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Comment by cag_ii | Hacker News Reader

This post didn't sound surprised or like a complaint to me. I think they new very well what they were getting into and handled it quite well.

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I would agree. It didn't have the crying and crisis and conspiracy tone that usually accompanies these posts. They knew what they were doing, and the tone was "it was totally worth it". Kudos to them for putting their grown-up pants on.

I don't know that I'd call it "putting their grown-up pants on" to receive free hardware in exchange for an agreement not to talk about that hardware, then publish a teardown of that hardware anyway. Keeping your promises counts for something too.

No, I'd agree that's a bit ethically questionable. I guess I'm so used to developers acting like entitled children that when someone doesn't take that approach, it's a breath of fresh air (though in a way it's kinda like an honest politician, it's a bit sad when what should be the baseline becomes extraordinary)

Maybe you're thinking of something else, but in my experience when people talk about developers "acting like entitled children" it's because those developers got screwed over by Apple for no good reason, exhausted every internal avenue for redress, and decided to take their grievance public. (Been there, done that.)

At least it's a breath of fresh air to see Apple smacking somebody down for an actual, legitimate violation, instead of the usual imagined nonsense they do.

I'm not speaking of Apple specifically; I'm referring to examples where someone blatantly knew of the risk they were taking (think violating NDA, using copyrighted content, or basing their business entirely on someone else's content) and then crying conspiracy when the rug was pulled out from underneath them. (the app store situation you described obviously being a different kind of situation)

Gotcha, and I agree with your assessment on those. I've seen a lot of pro-Apple arguments characterizing developers with IMO legitimate gripes as "whiny" and that's immediately what I thought of here, but glad to be wrong in this case.

Do we actually know that they signed anything directly in connection with receiving the dev hardware?

Yes. Unless they had some specific agreement with Apple to do a teardown and have time for research about the specific components pre-release, then they were under the same exact NDA that everyone that signed up to their developer unit pre-release lottery was under.

They even stated that they knew they had signed an NDA, but felt that publishing their teardown information was "more important" than the NDA.

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