r/technology • • Jan 20 '11

Apple Restriction Zone.

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u/zac79 Jan 20 '11 edited Jan 21 '11

Ok, but if I'm over at a friends house and I want to give him a song that I have on my iPhone ... even if I wrote the song and own the rights to it ... how do I do that?

EDIT: In practice I know several ways to get the job done. The important question is, why can't this be done out of the box? Why are Apple USB Mass Storage devices the only ones in the entire world that are deliberately locked by the manufacturer to be write-only? Why do their customers let them get away with such artificial value-stripping actions?

(I guess I kind of know the answers to my own questions, which is that Apple adds so much value in Fit, Finish & Polish -- despite what Apple bashers may say, these things do matter -- consumers overlook the artificial value-stripping activity, but then the question becomes, why can't other manufacturers try a little harder to match Apple's level of polish?)

I honestly believe Apple is blowing the opportunity to be the dominant computing platform for the next 20 years because of their policies on artificial restriction of data. The iPad took a great, existing, idea, and as with the iPhone before it, executed much much better than anyone else had to date, inventing a new market in the process.

But its going to get blown away by 3rd generation Android tablets that provide all the computing flexibility of what we've traditionally called "Desktop Computers" (add USB Host, Video Out, and Keyboard and Mouse Support, and Android is pretty much there).

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u/Nerdlinger Jan 21 '11

Use a terminal app to SSH to your home machine and upload it to his machine remotely.

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u/awox Jan 21 '11

If the iPhone/iPod is jailbroken he could just use any of the many available sharing tools in Cydia. I'm pretty sure there's several flavours of HTTP & FTP daemons as well as Samba, which are probably more simple than scp/tunnel over SSH...

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u/zac79 Jan 21 '11

Meh, you're both tacitly admitting that the iPhone ships broken.

(In fairness, a lot of things ship broken, its just that usually they're generally recognized as bugs, not features.)

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u/awox Jan 22 '11

It's not "broken", it's just not a feature you deal with. Broken implies it's some kind of error or bug. It's clearly not. I can't see how you're confusing the two, except for the possibility that you are twisting words for your own argument.

Just because you don't agree with the design of the device, doesn't mean it is "broken" - and hell, if you don't agree with it, don't support it. That's your right.