Although this is a very bitter blog post, I won’t make it angry. I’m just disappointed in one of my favorite companies.
Today, I sent my MacBook Pro in for a repair. Its (non-Mashita) SuperDrive is dead; that is, it spits out all discs and makes a lot of noise. While the technicians have my computer in their capable hands, I’m having them look at my battery. I get unacceptable performance from a battery of its age and I look forward to their diagnosis.
Being a geek, I took advantage of one of the greatest features of Mac OS X – its portability. Bear with me as I explain this, because it’s pretty cool.
Let’s say that I am going to lose my mac and want to minimize the downtime associated with the loss. In that case, I can clone the operating system to another hard disk and boot from that disk on another machine. That is to say, I have all of my files and settings, but they’re physically running on another mac. Then, when the original machine comes back, I can simply clone the external drive onto the MacBook Pro’s internal hard disk and pick up where I left off.
After carrying out the precautions I just detailed, a friendly man from DHL whisked my computer away on a journey to Apple Repair Land (Texas, USA).
Since then, I’ve been itching to update the podcasts on my iPhone. I took the external drive over to my sister’s iMac and successfully booted from it. I plugged in my iPhone and ran a sync, but was greeted with sync errors due to improper authorization. I’ve only purchased one album from the iTunes Store with DRM on it, the soundtrack to The Show with ZeFrank. Because I was using different hardware (the computer) to sync the iPhone, the tracks couldn’t sync.
In all honesty, I expected that. I know the dangers and consequences of Digital Rights Management and I was fully aware of what would happen when I moved those few songs around. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the ultimate consequence of that sync – all apps being stripped from my iPhone.
I remember it vaguely. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone Software Developer Kit some months ago, he detailed the aspects of revenue sharing, distribution, and application sandboxing. Those details were of little consequence to me until today.
Steve told us that the iPhone/iPod touch applications from the App Store were to be protected by “Fairplay” Digital Rights Management. In the past, Apple fully supported and advocated that proactive geeks do what I did – make a clone of one’s system disk to use during downtime. I’m following all the rules – it’s the same Operating System, just running on different hardware. I’m not breaking the law, but due to the arcane protections of DRM, I’ve lost my iPhone applications until I get my computer back.
There’s the problem with DRM – innocent people get screwed. Rather than just canceling the sync, iTunes went and uninstalled every third-party application from my iPhone. The phone is crippled.
Thanks, Apple.
0 Responses to “Bitten by DRM on iPhone Applications”