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Comment by tomh- | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely ridiculous, I wonder how long it takes before Apple to take over this behavior. Crackers will always be able to outsmart Microsoft. The only victims of this technology are paying customers, like me. Maybe it's time to cancel my Action Pack and Websitespark memberships and use software from a company who trusts its own customers and doesn't treat its customers as potential pirates.

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Seeing as you can't buy a mac without OS X (and that you can't buy OS X for a non-mac), I imagine it's much less of an issue. Doesn't quite seem worth the effort to engineer a DRM system just to block people skimping on the occasional $29 upgrade.

Why would you expect Apple to follow suit? They don't even have activation codes. They already treat their paying customers the way you're asking to be treated.

Apple has other products which could incorporate this behavior (not trusting their customers) like itunes content, iWorks or potentially jail broken iphones. I mean there are various ways for Apple to gain more control over their users.

As far as I know, Apple doesn't even make a product with online activation. They use serial numbers or nothing at all. They just don't care about controlling their users.

Someone isn't a longtime user of Logic Pro, which had one of the most obtuse and disruptive mechanisms to security that I ever experienced. Heaven forbid you lose your dongle...

Apple didn't originally develop Logic Pro (or the dongle), they bought it from Elogic. Within one release of buying it, Apple removed the dongle from the copy protection system. To be fair, this was pretty hard, as Logic actually offloaded some DSP processing onto it.

Today, the copy protection consists of:

1. The installer phones home to see if your serial is blacklisted. If Apple can't be reached, you can install it anyway (unlike activation).

2. Serials are blacklisted with each point release

3. Offline update install packages are behind a serial-wall on Apple's website, but are accessible with the system Software Update utility, which does not check serials.

4. Logic Pro broadcasts its serial over Bonjour, and won't start if another system on the local LAN is using the same serial

This is by far and away the most lax copy protection system of any of the professional DAWs. The primary copy protection is that it's mac-only, and the people who blow $2k on a mac aren't likely to balk at a few grand on good software.

This is not entirely true, if you treat iPhone applications like a software

Doesn't the iPhone have online activation?

True, hence "I wonder" when they do..is wondering something enough to downvote comments?

And yes they do care about controlling the users, they just use other ways to enforce that (appstore, hardware lock-in)

As far as iTunes goes, they've been going towards less control what with removal of the DRM and all.

I could definitely see Apple doing it on the App Store. If you jailbreak your iPhone/Touch and install one of the piracy app "stores" the whole process is just way too easy. I was perplexed why anyone would waste their time trying to steal a 99 cent app but after using the tools I understand. It's way too easy right now.

We can blame Microsoft for this but we should also blame the pirates. When piracy is hard and obscure it doesn't really hurt much. When these people go out of their way to create super easy methods of piracy and bring it to the mainstream they are forcing companies to react. They don't have to stop piracy completely but instead make it harder so the mainstream isn't so tempted.

It's definitely fair of Microsoft to try and protect its intellectual property. However I'm a paying customer and I expect that if I pay for their product I will not be hassled by their anti piracy measures.

Personally I rather have them invest the money they get from paying customers on creating more value for other people to buy their products than to create more "measures" against piracy. We all know that products with any form of DRM have a worse user experience than those exact same products without.

iPhone OS software? Maybe. Mac OS X software? Don’t think so.

Apple’s Mac consumer software is ridiculously easy to pirate. You can download iWork from Apple’s servers and find out the serial with five seconds of light googling. iLife and Mac OS X don’t even have a serial or any other kind of copy protection. (They might be harder to pirate, though, since you have to get the DMGs.)

And now get this: The $29 Snow Leopard update is license wise nothing more than an update for owners of Leopard and Leopard only. But the disc will install Snow Leopard even if you don’t have Leopard. It would be trivial to test (the could even let you install to an empty hard drive – just let the user insert the Leopard disc once to test whether she has it) but they don’t do it.

Software is maybe three percent of their revenue. Why overly protect it if pirates will find a way (or just not buy)? They don’t care much about protecting their Mac software from piracy because they make their money with Macs, not Mac OS X.

That might change with the iPhone, though. Don’t expect this Mac policy to carry over.

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