways to do this. Matter of fact, Apple themselves have a nice little set of digital keys that lets them turn all these locks off as they please.
So the argument is not "We have no way to do this safely" it's "We don't believe you (the owner of the damn device) can be trusted to do this safely."
Which brings me right back to - you don't own the damn thing.
Apple adds these arbitrary digital locks since they protect against the threat model of physical access, whether that be an attack thanks to leaving the phone unlocked or giving your passcode to your friend to use for a while. This is all in disregardless of whether or not the customer actually has this as part of their personal threat model.
Which they still own and have.
Adding an optional "You phone us and we can unlock your car with a copy of your key" is fine by me. As long as I still have the fucking key.
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For the second part - The security boogey man is not a compelling argument to give up ownership rights and enter digital serfdom where you only own a device if you use it in the way the manufacturer intends and approves of.
I'm not asking them to stop selling devices with locks. Hell, I'm even fine with them keeping a copy of the keys (which they have right now). I'm just saying: As the owner of a computer, I deserve to have a copy of the fucking keys that make it work.
Zero of which will be bought by me.
>Apple adds these arbitrary digital locks since they protect against the threat model of physical access
Apple can add as many arbitrary digital locks as they want. The problem is that they keep the key instead of giving it to the user.
Under the DMCA, if you rearrange the atoms or attempt to describe how to rearrange the atoms in a way not approved by the phone manufacturer, you are a criminal.
Copyright, and in particular the DMCA, has superseded your ownership of the atoms. You must do with them as the true owner of the atoms (Apple for example) permits.
No object should ever actively, uncompromisingly preclude me from using it to do something of which it is capable. Objects can suggest I take a certain course of action, but ultimately they must follow my instructions without trying to impede me. Any other way and I don’t truly own the object.
It is up to you to figure out how to get the electrons in the antenna to wiggle in the appropriate manner to make that happen, but there are absolutely no constraints preventing you, as the owner of said iPhone, from doing so.
Yes it will. The premise of your claim is wrong. It impedes me from doing lots of things, like running apps that aren’t approved by Apple.
Good luck with that, but don’t blame the device - the object you bought and own - for your failure to be able to.
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"
Because the government didn't step in early and say "Oh, that's just an obsolete feature, you can't do that with it, we'll remove it" and pass legislation in say 2005 to set the maximum ground rent at a notional £1, the "investors" got bolder. They added escalator clauses, after all £1000 per year is a nice earner today, but it won't be much in a hundred years, so let's say it doubles every 25 years to account for likely inflation plus some profit.
Actually wait, the idiots are still buying them, let's say it doubles every 10 years.
And next thing you know, some of the people who "own" a house are paying almost as much rent as people who don't "own" a house, oops.
Funny that the property owning, rich investor classes in the Tory party don't seem to be in a big hurry to actually fix this, although they do say it's a "Priority" (like everything else) when confronted. I wonder how much money Rishi earns every day from this "mistake" that he never got around to doing anything about as chancellor for example...
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/10/archives/queen-warmly-rec...
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.
In this case, the party setting the rules is more like the rich person who originally built and "sold" the houses (but still enforces curfew, and changes the rules whenever they feel like it).
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).
The term "buy", at least in the UK when it comes to housing, is a sliding scale.
When buying a flat or a non-detached house, you usually fall into an ownership law called "bostadsrätt". In essence, you don't buy a house. You buy stocks in a housing association, which grant you the right to use the chosen flat/house. The housing association is pretty much run like a company, with a yearly board meeting, a CEO, a CFO, etc. Your ownership is proportional to the surface area you bought.
So it is buying then.
I'm on board with the idea that there's a lot of arrangements in between full ownership and pure rental, as long as we have terms to describe the meaningful differences.
But in all these cases we use the word "buy" to buy the car or house, just like we use the word "buy" to take in posession of a slab of electronics
The problem is not that there are gradations of "ownership". The problem is that Apple (and many others) conflate the terms and deliberately obfuscate exactly what your rights are when you "buy".
And completely missed the main point - buying/owning a house can be complicated, so we frequently involve lawyers to represent our interests.
Buying a phone shouldn't be so complicated. But, not only are EULAs overly long, they're often written in legalese which is beyond the comprehension of the average person.
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.
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.
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.
A bad example given HN's audience - but I imagine of most normal-people, the majority of those with a VCR will have left it in the attic or basement and never bothered to connect it to their modern LCD TV. If it was a home-video camcorder vid then it's likely already converted to DVD if it's worth preserving.
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.
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.
A locked down phone without software updates will soon become not practical to keep using.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/nov/02/after-grenfell...
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.