Apple Hates You
I’ve been meaning to get this Nintendo DS homebrew HOWTO out the door in the last month but I keep getting distracted. Right now I’m too pissed to talk about it. Apple’s turned into a complete asshole in the span of about a month. Maybe two. Maybe it’s been brewing for a lot longer than that. I just can’t think straight.
As many of you know, Apple recently decided to take the incredibly unpleasant action of bricking* users’ unlocked iPhones. “What’s that, boolean? People are in trouble?” you are probably asking yourself. Yes, people, it’s true. People are in trouble. People who love Freedom!
Now sure, anyone who’s taken the time to go through the docs and unlock their iPhone to, say, install nifty softwares on it and detach it from the monstrously evil AT&T cellular network are probably not all stupid enough to just blindly install an update without first checking to see if it would disable their (i)phone. Well, it turns out some people were. And it did. They probably didn’t think Apple would be mean enough to disable their devices on them.
Why not? Because it’s fairly unprecedented. Apple’s long had a fairly relaxed attitude towards people using their hardware in unusual ways. They were, after-all, born out of the Homebrew Computer Club back in the seventies. Remember the Newton? People are still hacking those things. The iPod? Yeah, they (used to be able to) run Linux, not to mention allow people to transfer music to and from the devices without having to use iTunes. Why would people want to do this? Well, iTunes isn’t available for Linux last time I checked.
So what gives? This is not the first onerous and somewhat insulting thing Apple’s done to its faithful. It’s not often you’ll hear me complain about a price drop, but when some people paid $499 for their brand new iPhone and then saw the price dip by $200 the next day, well, that smacks of gouging. Steve followed that with a sort-of explanation saying that as an early adopter, you take your chances. And that’s fairly true. But then they added insult to injury and offered a $100 rebate for certain buyers. Ouch.
Oh, and about the new iPods. They’re not all fun and delicious; the reviews are mostly positive, and they look great. Ars Technica claimed that the menus were a bit slow (yay, coverflow). One intrepid individual went a bit deeper though and measured the audio performance of the new devices. Turns out, they replaced the much-lauded Wolfson digital audio decoders (or DACs if you’re into the audio-jargon) with (presumably) cheaper and poorer-sounding Cirrus Logic units.
But maybe that annoying 22khz phasing can be buffed right out with a firmware update. At least they look pretty!
Got a bunch of iPod accessories? Maybe a dock and a video cable from a previous version? Well throw ‘em away and buy brand new ones with Apple logos on them, because only branded accessories with the right-encoded CHIP will work with these new players. Why? I can only imagine that this is some perverse form of AACS technology to appease the media gods and allow them to continue to use Apple as a media vendor. Or maybe in an Apple world, all devices should be Apple for a proper Apple experience and any deviation from Apple will result in a swift, yet careful bricking#.
But what about Steve’s anti-DRM rant? He’s all cool and the media companies are all evil! Aren’t they?
(I’m not sure when this became a dialog between my inner child and this grown-up-like character writing these things on his keyboard, but… I’ve got a thing going)
No, little boy, Steve is evil. Apple is a media company. Apple sits on the Blu-Ray consortium board along with Sony and a bunch of other evil people. They’re busily bundling DRM deep into OS X to allow for HD playback from supported devices. Note that this means you can’t play back HD content on UNsupported devices. Like iPods without an Apple branded cable. Or non AACS capable monitors.
Why is this a problem?
Oh, I dunno. I’m tired. Just go to sleep, damnit.^
- Bricking – In this case, the term means, reset to “locked” state, usable only on the AT&T network and use of third party applications disabled. Not to say that the device is a completely worthless smoking pile of glass, metal and plastic.
- Bricking – be sure to keep your thumbs to either side of the bricks when performing this maneuver because it is quite painful to get them caught in between.
- If I were Stephen Colbert, and I’m not, I’d probably find a way to cleverly insert the term “Goldbricking” in here somewhere. But I’m not. /wørd.
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