Apple made it quite clear that the whole thing was under NDA and you were not to talk about it under any circumstances. This was mentioned repeatedly throughout the process.
I'm no fan of Apple's App Store policies, but this one is entirely iFixit's fault.
> I'm no fan of Apple's App Store policies, but this one is entirely iFixit's fault.
Not necessarily. It's not clear that Apple's rules were reasonable. If the dev unit is identical to the production ones then an NDA is unreasonable unless it was only under NDA until an embargo.
Why would you assume iFixit didn't violate the NDA? The NDA said you couldn't talk about your Apple TV developer hardware until the final Apple TV shipped. It hasn't shipped yet, and won't for a month or so, while iFixit already posted their teardown a week ago. That's a pretty obvious violation.
It's not like iFixit went to a store, bought something, tore it down, and are getting punished for publishing the pictures. They got prerelease hardware for free (technically for a dollar plus sales tax) in exchange for an agreement not to talk about that hardware for a while. Then they talked about it anyway.
Well, that's what they did. It's called lying (or in legalese, violation of contract) and the repercussions are that their relationship with Apple is damaged.
This might well be the last pre-release thing they ever receive from Apple. So, sure, things aren't black and white, but they didn't exactly leave room for Apple to respond positively, especially given Apple's rather well known positions on leaked information.
I love how a bunch of nerds get super upset over iFixit doing a teardown on prerelease hardware (lying, violation of contract (shrink wrap at that)). So much easier than getting upset about things that matter. I'd say it ranks about as high as jaywalking.
I see little room for shades of gray in a scenario where someone gives you $150 of hardware for free and all they ask in exchange is that you wait two months before talking about it.
To me it doesn't matter if the rules were unreasonable or not. If you accept an offer under specific rules, you have voluntarily bound yourself to them (moral, regardless of legal).
100% absolutely "necessarily". Ifixit broke the rules, and got a light punishment for it. It doesn't matter how you feel on the matter, or if the end product is the same as the dev kit.
They broke the rules, and saying things like "Not necessarily" is reckless and an uneducated statement, which is simply not acceptable in HN comment sections.
Thanks for the detail. It is interesting that violating an NDA about physical hardware results in getting your software pulled from a sibling app store. Clearly an android app would not be similarly affected. Though it does seems like they are getting a light punishment considering violating NDAs can have severe legal and financial consequences.
They won an Apple TV in a prerelease developer lottery, rather than being sent a demo unit by Apple like they do with the press.
> Unfortunately, iFixit’s app was tied to that same account, so Apple pulled the app as well.
This doesn't seem like a coincidence: _because_ they are iOS developers, they were able to receive an Apple TV unit.