My Letter to Apple
I have been a loyal Apple customer for years, have owned several computers, iPhones, iPods, personally and for my business, I also have turned numerous people on to your products. However the latest software update for the Apple iPhone absolutely disgusts me. I owned the first generation iPhone and it would charge with my built in iPod stereo connection in my car, I thought this was a great feature. However with the third generation iPhone it would not charge the device for some odd reason, even though it is the same connection. My father also experienced this with his aftermarket car hookup. I understand this is your poor attempt to control the market place and make people buy your over priced accessories. Over time I grew to accept this fact and was a little disappointed by your move to do this.
Before a recent trip to Europe I purchased a Brookstone external battery to extend the life of the mediocre at best iPhone battery during my travels. The product worked great and allowed me to use the iPhone for extended periods of times between charges. Upon my return I kept the battery in my car as an emergency charge since you took away my capabilities to charge my phone via my stereo hookup with the iPhone 3GS. During a recent all day trip I needed to charge my phone, and low and behold I was greeted with a warning screen when I plugged the device in. “This accessory is not made to work with iPhone. Charging is not supported with this accessory”. This is funny because it was supported and worked fine for me before. I had to shut my phone off for extended periods of time to conserve the batter for my trip home in case of an emergency. It is obviously a software update that disabled the charging from other devices as this battery worked fine for weeks, and it works fine on my first generation iPhone. I would like to know why you took away the ability for other devices that once worked to do something as critical as charge the phone? Is it so you can make more money on over priced Apple accessories? I bet it will be hard to sell accessories to the loyal customers you keep screwing over.
I am going to educate as many people about this issue as possible in hopes that you take notice of this and stop doing shady software updates taking away valuable features that people are used to and depend upon. Your once perfect brand is now tarnished severely in my eyes. No longer will I blindly purchase any Apple product just based on your brand. I will do detailed research and consider other alternatives when in the past it was anything Apple.
I would like a response back as to why you disabled the ability for my already purchased accessories which are now worthless and a waste of my money. Also is it is possible to revert this update back to a previous version in which my external battery worked. I know I probably will not receive a response, or some canned response not addressing my problem or how to fix it, but I figured it was worth a shot.
Josh Hughes, former Apple advocate






