Mon 4 May 2009
There has been a lot of frustration lately between developers for the iPhone and Apple. The developers’ main beef is that when submitting their programs to Apple for the App Store on iTunes, the applications will go through a mysterious approval process and then either unceremoniously submitted or denied with very little reasoning. See here. The issue is one of transparency which is something that Apple has, for better or worse, been terrible at. In fact, it is it’s greatest signature in that products are announced and make a huge impact.
Back to the prototype. I got it working, albeit with Tiger (OSX 10.4) and not Leopard (10.5). The problem is that I want a laptop for Megan that doesn’t offer up any issues and so bleeding edge prototype hardware really isn’t the best solution. Since it is a rarity and something that someone somewhere might enjoy either as a piece of Apple history or as something to poke around on, I find the best promotional tool for a national audience. That’s right, eBay.
I posted a 10-day auction and by the end of the 8th day, was up to $700. In less than 48 hours, someone would be buying the laptop and I could focus on getting something more appropriate for Megan. Then, less than 24 hours before the auction end came this:
MC019 eBay Listing Removed: Copyright Violation - Unauthorized Item (294098106) |
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Awesome. Apple in no way tried to contact me and say “Hey. That’s ours. We’d like it back.” Instead, they contacted eBay and got them to unlist it. So what am I supposed to do? Well, I tried to contact the email they provided: piracy@ebay.com (Is this really piracy?) and got no response. So, who do you talk to about something like this? An Apple Store Genius? Call up corporate? Well, none of these things seemed appropriate. So, I decided to email Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs.
As silly as that sounds, I know that Steve is not going to read my email ever. Some lackey will and it will be distributed to the correct person. The thing is that sometimes, it produces results. I was just hoping that someone could contact me and say “Please don’t sell that.” or “Go ahead and sell that.” but basically anything so that it can be resolved but nothing has happened. I’ve since emailed twice and nothing came out.
Apple is stonewalling because that’s what Apple does. It’s much better legally to say nothing than it is to say anything. I understand that they are huge corporate company that has much better things than helping me sell a laptop. I also get that me selling this laptop is potentially one less laptop they get to sell at their stores but it’s still frustrating. In much of the way that they are stonewalling the very people who are providing content to their device, they are remaining silent in this matter.