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Apple Shuts Down iPad Air and iPhone 5s In-Store Pickup Tracking Site

Apple should provide this service itself, so customers don't waste their times searching through many pages to find out which store has the inventory.
 
griffd said:
Apple obviously has its reasons that may not be apparent. For one, this information is valuable to marketers of competing products to show popularity of different models/sizes/colors/carries - information that Apple never releases when they announce their sales numbers. In addition, I'm sure they are constantly hammering Apple's site to scrape this availability information.
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You can't glean much from the tracker without knowing how many phones have been built and sold. The tracker doesn't tell you how many devices are in stock.
 
trainwrecka said:
Sounds like a cool tool, but I'm guessing Apple would rather people hunt for that information on their site as it might lead to other sales.
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exactly.

this guy was giving people precisely what they wanted but it interfered with the marketing strategy.

Sort of like Vegas. There is only one way to get to the hotel's front desk and that's thru their casino lol.
 
The tool displayed ads! I hope that was one reason for the takedown

And scraping all the data removes the ability for Apple to know which devices are being checked at which time on which day.. They'd probably use this to adjust the production orders on a daily/weekly basis. Their ui is usually good, so why else was it allowed to be so clunky?
 
If I read the terms of use correctly, I am prohibited from using the tool in Safari to select the region of the page on Apple's site that shows the availability and displaying on my dashboard. Couldn't I just clip the pages for all the stores in a given area and keep track of them?

I remember when Steve (RIP) demoed this feature and showed how he could keep track of his daily Calvin and Hobbs cartoon and even an eBay auction. So in the case of eBay, it's OK to monitor another site, but not your own?!?
 
We got the people more worried about marketing 'problems' in charge ("don't use gold iPhone pictures in your marketing materials"...really??), next their lawyers will be showing up as salespeople in the stores...oh wait, they already have NSA agents doing sales. This company is in danger of falling off my Christmas card list...and, as is going the rest of the world-in-charge, they couldn't care less. The customers are not always right anymore. :(
 
talmy said:
Refurb.me has be going for years, scraping the Apple refurbished store. Why hasn't Apple ordered that shutdown???
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refurb.me isn't used by scalpers to clean out stock so the regular customers can't buy what they want
 
This has been shut down to prevent scalpers flooding stores. Store A shows phones in stock, so that store has a massive queue of scalpers at 6am.

Tbh, the more Apple do to stop scalpers easily getting phones the better.
 
While it is sad to see services like this go, large sites like Apple's always have policies to stop bots because of the potential for very high traffic being generated by them. You either have to stop all of them or none so this site falls fowl of the rule even though what it is doing is probably not doing any real harm.

Also Apple will not want to allow other sites not under their control becoming the place to find their products without using their site. Its to do with marketing and kind of understandable even though its annoying.

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Michael73 said:
If I read the terms of use correctly, I am prohibited from using the tool in Safari to select the region of the page on Apple's site that shows the availability and displaying on my dashboard. Couldn't I just clip the pages for all the stores in a given area and keep track of them?

I remember when Steve (RIP) demoed this feature and showed how he could keep track of his daily Calvin and Hobbs cartoon and even an eBay auction. So in the case of eBay, it's OK to monitor another site, but not your own?!?
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Not the same, one is a bot scraping info to distribute to 3rd parties and the other is an end user viewing a page fragment for their own use.
 
How can a site have terms of use that say what you can't do with data that site posts?

I have never read the terms of use for apple.com. What if it said "every person who visits this site must pay $0.02 per minute"?

Is that enforceable any more than what this scraper does/did?

I understand copyright on pictures and other works but inventory? How is that "protected" once the original company puts in out for consumption?

I like Apple and would not want to face them, but as others here said, it was a better mousetrap.

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Brian Y said:
This has been shut down to prevent scalpers flooding stores. Store A shows phones in stock, so that store has a massive queue of scalpers at 6am.

Tbh, the more Apple do to stop scalpers easily getting phones the better.
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<opinion>.
 
This site was extremely useful. I got my gold 32gb at&t iPhone this way. It was very accurate and the database was updated with new shipments around 1pm CDT.
 
WissMAN said:
How can a site have terms of use that say what you can't do with data that site posts?

I have never read the terms of use for apple.com. What if it said "every person who visits this site must pay $0.02 per minute"?

Is that enforceable any more than what this scraper does/did?

I understand copyright on pictures and other works but inventory? How is that "protected" once the original company puts in out for consumption?

I like Apple and would not want to face them, but as others here said, it was a better mousetrap.

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<opinion>.
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So you can legally take any video on YouTube and repost it on your site.

Or take news stories from MacRumors and post them on your website.

Plus, it quite clearly says "BY USING THE SITE, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS OF USE; IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT USE THE SITE." At the end of the day it's their content. They can stop you doing whatever they like with it.
 
Just how often was the bot hitting the server? In order to maintain accurate data, it would have to be hitting it constantly. Otherwise it would be inaccurate.

You may disagree with Apple here, but they have a right to ensure accurate information about their stock is displayed correctly, and they have the right to ensure a bot isn't hitting their servers every 10 seconds scanning every configuration and possibly slowing down performance for users of the site itself.
 
Typical of Apple. :rolleyes:

Maybe Apple didn't like how this guy's tracker was better than and improved upon their own.


Your Use of the Site. You may not use any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”, “robot”, “spider” or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, or any similar or equivalent manual process, to access, acquire, copy or monitor any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Site or any Content, to obtain or attempt to obtain any materials, documents or information through any means not purposely made available through the Site. Apple reserves the right to bar any such activity.
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Has Apple sent a cease and desist letter to Google yet? Since Google cache's Apples site, wouldn't they violate the part which states: "You may not... copy... any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce...the Site or any Content"?
 
Brian Y said:
This has been shut down to prevent scalpers flooding stores. Store A shows phones in stock, so that store has a massive queue of scalpers at 6am.

Tbh, the more Apple do to stop scalpers easily getting phones the better.
Click to expand...

The tool was also used by non-scalpers. Apple needs to make their site more user friendly when it comes to determining which store has stock. It takes way too many clicks and then going back and more clicks if you're on the fence about color, capacity, and Wi-Fi vs. cellular and just want to see which stores have which configurations in stock.

The Mac portion of the site has the same problem. If I need to buy a Mac today, I want to be able to go to Apple's site and see which of the four Apple Stores in my area have which configuration in stock so I can walk out with a Mac today.

I don't want to have to click 6 times just to find out that the configuration I want isn't in stock at any of the stores so then I have to click the back button 5 times to choose another configuration and repeat the process again until I find a configuration I can walk out of the Apple Store with today.

They really need to streamline their site with an "at-a-glance" availability layout for all models across their major product lines that eliminates the need to click through several screens, go back, and repeat to check a different model's availability.

The Apple Tracker site was great at presenting actionable data in a concise way. Apple would do well to learn from it.
 
Many of you have weird complaint about keeping checking supply. If you really want gold iPhone 5s or iPad Air, just or it online from day 1. My gold iPhone 5s came 10 days after I ordered and iPad Air came after 2 days. Why keep checking and complaint? Spend that time for something else more useful.
 
Meh. I just whipped up my own in less than 15 minutes. It's just a GET request with zip code, and a list of model numbers. Add a random string parameter to prevent getting cached results from apple.

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skycorgan said:
Just how often was the bot hitting the server? In order to maintain accurate data, it would have to be hitting it constantly. Otherwise it would be inaccurate.

You may disagree with Apple here, but they have a right to ensure accurate information about their stock is displayed correctly, and they have the right to ensure a bot isn't hitting their servers every 10 seconds scanning every configuration and possibly slowing down performance for users of the site itself.
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It hit Apple every time a user did a search.
 
KeepCalmPeople said:
Exactly. The right thing to do would have been to pay this guy a 'finder's fee' and create a similar page or pages on the Apple Store website.
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Even better, hire the guy since he seems to understand customers' needs and build solutions to satisfy them.
 
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