Purchases made on Ipad's
 

How is it determined that a purchase is made on an ipad vs an Apple computer or a smart phone, iphone. I find it amazing that three days after Christmas they are able to tell how many apps have been installed on new devices, how many new devices have been activated and how many purchases have been made on these devices.

Just amazing for me. I use them all but certainly don't claim to understand how the magic works.

Thanks for any logical answers.

Your device has a unique ID, I don't know the mechanism but I'm sure this ID gets registered when you connect to youriTunes account.

Just to be uber-geeky, the "unique ID" would be a MAC address (even they can be spoofed) that would only be known to the DHCP server that assigns the Internet IP address(es) and IP addresses typically change over time. I doubt seriously if that's how they monitor. I'd bet on software that's feeding the info back to them, not device registration. Removing "geek hat" now... :)

Each device has a unique serial number, you can find it in the "About" page and it is shown when you connect the device to iTunes. No idea if that's what they use or not.

I hear ya Matt...that would be the "software layer" that I referred to earlier. I stand corrected as I've never used iTunes, but do know quite a bit about "geeky networking hardware" and spoofing :). Thanks for setting me straight...

Well, thanks for shedding some light on it. Guess the days of being secretive about things are gone forever. Another thing is that all this tracking determined that Apple had a great holiday period. Wonder if many people return Apple products like women do clothes.

It doesn't fit me right, i don't like the color or it makes my ass look too big!

I thought I was doing pretty well yesterday just typing a brief phrase into terminal command to get the machine to stop storing local backups, I'm lucky I didn't dump my entire HD but sometimes I get lucky.

"All your base are belong to us" :)

You've pretty much hit the limit of my expertise! :D

Thanks for the input from everyone.

Thanks Wayne, I'm "out of the game" now, but is this header in addition to the TCP and IP headers? I understand how Apple can dictate "proprietary headers" for their devices, so I suspect any non-Apple's default into "other" if the header is missing, or is there another defacto industry standard for all devices now...inquiring minds and all that?

ps: I've looked at ooodles of traces over the years, and the geek still comes out at times :)

There is a defacto standard for this now as part of the HTTP protocol called "user agent strings" and all browsers send them. It's embedded in the browser itself, and it is used to negotiate content settings with the web server as Wayne said. The browser will usually identify itself, (Safari, Firefox etc) the version of HTML it supports, and the platform running the browser (Windows, IOS, etc)

For example, an ipad would send something like:

"Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (HTML, like Gecko)"

My PC is sending "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7"

This is what any website can use to determine the makeup of devices and operating systems that are accessing their pages.

Thanks David! I should have heeded my own sarcastic response that I would have probably dished out...Go RTFP :).

No Problem.. Removing MY geek-hat now :)

Apple over android

iOS vs. Android: comparing Christmas activation numbers | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog