US-based iPad Air hunters have to visit the Apple Store if they want to get information about in-store personal-pickup availability, as Apple has shut down the Apple-Tracker.com website, which offered stock data about available models near them (via AppleInsider).
The website provided a much nicer way to get information about a certain model’s availability in Apple’s online store, as it showed iPad Air availability for all models at the 20 closest retail store locations – all of that in one handy page.
I’m not really interested in picking a fight with apple so….. I guess it time to just say good bye.
But the fun is over now: the site’s developer Mordy Tikotzky received a DCMA notice from Apple dated October 17, so he decided to shut down the site.
The Cupertino-based company cited the tracker’s violation of the terms of use of its own site:
Apple.com 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.
Apple-Tracker.com had trackers for the iPhone 5s, and as the developer notes, it was readying a tool for tracking iPad mini stock with Retina display. However, it is worth noting here that the site tracked in-store personal pickup availability for the iPad Air, and it did not necessarily represent the device’s real stock availability in stores.
This, however, didn’t stop other iPhone 5s or iPad Air inventory tracking tools. US-based customers can still check the availability of these devices by using two unofficial tools: iPhonechecker.heroku.com and scraypr.com (we cannot confirm their accuracy though).
