Apple Legal: Reasonable People Do Not Believe the Claims of Apple Marketing | Hacker News Reader

Apple Legal: Reasonable People Do Not Believe the Claims of Apple Marketing

gizmodo.com

15 pointssutro12 comments

The real problem with the iPhone commercials is not that they say the phone is 2x as fast as the first generation model, but that the demonstration they give is at least 5x faster than reality. I guess the 2x claim is an easier thing to base a court case around, though.

I think this is more of a "when we said twice as fast, you should interpret it as much faster, not 2.00x as fast"

Admittedly, still a pretty weak argument.

It's the same sort of line as "5000 songs in your pocket" or whatever they used to say about the iPod. Some people read it and think "it's got enough space to hold about 5000 songs". Others read it and think of it in the context of a CD rack or something that holds exactly 100 CDs. In other words, it's got exactly 5000 slots for you to put your songs in. Something like that is common sense to most of us, but when you think about where we came from it's not so clear. A 30GB iPod could be filled any number of ways depending on codecs and bitrates. Just a few years ago music storage was measured as an exact number of minutes.

But I can sort of see where they're coming from. It's like if I trade in my sports car for an SUV and tell people how much I like it because it's got twice as much room. No one expects a statement like that to be based on exact measurements. I think their marketing is going for the same sort of tone-- kind of how a non-technical person is going to explain to a friend why the new version of a product is better than the old one. "It's great! It's twice as fast as my old one and only cost me half as much."

You see marketing slogans like this everywhere. I can imagine a car ad saying something like, "you'll never be short on power with 250 horses under the hood!" What reasonable person is going to believe the car comes with horses? I think that's what they're getting at here, and when you consider it in that context their argument makes much more sense. I'm sure with a little digging one could find enough examples to convince just about anyone that only an idiot would believe advertisements.

The headline is worded in a way to suggest that Apple is completely in the wrong or being overly harsh. The situation isn't that black and white.

I would say there is a difference between people and companies. You saying twice as big is different from Hummer saying it. They should know the dimensions of their vehicles.

Secondly I think that making a claim that was reasonably rounded up or is conservative is much more reasonable than making a bold claim and then under delivering. Saying "My patented snake oil cures cancer" and then claiming anyone who believes you is an idiot, is a pretty flippant argument. If the iPhone 3G had a 1.89x bandwidth capacity for example then the 2x claim might be reasonable.

I think the key thing here is the difference between marketing materials and facts. Marketing materials may be going for a certain tone or theme that may not coincide with fact. They exaggerate a little. They take certain liberties when describing a product or use common figures of speech that are not intended to be taken literally. Marketing materials are intended to be the hook to get consumers interested.

Take alcohol or cigarrette advertisements for example. There's always a guy out partying with a bunch of hot women. Are we to believe that if we start drinking cheap American beer or smoking we're going to have to beat the girls off with a stick? When a car dealer tells you a car is a pussy magnet is that supposed to be taken seriously? Of course, those things _could_ happen, but they probably won't.

I guess the conclusion is that marketing materials are all about the possibilities but not necessarily the outcome that should be expected from buying a product. And right or wrong, marketing materials are clearly not held to the same standards as something purported to be fact.

Marketing can not make false claims. Claims such as "this car will get you laid" can not be falsified. Claims such as "this car can go 0-60 in 3 seconds" can be falsified.

I think "twice as fast" fits with a falsifiable claim. It's a figure of speech as well, but I'd rather err on the side of protecting consumers. If a company claims something is "twice as fast," it had better be, by some metric, twice as fast.

You're absolutely right. But in the case of "twice as fast", if it is twice as fast under the right conditions then it's not exactly a false claim. Maybe the right condition for the phone being twice as fast is being within a short distance of a cell tower. The fact that at any given time a user likely won't be within that distance is certainly deceptive in that it doesn't present the entire truth, but it's going to be extremely difficult to prove it's a false claim.

In that case why dispute the claim? Or at least why not add small print to clarify the point to a layman that performance varies.

The FTC disallows deceptive advertising as well: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/policystmt/ad-decept.htm

Reminds me of the amusingly named "Carlill v. the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company" case in contract law (though nothing like as blatant): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v._Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_...

This is one of the things that amazes me, that it's not actually illegal for advertising to issue falsities in the US. I'm pretty sure that's not true back home in the UK, or at least there is an industry watchdog that can punish people who do.

Where did you get that impression? The FTC has the authority to regulate advertising, and false or deceptive advertising is illegal in the US.

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