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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

He lays out nicely written screed, but omits any inconvenient evidence and fabricates data to bolster his position. The end result is just technodemagogy. Missed opportunity.

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That's a rather tall claim-- what evidence has he omitted here, or more to the point, what data did he make up?

For an omission: in his section on Apple's DRM policies he omits that after getting the music labels on board Apple then drove them to drop DRM. How would this change the paragraph containing:

For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn't be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles.

Then for a fabrication:

The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you).

Read that closely. He wants you to believe iPad batteries last less than 12 months, degraded to the point that you will throw away the device if you don't buy a new battery (with installation). Look at the verbs. He isn't saying he fears this might happen. He definitively states it as fact.

This kind of crap drives me nuts.

There are completely legitimate reasons to be opposed to the concept of the iPad, or to suggest that people should not buy one. When you construct an argument with stretched truths and hyperbole, you just weaken the entire position and make people who agree with you look like fanatics.

In other words, if you have such a good argument, why are you employing Rovian tactics?

I think I agree with you, but as frustrating as they are, weren't Rovian tactics shown to work pretty well?

I'm not saying it doesn't work, I'm saying it's dishonest.

They work great in the short term. Over the long term though you create fear fatigue in people and undermine credibility. It also tends to alienate people who are undecided or sympathetic to your argument but informed enough to see the tactics.

He doesn’t omit Apple’s DRM past, he merely accuses Jobs of hypocrisy with respect to DRM. Jobs seems to hate it if music labels use it (“… whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM …”) – all the while he has no problem with much of the Video content and all the Apps keeping their DRM.

I'm not sure that Steve Jobs has ever indicated that he's against DRM as a concept, only that he thought it was pointless and self-defeating to continue selling <em>music<em> with bundled DRM. Especially with BitTorrent and p2p networks being so prevalent. His opposition to DRM on music was expressed in practical, not moral, terms.

But DRM on movies still appears to be relatively effective, even though that might soon reach the same point music did and I don't think there's much doubt that DRM on apps has prevented a fair bit of piracy. If I think back to how easy it was to get pirated apps for an S60 phone a few years ago and how not one of the people I know who have jailbroken their iPhones has paid for any of the apps they own I can definitely understand why Apple would prefer a closed system with DRM.

I would agree with you that this seems to be Job’s view of the whole DRM thing, but it’s certainly possible and plausible to parse Job’s actions differently. If you squint your eyes a bit it can really seem as though Jobs wanted to look like the larger than life crusader against DRM. That’s clearly not what he is. If you think Jobs wanted people to have that impression (which is what Cory Doctorow seems to think) his actions begin to look hypocritical.

It'll be interesting to see if Steve's pragmatism regarding the pointlessness of music DRM extends to potentially sacrificing Pixar profits when the next order-of-magnitude increase in home broadband puts video DRM in exactly the same position as music DRM is today...

Aren’t we already in that situation? Downloading a pirated movie takes maybe an hour, downloading a album took about the same time ten or so years ago. We are definitely damn close. Yeah, ok, so that’s ten years ago, Jobs wrote his letter three years ago, so maybe we have to wait another seven years :)

I'll agree with your latter point, he does seem a bit sensational in his claim that the device will be physically useless in less than 24 months. But I disagree with your first argument.

You're correct that he omits that they have removed DRM from their music, but not their videos. And I think you can safely argue the point that if Apple had started out with iTunes without DRM that they never would have made it off the launchpad. He also specifically used the term "entertainment industry", which is still true. Apple still uses restrictive DRM on it's videos, as well as it's i(Phone|Pad|Pod Touch) products. The latter are definitely marketed as "entertainment devices".

As for the fabrication charge, that's at best an unfortunate choice of phrasing. His point is that when an iPad battery fails (it will-- all batteries do fail), you have no choice but to throw away the device or to send it back to Apple for them to perform the battery replacement. What happens when Apple decides that the current model of iPad is too old to bother replacing batteries on? You can no longer maintain your own device. This is quite different from not being able to repair your own device, as it has long been the expectation that users are responsible for changing out batteries. By locking down the device, Apple is promoting the production of more e-waste. Regardless of any unfortunate phrasing, the point remains valid.

Or you could open it up, replace the battery yourself, and void the (undoubtedly expired) warranty. There's nothing actually preventing that, legally or physically.

I've tried replacing parts inside Apple devices before, and they're not built for that generally. Does Apple go so far as to embed "booby traps" like those seen in the PlayStation 2 which attempt to punish people who self-repair by breaking their devices? I honestly don't know how easy it is to replace the battery without permanently damaging the device, so I'd say it's not a settled matter that there's nothing physically preventing one from doing it.

Well, if it is anything like the iPod or iPhone, it is pretty easy to replace the parts. There are multiple vendors selling parts for them (some parts better than the original). The "closed" battery should be the least of people's issues. The replacement is the same price as another laptop battery and you get a whole new iPad.

For example, at some point, I am going to replace my iPod's (5th gen) HD with an SSD and there are multiple vendors and video showing how.

And, since we are talking about something as hyped as the iPad, getting a replacement battery will be ridiculously easy as will getting the thing inside the device. There will (literally!) be hundreds of step by step instructions online and there will be more than one vendor willing to take your money for a battery.

I could get a replacement battery for my trusty six year old iPod mini (still works like on day one) right now. Costs $15 and even comes with tools to open the little sucker up. Let’s just hope the iPad’s battery is not soldered in :)

Just to clarify something that appears to be a common misconception - Apple doesn't ever replace the iPad battery, it just gives you a whole new iPad for $105.95:

http://www.apple.com/support/ipad/service/battery/

As a point of comparison, my Lenovo batteries that always seem to crap about a few years in cost about $100:

http://www.newegg.com/Store/BrandSubCategory.aspx?Brand=1041...

So... that's a pretty great deal. And I think speaks to how comfortable they are with the battery longevity. Or how fat their margins are.

... They give you a newly refurbished iPad and then swap out the battery in yours, refurbish it (a new housing perhaps) and give it to someone else. It's not like they are chucking them out the back dock.

In my experience Apple has pretty high quality refurb processes (replacing excessively scratches chassis, etc) - so while it might not be brand new you might end up with something better than what you started with.

That said, given some of the probable porno use cases of the iPad...

What happens when Apple decides that the current model of iPad is too old to bother replacing batteries on? You can no longer maintain your own device.

If you have to send it to Apple, you already can't maintain your own device, regardless of whether they decide to keep supporting it.

I would note that Apple still replaces batteries for the original iPod. And as far as I know Apple doesn't prevent third parties from replacing batteries. What is the fundamental difference between the batteries and another component, like the hard drive?

I agree, he could have made a truthful point about that. But he didn't.

Will the iPad battery fail before the useful life of the device expires? I doubt it[1]. But if it does there is a convenient procedure for replacing it. Eventually there will no longer be a procedure, but the device will have passed from "useful" by then.

Look at the numbers: Applecare on an iPad runs from month 13 to month 24 and covers a new battery if required = $99. Battery replacement on an iPad = $99. Apple is not expecting significant numbers of batteries to die in two years. (Or they are and aren't expecting anything else to go wrong.)

it has long been the expectation that users are responsible for changing out batteries

And car users used to be responsible for keeping the water topped up in their batteries. That day passed. In an nice parallel to iPads, my Honda FIT has a tiny sealed battery in a unique size. They worked the mass/volume tradeoff[2] and came up with a completely unique battery. (At least they didn't put a pull cord on the dash or a kick starter on the floor.)

[1] My nearly three year old iPhone is just fine and I can still skip charging at night and get through the second day if I need to. The device is about to be orphaned by iPhone OS 4.0. Given the cost of a phone vanishes in the cost of service the only reason I'll keep it is because I have the original, cheaper, plan in place.

[2] I deleted my section on mass/value/cost/ruggedness tradeoffs of glue/screw, custom/commodity cells, and compartments/torsion box. I've covered that too many times before. I'd still love to read an article comparing a handful of devices that make those decisions different ways. My personal estimation is that using screws and having a replaceable commodity battery would add 50% to the thickness of the device keeping other factors the same. It would still be a cool device, just slightly less so.

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