IMHO mainly that and clearly those trains are required to be designed in such a way that they could be repaired by a third party (either by law or by contract based on how the situation is described).
Apple provides (nor is required) no such guarantees. Also it has more or less legitimate reasons for its design decision (making it harder to reuse stolen parts).
> equally egregious
I certainly disagree almost completely. With Ape you know what you’re getting and can make an inform choice. Also it’s a completely different type of product. Trains have various regulatory, safety and maintenance requirements which are irrelevant for consumers devices. Screwing with the software controlling trains can literally kill people..
Imagine if this happened to an airliner in flight: there'd be criminal charges for sure, not to mention huge damages and lawsuits from the families of the dead if some of the control systems locked up in mid-air.
Trains are not quite as susceptible to disaster arising in the course of operations as airliners, but a Newag Impuls 45WE runs at up to 160km/h in service with up to 218 people on board. (Their speed record is considerably higher.) A sudden breakdown in service is at a minimum going to cause timetable havoc and knock-on delays for other trains and at worse could lead to a mass casualty accident.
(John Deere tractors don't usually carry 200+ passengers and Apple computers don't usually get deployed in safety critical situations. So, different!)
For instance, has anyone really analyzed, what would happened if the trains were running at 160km/h at midnight, on Nov 21? I mean, they might have, I don't know. But that would be pretty funny--having documentation for what's very likely a tort (well, it's Polish counterpart), if not an outright criminal act.
In battery gate, 1-2 year old devices were starting to reboot at low state-of-charge (typically <30% battery). Apple issued a software update that fixed the reboot problem... hmm, how does software fix what smells like a hardware issue? Well, the underlying cause was that aged batteries could not supply enough current and would brownout the CPU (which caused the reboots). The fix was to throttle the CPU a low SoC, which avoided the brownout--so they "fixed" a real problem that I experienced.
My feeling is that Apple owed customers like me some compensation. But, it is clear that the performance throttling was not just an arbitrary "fuck you". Rather, it was a misguided attempt to save the cost of warranty battery replacements in a way they thought customers wouldn't notice.
The current situation couldn't be more different. Here, the manufacturer has added software from the factory to create fake error codes. The hardware is working perfectly fine, but when the train sits in certain locations for too many days, it will pretend to have a hardware failure. During certain months of the year, the train will fake a hardware error. There is no possible explanation for this, except as a "fuck you" to the customer who wants to use 3rd party service.
Sounds like fuck you to me.
If they want to explicitly claim exclusivity on maintenance or a certain enforced product lifetime, fine, it is a nasty practice but fair enough. But not making the operators aware of these conditions, when they knew months beforehand what would happen when they lost the tender, and while it was seriously affecting the public later on, that is criminal in a way that is not comparable to Apple's practices for instance.
(I think both are equally egregious personally, but I know there's a lot of support here for Apple, so I'm curious how people reconcile these. I don't want to make this a religious war about Apple, but those practices in general regardless of which company is doing it).
Is it the secrecy that makes it different? i.e. if the train company were honest about it then it would be ok?
Or is it the scale that matters? Trains are big and expensive, while phones are small and cheap, so it's ok? (that wouldn't work for John Deere but would for Apple)