Apple patents tool to catch gear abusers red-handed
So you spill a coke in your MacBook. Or dunk your iPhone on a drunken night. You clean off the sticky parts, clomp on down to the Apple Store, sidle up to the Genius Bar…and say “I don’t know what happened..it just won’t start.”
Today, Apple already has liquid immersion sensors inside its devices that can warn technicians that you sent your iPod for a swim and they’ll accordingly deny your warranty claim.
But what if you baked it in a hot car? Or dropped it without showing any outside damage? Apple’s currently got no way of determining whether its device failed early or the user was to blame in these cases. But they’ve patented a new technology–that may or may not be coming soon to your new Apple device–that will tell the company if you’ve been a less than careful customer:
A technique is provided for detecting whether consumer abuse has occurred in an electronic device. In accordance with this technique, a system is provided for detecting the occurrence of a consumer abuse event and storing a record thereof. In one embodiment, the system provides one or more sensors coupled to an abuse detection circuitry for detecting the occurrence of an abuse event. The system may further provide a memory, wherein upon detecting an abuse event, the abuse detection circuitry may store a record of the abuse event into the memory. The system may further provide an interface by which a diagnostic device may access the memory and analyze the abuse event records to determine if an abuse event occurred in the electronic device.
The full patent application can be read here.
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