Apple’s>”>suing a number of unlicensed third-party accessory makers for products of inferior quality that reflected poorly on Apple’s brands.
Of course, part of the reason why third-party accessories work so poorly is because Apple is sneaky and employ various hardware tricks to make sure that only “Made for iPod” accessories work perfectly.
The hackers over at Minty Boost have gotten to the bottom of one such trick Apple deploys to make sure that unauthorized accessories have a hard time charging your iPod or iPhone.
In essence, Apple uses secret resistors that are placed in the connectors for Apple devices: if these resistors aren’t there, your iPhone or iPod Touch won’t deted the 2.8V and 2V signals, and hence won’t charge, coughing up a “Charging is not supported with this accessory” message instead.
The good news for unauthorized accessory makers (and makers) is that once you know the trick Apple employs to stop iPod charging on non-“Made for iPod” devices, it’s pretty easy to work around. Now that the secret of how Apple gimps unauthorized accessories is out in the wild, though, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple come up with a new way to stick it to those unwilling or unable to pay their “Made for iPod” licensing fees.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
