If you have been trying to find a gold iPhone 5s or a new iPad Air in stock, you probably know about Apple Tracker, a simple web app that checked Apple’s inventory in order to help you find the precise model you were looking for in stock.
Or, rather, knew about it. Because it’s dead. And Apple killed it.
According to an update posted by developer Mordy Tikotzky, the developer behind Apple Tracker, the site was killed by Apple after they sent him a DMCA takedown notice.
The notice, dated October 17th, claimed that Apple Tracker is “unlawful because, among other things, the page scrapes and collects data from apple.com in violation of the apple.com Internet Service Terms of Use (see: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/terms/site.html) and Heroku Acceptable Use Policy.”
Apple cited these provisions from Apple.com’s terms of use:
Your Use of the Site. You may not use any “deep-link”, “page-scrape”, “robot”, “spider” or other automatic device, program, algorithm or methodology, or any similar or equivalent manual process, to access, acquire, copy or monitor any portion of the Site or any Content, or in any way reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Site or any Content, to obtain or attempt to obtain any materials, documents or information through any means not purposely made available through the Site. Apple reserves the right to bar any such activity.
“It was fun while it lasted,” quipped Tikotzky. But it’s still a shame such a useful service has gone away, especially considering the iPad mini with Retina Display launch is just around the corner, and all signs point to them being very hard to find.
Source: Apple-Tracker
