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'Relax' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'
 
C'mon

I'm a huge Apple fan and even I can see this is screwed up.

No way Apple should have sat on this for as long as they did and if it happened to me I'd be super pissed.
 
I have moved numerous times. The postal service not only forwards my mail for free, but also notifies people who send me mail of my new address. And they will do that whether I move one space over, or across the country.

I don't bother informing anyone when I move. Yet they all get my new address from the postal service.

What Apple did was lock a person in to using one specific delivery location. iPhone. Then prevent said users from moving to another phone without losing the ability to receive texts. That is an established violation of law. It falls into the characteristics of a monopoly practice.

We've seen this before. You cannot legally lock a customer into using your product with no options to move away from your product.

And Apple provided no means for the iPhone owners to move away from the iPhone to another brand of phone without losing text communication.

Now, everyone seems to assume that it's trivial. However, there are certainly situations where people need to receive all texts or they could themselves be sued, fired, or even jailed for noncompliance with an order.

Those people should still have the right to switch to another brand of phone. And they do have that right. But Apple chose to use strong arm illegal monopoly tactics to prevent them from switching or penalize them if they did.

But what you don't understand is the post office is not obligated to do this for you. It's a service they decided to provide some time ago. And fortunately they do a pretty good job of it.

You've also grossly mischaracterized the situation. Far from having "no options," people who switched had plenty of options. Including the one that always works if the post office fails to handle your change of address well - just notify the senders!
 
Judge Koh thinks things should work a certain way - the whole world should work ideally and "fairly" - and complains whenever they don't. Boys grow up playing sports and realize that even the most heroic game they ever played included many mistakes by them and the other players. They don't suffer under the delusion that heroic perfection exists. And the boys who couldn't play the sport well have even less trouble understanding this. But some spectators just don't get it.

Oh, shucks guys. Geez. Yeah, thousands of people didn't receive months of text messages after switching phones due to a pretty big mistake on our part. But hey, the important thing is that we gave it the old college try, right?

YOU TELL IT, RUDY!
 
uuurgh, really???

jim-carrey-liar-liar-oh-come-on-angry-its-enough.gif
 
But what you don't understand is the post office is not obligated to do this for you. It's a service they decided to provide some time ago. And fortunately they do a pretty good job of it.

You've also grossly mischaracterized the situation. Far from having "no options," people who switched had plenty of options. Including the one that always works if the post office fails to handle your change of address well - just notify the senders!
Still not a good analogy really, but to go with it nonetheless: if the Post Office stops delivering some of your mail to you because you put up a different mailbox (one that is still valid and all that) you should just contact anyone who might be mailing you something (even those who you don't even know that might be mailing you something) and tell them to do something different just for you? That makes good sense, right? Over, you know, actually making sure that the Post Office deals with whatever issue it is they have with actually delivering all of the mail to your mailbox.
 
You won't find a bigger critic of class action lawsuits than me, due to the fact that most cases are settled in favor of the lawyers while the actual plaintiffs get nominal coupons or other useless tokens.

That said...

if Apple is going to wait until the eleventh hour to implement basic, simple solutions to obvious problems like the "iMessage deimplementation" debacle in an effort to avoid litigation, well, they've just set the model for every two-bit shyster to follow. Better staff up that legal team, Tim!
 
Tool is worthless. Doesn't work. Never recvd a text. Click the link to contact Apple and you're prompted for an iPhone serial number which, of course, you no longer have. I had to call and wait for over 20 minutes before speaking with a rep who did work through the problem and sent a test (presumably from an iPhone) which did arrive on my Nexus 5. Might be fixed but it's hard to prove total success.

So even the Fix is fixed. I guess they had to rush it out in order to try to get the suit thrown out.
 
"Plaintiff does not have to allege an absolute right to receive every text message in order to allege that Apple's intentional acts have caused an actual breach or disruption of the contractual relationship," Koh wrote.

and apple doesnt have to prove that it was not intentional - in fact it is pretty obvious that it was not intentional...

I also dont see how this issue caused her to cancel her contract with verizon...

and if she wins this case - doesnt it mean anyone who feels any software doesnt do everything they thought it would could sue for damages?

Apple also didnt inform me that when I change my email address or phone number I will no longer receive iMessages - and ATT failed to tell me i would not receive phone calls. I assumed it was just linked to my iPhone and it would update to the new address and number automatically....
 
'Relax' said the night man,
'We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave!'

I always thought that was "Relax said the nice man"

On the iMessage front. Why must Apple forward it as an SMS when someone goes Android. I assume at this point it costs Apple money. Should they not just send a note back to the sending phone that the recipient can't be iMessaged. "iMessage contact unavailable. Would you like to send as an SMS text through your service provider? No/Yes"
 
I always thought that was "Relax said the nice man"

On the iMessage front. Why must Apple forward it as an SMS when someone goes Android. I assume at this point it costs Apple money. Should they not just send a note back to the sending phone that the recipient can't be iMessaged. "iMessage contact unavailable. Would you like to send as an SMS text through your service provider? No/Yes"
That's what happens when they send it as SMS, it's just done on its own if iMessage delivery actually fails and Send as SMS feature is enabled.
 
anyone who thinks this is not a real issue should take a look at this guy's experience which is fairly common
http://adampash.com/imessage-purgatory/

Frankly, the most surprising thing here is that it took so long for people to sue.
Apple really deserves to lose this one.

In the UK, if you switched like that and Apple did not warn you, or advise you that you had to disable your phone number from iMessage, and then they told you to pay money to fix the problem after, I believe it would be classed as extortion along with breach of competition and monopoly laws.

So does Apple have this clause in it's fine print? Or clearly advise/ warn you to disable your mobile number from iMessage?

Who knows, maybe they do the same thing in the UK too?
 
In the UK, if you switched like that and Apple did not warn you, or advise you that you had to disable your phone number from iMessage, and then they told you to pay money to fix the problem after, I believe it would be classed as extortion along with breach of competition and monopoly laws.

So does Apple have this clause in it's fine print? Or clearly advise/ warn you to disable your mobile number from iMessage?

Who knows, maybe they do the same thing in the UK too?
Part of the problem is that even disabling the number from iMessage doesn't seem to work reliably for various people who did that and still ran into these types of issues.
 
Part of the problem is that even disabling the number from iMessage doesn't seem to work reliably for various people who did that and still ran into these types of issues.

Hmm seems like an utter huge mess Apple has made for themselves here then? I can certainly see why people would sue them over this.

Does it mean that people with an iPhone cannot send you a text message via SMS? Or is that blocked too?
 
and apple doesnt have to prove that it was not intentional - in fact it is pretty obvious that it was not intentional...

I wouldn't say it was intentional at all. Apple does have its faults, but I'd hardly call them vindictive.

But I would say they were kinda lackadaisical about the whole thing. I mean we're talking about a company that releases yearly updates to their OSes, and keeps a constant stream of bug fixes flowing in at all times. It shouldn't have taken them three years to fix this one relatively small problem.
 
In the UK, if you switched like that and Apple did not warn you, or advise you that you had to disable your phone number from iMessage, and then they told you to pay money to fix the problem after, I believe it would be classed as extortion along with breach of competition and monopoly laws.

So does Apple have this clause in it's fine print? Or clearly advise/ warn you to disable your mobile number from iMessage?

Who knows, maybe they do the same thing in the UK too?

Part of the problem is that even disabling the number from iMessage doesn't seem to work reliably for various people who did that and still ran into these types of issues.

Hmm seems like an utter huge mess Apple has made for themselves here then? I can certainly see why people would sue them over this.

Does it mean that people with an iPhone cannot send you a text message via SMS? Or is that blocked too?

I don't know why the DOJ has not got involved.
 
But he did not make a comment "to" another user. He clearly made a comment "about" another user. That's much less of a provocation.

This isn't what I said, but I don't see the difference between saying "you are an idiot" and quoting the entirety of someones post and saying "how idiotic" - Oh, well, just saying. Its all subjective.
 
Hmm seems like an utter huge mess Apple has made for themselves here then? I can certainly see why people would sue them over this.

Does it mean that people with an iPhone cannot send you a text message via SMS? Or is that blocked too?
The problem there is that Apple doesn't really let you choose (short of disabling iMessage completely on your phone)--when you are sending a message if Apple thinks your recipient can get iMessages it will send it as that, and if not, it will send it as SMS, but it doesn't really let you choose (you can usually force it to send an iMessage as SMS while that iMessage hasn't been delivered yet, but you have to basically catch it in that state, and in some of these cases it seems like messages would even show up as delivered for whatever reason so there wasn't really a way to even tell there was an issue with anything).

It'd be a bit better if you could choose if you wanted to send an iMessage or an SMS on a per-message basis or per-conversation basis, but in trying to make it as simple as possible Apple didn't want to provide functionality like that (and unfortunately overlooked some issues and then mostly ignored them even when they were pointed out).
 
They couldn't, and they won't.

To Verizon, all they would see is encrypted web traffic going through their servers. Could be anything. Could be iMessage, could be GMail, could be Outlook.

See, when an iDevice tries to send a iMessage, it'll first ask the Apple server, yo, you got someone with the number xxx-xxx-xxxx?? If Apple server says, yeah, why don't you send that message my way and I can give it to the recipient rather than you sending it over the air as an SMS, it would be encrypted and sent via TCP/IP rather than SMS.

I get that, and I think Apple SHOULD have dealt with it sooner.

It's still a stupid lawsuit. I"m betting that somewhere in that 8 page contract she clicked on but didn't read, there is small print that says "WE DO NOT GUARANTEE ALL MESSAGES WILL BE DELIVERED. In addition, Apple will argue that By switching phones to an unsupported contract all implied obligations were nullified. We have all had times when the phone didn't ring, or a message arrived much later than it was sent, or the circuits were busy like during rush hour.

I live in Minneapolis and when the 35W bridge collapsed, You couldn't make a call for several hours. I went up and asked my wife if we paid the bill because I couldn't even get a signal, only a fast busy.

This reminds me of Satellite TV during a storm. So you missed the Super Bowl. Direct TV will only refer you to your contract quoting acts of god, etc. All I am saying is that there are built in loop holes. They will probably ask her if she went to Apple and demanded that they fix it or did she just sit around and complain for months before hiring a lawyer. Either way, It will be interesting if this goes anywhere. Lawsuits require HARM. How was she harmed?
 
Why would Apple have to be compelled to support customers who stopped buying their product and went to someone else? If anything, Apple could have used this as a strong barrier to prevent users from leaving the iOS ecosystem.
 
I always thought that was "Relax said the nice man"

On the iMessage front. Why must Apple forward it as an SMS when someone goes Android. I assume at this point it costs Apple money. Should they not just send a note back to the sending phone that the recipient can't be iMessaged. "iMessage contact unavailable. Would you like to send as an SMS text through your service provider? No/Yes"

I don't know, I just clipped it from here.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eagles/hotelcalifornia.html




Apple shouldn't have to forward anything. They just should have allowed her to deregister her number in the first place.
Earlier this week, Apple introduced a tool that allows users to deregister their phone number from iMessage in order to prevent the issue from occurring. Prior to the launch of the web tool, there was no way for users to effectively remove themselves from the iMessage system.
Hence the Hotel California quote.
 
The problem there is that Apple doesn't really let you choose (short of disabling iMessage completely on your phone)--when you are sending a message if Apple thinks your recipient can get iMessages it will send it as that, and if not, it will send it as SMS, but it doesn't really let you choose (you can usually force it to send an iMessage as SMS while that iMessage hasn't been delivered yet, but you have to basically catch it in that state, and in some of these cases it seems like messages would even show up as delivered for whatever reason so there wasn't really a way to even tell there was an issue with anything).

It'd be a bit better if you could choose if you wanted to send an iMessage or an SMS on a per-message basis or per-conversation basis, but in trying to make it as simple as possible Apple didn't want to provide functionality like that (and unfortunately overlooked some issues and then mostly ignored them even when they were pointed out).

Thanks I didn't realise it was like that. Well this is Apple doing what Apple does best, forcing it's own standards first, and then the standards everyone else uses after..
But this time I guess it may have bitten of more than it can chew especially, as you said, by ignoring the issues for so long. I use Android and it gives me a conversation list no problem via SMS, but as I said I live in the UK so it may be different as we have used SMS for donkey's years, and you literally get hundreds or thousands in your contracts, people text more than talk in Britain.

I know it must be different here as plenty of my friends and family have iPhones and we have never had any issues texting.

Oh nope, a quick Google reveals that they have done the same thing here in the UK, but you can just log into your support account and remove your device to fix the issue, apparently:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2013/11/28/switching-from-iphone-to-android-switch-off-imessage/
 
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