You know how some people like to say that
physical media is dead and streaming is the future? Well, Apple is
doing a pretty good job right now of proving that theory well and truly
wrong.
Reports have started to emerge of Apple completely deleting films
from iTunes accounts even when they’ve been bought, not merely rented.
And when people complain about this, they’re receiving an astonishing
message from Apple telling them that iTunes is just a “store front,” and
so Apple isn’t to blame if a film studio decides it no longer wants to
make its titles available on iTunes.
Even worse, it seems that if bought film titles are removed from your
account you may not even be entitled to get a refund for them. When an
iTunes user in Canada complained to Apple that their initial offer of a
free $5.99 rental hardly seemed suitable recompense for him having three
bought films summarily removed from his account, Apple replied that
“our ability to offer refunds diminishes over time. Hence your purchases
doesn’t meet the conditions for a refund.”
The Canadian user was offered a further two free rentals as
compensation. But, of course, as well as being far less in monetary
terms than the films user had bought, having short-term rental rights to
a film is very different indeed from owning a film.
While I’m hearing from others who fortunately did get a refund for
their deleted films, the bottom line in all this is that Apple appears
to be openly saying that if you buy a film on iTunes, you don’t really
own it at all. It may only stick around in your iTunes account for as
long as the studio who really owns it decides it wants it to stick
around in your iTunes account.
The Canadian user suffering this issue was pointed to this page of Apple legalese in the response where he was told that he wasn’t entitled to compensation for his lost purchases.
I’m also starting to receive reports today of the recent return of
another major issue with iTunes movies: the downgrading of 4K HDR films
to HD. This started happening in 2017, just after the Apple TV 4K
launched, as reported here.
At that point Apple suggested that there was some sort of labeling
issue (where films said they were HD on their header page, but played as
4K) that they managed to (largely) fix. And it seems that the return of
this issue may still be responsible for some of the “lost” 4K movies
Apple TV 4K users are seeing now.
This doesn’t seem to explain all of the 4K to HD switches, though. It seems that some are down to Apple’s
original policy of offering free HD to 4K upgrades of films no longer
applying to titles bought in HD outside of iTunes. Say, via the
iTunes-compatible Movies Anywhere platform. Though I am recently hearing
from people saying that films bought on other iTunes-compatible
platforms in 4K are also now only appearing in HD on iTunes.
In fact, I have even been contacted just today by an iTunes user who
tells me that dozens of films he owns in iTunes — many of which were
actually bought in iTunes — have stepped back on his Apple TV 4K to HD,
having previously being available in 4K. This includes titles that are
still available in 4K on VUDU.
It’s worth noting that the specific incident of films being
completely deleted I refer to in this article happened in Canada; it’s
possible that iTunes users in the U.S. and elsewhere haven’t experienced
the same issue (yet…) due to differences in film rights between
different territories.
But actually these sorts of regional rights differences merely
underline the fundamental point Apple seems to be doing its best to
confirm right now: That the only way you can be sure you own anything is
if you’re physically holding it in your hand.
I’ve asked Apple for comment on these iTunes issues, and will provide
an update if they come back with anything worth sharing. In the
meantime, though, if you’ve experienced either films you bought
disappearing entirely from iTunes, or films that once appeared in 4K now
only appearing in HD, please let me know (with details, if possible, of
whether you bought the title from within iTunes or via another
compatible platform) via the Twitter account shown at the bottom of this
article.
You don’t own anything that has DRM – not movies, not ebooks, nothing.
“lol Android users be like-” your phone is designed to break down after a year, your apps are all programmed to draw unnecessary power after 2 years, all your accessories and hardware are arbitrarily made with only 1 kind of plug in mind so you can’t use them with anything else or get them from anywhere else, the cables are 150$ and break in a year, your phones will not charge if there is lint in the port, the stores will ask you for 150$ to remove that lint, the phone itself is 900$
But your chat bubbles are blue so that balances it out right
they literally removed the audio plugin and called it a benefit that it can now only work with their arbitrary wireless headphones. They coloured the phones a pinky gold and sold it for twice as much.
This isn’t a drag against you this is a drag against apple, the company. Their products are price hiked to an insane, impossible degree. They aren’t selling you the product, they are selling you the superiority of being able to smugly say you have an iphone.
They deliberately built up a culture of apple supremacy (especially as a class barrier but i aint even gonna go into that), and now people are making posts like “lmao android users have a bad camera” (they dont) or “lmao android users send bad snapchats” (the android version of snap is deliberately coded to force lower resolution images in order to, surprise, get people saying that exact thing to further encourage #iphoneculture)
Buy an iphone if you want lord knows I’ve bought frivolouss things but can you PLEASE recognize youre being deceived??? theyre playing you every single time you make a post about your iphone and buy into their culture to squeeze more and more money out of you and divide the market and inevitably the classes.
Apple has this this culture of arriving late with the same tech Android flagships had years earlier and calling “new”
Like the infinity screen on the IphoneX being a quite a few months earlier on the Galaxy S8.
Also the whole bit about REFUSING to have SD card slots and then charging huge premiums for more internal storage.
i'll apple your turnover 