Apple Sued Over Siri

dr.stevil said:
and lawsuits like this is why there's a warning label on my clothes iron telling you NOT to iron your clothes while wearing them. Can't we let natural selection do it's thing? :D

I'd say that this guy has no chance of winning if it weren't for him being in California.
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I dunno, I think natural selection still is allowed to work. It does narrow the selection field slightly, but you still have people that will try it just because it says not too that never would of thought of it otherwise.

It goes something like this; "Hey! check this shit out! this shirt says not to iron it while wearing it. I'll show them how to do it!"

And then we end up with great stories of morons trying to remove themselves from the genepool.
 
wonderfield said:
The more we pay for Apple products, the less we'll have to spend on products from other manufacturers.
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This assumption is only true if everyone was planning/forced to buy an apple product regardless without a competing alternative, which they have plenty of.
 
Mize said:
I remember one Siri commercial with Santa Claus in it...they better not have been making that shit up!
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I came in here to mention this commercial specifically.

The Santa-Siri commercial is FALSE advertising for a few reasons that may not be obvious.

We're accepting that Santa is "real" for the purpose of the commercial, which while not obviously true, in the context given, we're led to believe that.

Santa lives in the North Pole and as of the airing of that commercial, Siri was not available for residents outside of the United States. So how was he able to use it?

Also, his iPhone appears to be tracking and setup to give him directions to all the houses he has to visit, all 3.7 billion of them. Again, making the assumption that we're being led to believe, he's getting directions to all those stops and Siri is once again assisting him....outside of the United States, which is against their Terms and supposedly not a feature.

Again, it's a minor silly thing, but technically speaking (IE; legally speaking) it should be considered false advertising as presented at the time.

And no, I don't have too much time on my hands. Took me five seconds to realize the above, five minutes to talk about and type it out! :)
 
Inacurate said:
I came in here to mention this commercial specifically.

The Santa-Siri commercial is FALSE advertising for a few reasons that may not be obvious.

We're accepting that Santa is "real" for the purpose of the commercial, which while not obviously true, in the context given, we're led to believe that.

Santa lives in the North Pole and as of the airing of that commercial, Siri was not available for residents outside of the United States. So how was he able to use it?

Also, his iPhone appears to be tracking and setup to give him directions to all the houses he has to visit, all 3.7 billion of them. Again, making the assumption that we're being led to believe, he's getting directions to all those stops and Siri is once again assisting him....outside of the United States, which is against their Terms and supposedly not a feature.

Again, it's a minor silly thing, but technically speaking (IE; legally speaking) it should be considered false advertising as presented at the time.

And no, I don't have too much time on my hands. Took me five seconds to realize the above, five minutes to talk about and type it out! :)
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'
What are you smoking? and Can I have some? :eek:
 
jedijeb said:
Not buying Apple products gives you tons of money left over to spend on other manufacturer's products :)
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Not buying other manufacturer's products gives me tons of money left over to spend on Apple products. It's cyclical :)
 
dr.stevil said:
lol touche
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Not really. A "common man" would not believe that the bubbles would ever come to life and so that advertisement is fine. As long as you are sufficiently outrageous as to be unbelievable you can make unrealistic statements. However, a "common man" would likely believe the Siri commercials, and so those advertisement are in trouble if Siri doesn't do what they indicate it does in the commercials.
 
It's one thing to advertise something like Siri, or any voice recognition and call it revolutionary. It's quite another to sell a product, and retroactively slap a "beta" label onto the technology.

Before the iphone 4S w/Siri, there was an application called Siri that did all the VR processing on the device itself. It would run horribly on a 3G, and decently on a 3gs or 4. Apple bought the company that developed it, and pulled the app from the store. They also moved the VR processing to their farm of servers and made every, single, VR request from simple voice-dialing "call Dad" to making a reservation at a restaurant go through their servers.

This resulted in an extremely, extremely poor user experience partially because of the 2-15 second delay after you say something to siri before it even attempts to do anything (which didn't happen in the siri app, or with voice dialing). Even if you are willing to put up with the FAR slower VR tech, and siri not understanding what you said, or even "learning" to understand you better (as most implementations of VR tech do as a requirement, and have a "training session" you usually go through to develop a baseline) you still have to deal with apple denying access (intentionally or not) to the siri service sporadically throughout the day.

At launch, i was convinced it was just overwhelming demand, or it being "beta" and them not having all the bugs out, at this point i think it's fair to start up a lawsuit when the Siri services is down, just plain down for hours out of the day, every day. Every Day Since Launch i would estimate you have a 50% chance (lower on the weekends) that you'll be able to connect to the siri servers at all.

My point in saying all of this: it's not just that they're pretending siri's ability to process speech to text and reference databases, etc.. is faster than it actually is, but that the service itself isn't a available a significant portion of the time. With a device called iPhone4S (where the precedent has been set that the S = Siri, i.e. no other apple device has it) Apple isn't living up to their end of the bargain to make siri available more than 50% of the time for requests. To put it another way, if SWTOR charged me $15 dollars a month to play and their servers were only up 50% of the time; i'd say that behavior merits a lawsuit as well. 50% uptime does not represent a reasonable effort at maintaining any service, be it the computer industry or the auto industry.
 
I think a huge percent of consumer lawsuits are frivolousness, including this one.

If you're a coffee drinker, you know it can be hot, and you probably like it better hot. So, you shouldn't be compensated if you burn yourself.

If you buy an iPad and Siri doesn't live up to representations, take it back for a full refund.
 
Stone Cold said:
I think a huge percent of consumer lawsuits are frivolousness, including this one.

If you're a coffee drinker, you know it can be hot, and you probably like it better hot. So, you shouldn't be compensated if you burn yourself.

If you buy an iPad and Siri doesn't live up to representations, take it back for a full refund.
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I'm not sure if you're indirectly referring to the McDonalds coffee lawsuit, but if you read about it (someone actually posted a link earlier in this very thread) you'd see that the coffee actually was WAY too hot. It caused almost instant third-degree burns through clothing.
 
Stone Cold said:
I think a huge percent of consumer lawsuits are frivolousness, including this one.

If you're a coffee drinker, you know it can be hot, and you probably like it better hot. So, you shouldn't be compensated if you burn yourself.

If you buy an iPad and Siri doesn't live up to representations, take it back for a full refund.
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People keep using this reference, but that coffee incident was a legitimate case.. the coffee was kept at an unnecessarily hot temperature. (180-190 F) Your average hot cup of coffee doesn't cause third degree burns when it comes in contact with your skin..

She only sued McDonalds after they wouldn't help her pay her medical expenses -

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
 
ir0nw0lf said:
With the cell phones, I see lots of fine print like sequences shortened, etc.
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I'm just going to make fun of you. Life is not shortened by a commercial. They should show real-time and PAY for it for a lengthy commercial therefor less would less and NOT be false advertising. Correct me if I am wrong but WHY cant APPLE spend 5 Minutes for a single commercial vs 6 of the same short ones. Why not buy a Advertising block, like seen on late night /early morning infomercials
 
You know Fazio's attorney is somehow hoping this case goes through so he can collect his 70+% of the lawsuit payout and make a nice chunk of change in the area of a few million and retire. I would be if I were Fazio's attorney.
 
MavericK96 said:
I'm not sure if you're indirectly referring to the McDonalds coffee lawsuit, but if you read about it (someone actually posted a link earlier in this very thread) you'd see that the coffee actually was WAY too hot. It caused almost instant third-degree burns through clothing.
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Actually if you did further research you'd find out that the coffee was on par with standard coffee brewing temps and well below the boiling point of 212Fsuggested for instant coffee. Also the lady spilled the coffee on herself and sat in it for 90 seconds, where even if the temperature was far lower it would've caused the same amount of burn, but even at the standard temp it only takes a few seconds to cause the burn.
 
Andrmgic said:
People keep using this reference, but that coffee incident was a legitimate case.. the coffee was kept at an unnecessarily hot temperature. (180-190 F) Your average hot cup of coffee doesn't cause third degree burns when it comes in contact with your skin..

She only sued McDonalds after they wouldn't help her pay her medical expenses -

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
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Except coffee is best brewed at 195-205 degrees.

According to the SCAA, the optimal water temperature for coffee is 92 - 96C (197.6 - 204.8F) for 90% of the contact time.
 
Andrmgic said:
People keep using this reference, but that coffee incident was a legitimate case.. the coffee was kept at an unnecessarily hot temperature. (180-190 F) Your average hot cup of coffee doesn't cause third degree burns when it comes in contact with your skin..

She only sued McDonalds after they wouldn't help her pay her medical expenses -

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm
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Her medical expenses were 11,000 but she was suing for 20k when it was her fault for trying to store a cup of hot coffee between her legs while twisting the top off and then allowing the hot liquid to sit for 90secs
 
Ryan45 said:
Except coffee is best brewed at 195-205 degrees.

According to the SCAA, the optimal water temperature for coffee is 92 - 96C (197.6 - 204.8F) for 90% of the contact time.
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Doing a simple Google search for "Coffee temperature" I saw more like 150-175F for "optimal" coffee temperature. Most sources seem to think McDonald's 195-200F was way too hot.
 
Also is worth pointing out that there is a difference between brewing temperature and serving temperature.
 
I should sue Kool-Aid because the Kool-Aid man didn't come blasting through my wall. If that actually happened though, I could sue them for breaking my wall. It's a win-win right?
 
Andrmgic said:
People keep using this reference, but that coffee incident was a legitimate case.. the coffee was kept at an unnecessarily hot temperature. (180-190 F) Your average hot cup of coffee doesn't cause third degree burns when it comes in contact with your skin..
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Coffee can't be hotter than 212, which doesn't cause severe burns for most people if they spill a cup. McDonald's served their coffee very hot because that's how customers like it. That woman was a life-long coffee drinker who should have been held accountable herself, knowing the risks inherent in ordering coffee.

Now, all our coffee is worse, if not more expensive, because of liability fears. Just like a lot of things in life, thanks to excessive liability payouts.

The old woman could have tripped on a curb, walking into McDonald's, and broken bones, because her age made her unsteady and her bones brittle. "McDonald's should have clearly marked the curbs... McDonald's wasn't very sympathetic... Curbs should have rails... Scores of people [out of billions of visits] have fallen going while going into McDonald's restaurants, so McDonald's knew of the problem and still did nothing...boohoo..."

And, if this guy doesn't like Siri, he should return the iPad, and not be given the time of day by the courts.











She only sued McDonalds after they wouldn't help her pay her medical expenses -

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm[/QUOTE]
 
pgwalsh said:
While I agree that it's wrong for companies to over sensationalize their products and Apple is definitely guilty of this, I don't believe in frivolous lawsuit's either. This is definitely frivolous and someone trying to make a buck. That being said, I think Apple should be warned or fined for over sensationalizing their product. I don't think people are stupid for believing the commercials, but maybe a little naive. If they don't have a grasp on technology, they may be easily fooled and disappointed.
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Whatever makes advertisers stop making false claims about stuff the better. if advertisers can't visually embellish the performance of their product there will be more adverts showing more abstract concepts such as king kong and godzilla fucking after getting all crazy n shit on insert energy drink here. and that's a good thing.
 
I think I fall into the agree category on this one. The commercials are WAY out of bounds from what siri is/does. is it my mom's responsibility to magically know that Apple just wants Siri to function that way? i don't think so.

I finally disabled Siri when it couldn't tell me what time the Super Bowl was. "You don't have any Super Bowl scheduled"
 
Ididar said:
Valid as all heck. I've had to convince some members of my family that ... NO ... they do not need a damned iPhone (or any smartphone) because they barely use their basic cellphone that they have. And, since they couldn't answer the question about what they felt they needed it for ... the answer for me was simple ... don't buy one. Basically, I got the impression they were going to get the iPhone instead of an iPod which was the stupidest thing in the world since they planned to let their 3 year old and 6 year old kids play games on the iPod ... and drop it or toss it across the room when they get angry. Once I explained the stupidity of having your kids play games on your only cellphone they changed their mind.

But, they were fully prepared to go buy an iPhone and primarily use it to let their kids play games on it ... all because of the commercials.
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There's the key word, "Need" and not "Want". If you can't tell the difference no further explanation is required.
 
Oldie said:
To be honest I kind of do too. Having some knowledge of voice command use (seeing as how Android had it for ages before Apple decided to invent it) I was pretty damn amazed at how it was portrayed in advertising and was pretty sure there was absolutely no way it worked that well at this point in time. Some hands on confirmed what I thought.

A quick search couldn't find it, but weren't they also in some trouble for showing an Iphone or an Ipad working significantly faster in an ad than was possible on the actual device? It sounds like they need a lesson on why it's bad to mislead consumers.

I mean seriously watch this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcWzMTTde2M

If you have an Iphone would asking several of those questions actually net a useful result?

Also this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnUg_qfEarg&feature=related

They seem to not show the users having to repeat themselves 3 times and then give up and do it manually because SIRI can't understand them, which happens frequently.
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Actually I have to say that after trying my brothers iPhone I would say its pretty good I didn't find myself repeating and generally it got the right answer.
 
Stone Cold said:
Coffee can't be hotter than 212, which doesn't cause severe burns for most people if they spill a cup.
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Uh, that is simply not true. 180-190F will cause 3rd degree burns in 2-7 seconds.

McDonald's served their coffee very hot because that's how customers like it.
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[citation needed]

The two likely scenarios I've heard about McDonald's choice of temperature is to cut down on free refills due to reduced consumption rate and so that it is still hot after a car ride to work.

That woman was a life-long coffee drinker who should have been held accountable herself, knowing the risks inherent in ordering coffee.
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This just doesn't make any sort of sense. I've spilled coffee on myself before - I didn't get 3rd degree burns, 8 days in the hospital, skin grafts, and a 2 year recovery period. That is simply too fucking hot.

Now, all our coffee is worse, if not more expensive, because of liability fears. Just like a lot of things in life, thanks to excessive liability payouts.
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No, it really isn't. First of all, the bulk of the damages were punitive because McDonalds ignored 700 other complaints and repeatedly ignored warnings. They weren't a first offender. Second of all, the initial $2.7 million punitive damages were based off of 2 *days* of revenue from *coffee alone*. And it was later cut down to $640,000. The lawsuit barely showed up on McDonald's balance sheet. Finally, you're not going to McDonald's for a finely brewed cup of coffee, you go there because it's quick, convenient, and they have a drive thru.

The old woman could have tripped on a curb, walking into McDonald's, and broken bones, because her age made her unsteady and her bones brittle. "McDonald's should have clearly marked the curbs... McDonald's wasn't very sympathetic... Curbs should have rails... Scores of people [out of billions of visits] have fallen going while going into McDonald's restaurants, so McDonald's knew of the problem and still did nothing...boohoo..."
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The result of the lawsuit was *not* marking "contents is hot" on the cup, it was reducing the temperature from 180-190F to 158F.
 
trav04 said:
I'm just going to make fun of you. Life is not shortened by a commercial. They should show real-time and PAY for it for a lengthy commercial therefor less would less and NOT be false advertising. Correct me if I am wrong but WHY cant APPLE spend 5 Minutes for a single commercial vs 6 of the same short ones. Why not buy a Advertising block, like seen on late night /early morning infomercials
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Who the hell make 5-minute commercials?
 
Azhar said:
Who the hell make 5-minute commercials?
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Extenze makes 30 minute commercials at 3am in the morning. But you're right... that would make for some stiff competition in the wee hours.

*drum roll*
 
pelo said:
Extenze makes 30 minute commercials at 3am in the morning. But you're right... that would make for some stiff competition in the wee hours.

*drum roll*
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That's infomercial - a show of it's own. I'd imagine if Apple made 5 minute commercials, they'd get lynched by their viewers. Remember the long Windows Vista commercial with Gates and Seinfeld? Lots of angry people then too!
 
I do not but youtube probably does.

Uh.. it's weird. In some cases you don't exactly need fine print (like the scrubbly bubblies) but there are certain scenarios where it would make more sense. Ultimately it boils down to common sense: coffee is hot, magical bubble people don't exist and won't clean your toilet and companies will exaggerate the performance of their products. When it gets technical, say with hardware/software, then the fine print would make sense -- like a car only accelerating to 60mph in 6 seconds in a lifelike scene. But if it were done with magical lights and the car was going at light speed that's where common sense should kick in. Unfortunately, our court system, though founded on the principle of common sense and rationality, often neglects to take into account the two in the court of law.

This lawsuit with Siri has nothing to do with that, though. Siri doesn't "claim" anything other than what's in the commercial. Apple never states its a personal assistant with no errors, but rather that the uses that were represented in the commercial are factual and may be replicated by end users. And guess what? they can.

I'd jump all over the apple hatewagon, but this just ain't one of them times.
 
i think there is a fine line for this kind of lawsuit.
on one hand, the commercials do make "siri" look like having a personal talking secretary. on the other hand, where do we draw the line on suing advertising. if the weather is sunny and birds are chirping when an actor on the commercial is using a product, does that mean the weather will be sunny with birds chirping for a customer with the same product?
Miss leading? yes, imo
Negligent misrepresentation? no, imo

personally, i hope apples dies a horrible death, cant stand that fricken company.
But they make great products, just not for me.
 
dr.stevil said:
and lawsuits like this is why there's a warning label on my clothes iron telling you NOT to iron your clothes while wearing them. Can't we let natural selection do it's thing? :D

I'd say that this guy has no chance of winning if it weren't for him being in California.
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Oh come on, who hasn't been running late, seen that one nasty wrinkle and thought "Well, maybe if I'm quick enough..."
 
Azhar said:
That's infomercial - a show of it's own. I'd imagine if Apple made 5 minute commercials, they'd get lynched by their viewers. Remember the long Windows Vista commercial with Gates and Seinfeld? Lots of angry people then too!
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I actually thought those were pretty funny. Rather see that for 5 minutes or whatever than a bunch of retarded 30 second commercials for 5 minutes total.
 
Stone Cold said:
Coffee can't be hotter than 212
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Not quite. Water can't be hotter than 212F. Once you add Milk, Sugar, and coffee/coffee mix (some have salt in them) to it, the boiling temperature rises, much like when you add salt water when making pasta, or when salting a driveway/road for snow (salt also lowers the freezing temperature as well)

I haven't done any tests, so i don't know exactly HOW much hotter milk/sugar/coffee allow the boiling point to rise to, but it will be higher than 212. Also, when using a microwave to heat/reheat water based liquids, there's a potential for it to become super-heated due to a lack of nucleation sites resulting in an explosion similar to dropping mentos in a bottle of diet coke if you were say, add some sugar to it when super-heated.

see the FDA for more info: http://www.fda.gov/Radiation-Emitti...YouRadiationEmittingProducts/ucm252762.htm#11
 
Beta tag or not, you can't advertise one thing and deliver something that doesn't remotely resemble it in reality.
 
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