Four teenage visitors to the Palo Alto (N. Calif.) retail store were detained by employees, interrogated by the police, photographed, and then told by the manager that their mug shots would be sent to other Apple stores. The actions came after one of the four admittedly downloaded a third-party game onto a store display iPhone. According to a story in the San Jose Mercury, the teens left the store, but were chased down by the manager, who ordered them back to store, where a security guard detained them while awaiting police. No arrests or criminal charges were filed, but the manager gave the four a stern lecture, according to the story. The participants report in an IFO comment that they received an apology from the store manager, who assured them they are still welcome at any Apple store.
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Just to update, right after the 4 boys talked to the reporter, a friend of theirs (who wasn’t banned for life from every apple store worldwide) went in and talked to a different Manager and he said that just the 4 boys where NOT banned. And nobody will call the cops on them, he then invited the 3 that where waiting outside to come into the store and he apologized to them very nicely.
So just to clear it up there is no lingering confusion and kudos to Ben the manager that cleared everything up very nicely. [IFO -- Thanks. I've updated the story with your info.]
There’s always 2 sides to a story. Like to hear the other side. How did they download a game to an iPhone that hasn’t been cracked?
I’ve been thinking about this: the issue is that Apple Stores make the phones (and iPods and Macs) available to all to try. That’s great for sales and marketing but it really puts the risk on Apple. What if someone was downloading illegal or obscene material to an iPhone or Mac inside an Apple Store? As macMUcho noted, you can’t hack an iPhone if you cannot jailbreak it. So Apple needs to improve the content filtering at the stores to block jailbreak sites as well as obscene or illegal material.
gglockner:
Apple already filters obscene sites. As to Jailbreaking sites, I don’t see that as much of an issue. I assume the iPhones are restored nightly similar to how the Macs are wiped and reimaged nightly. Is this the case?
Cameron,
I know that when the iPhones first came out they were restored every night with a MacBook but it was a pretty time consuming process. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was only done every once in a while now.
Manager chasing down? Security guard and employees detaining a visitor? Police? For such an issue? This is a bit extreme. A simple “please don’t do this again with our merchandise at our store” would have been enough. I question the actions and conduct of the store manager and I hope they will be given “fearless feedback” at the very least. This will most certainly be a topic of much debate at our Apple Store.
Cameron:
It would be impossible for all of the Macs at every Apple Store to be wiped and re-imaged nightly. My understanding is that’s the way it happened when Apple first started retail, but they quickly found other solutions. Currently, all customer-facing Macs at Apple Stores run special software that, upon restart, reverts all changes made since the previous restart. Unfortunately, no such software exists for OS X iPhone/iPod touch, so they must be re-imaged.
Also, I think the only sites currently blocked in Apple Retail stores are MySpace and jailbreakme.com.