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Apple Tries To Gag Owner of Exploding iPod

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the streisand-this dept.

David Gerard writes "The Times in London reports that Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child's iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company. Well, at least they're not Microsoft. Or something."

9 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Consumer protection? by Arimus · · Score: 4, Informative

    What has America got to do with this story? Several pointers as to why this is a UK story (and no, despite appearances to the contrary we're not part of the US yet):

    1. Its a story from the Times - a major UK broadsheet newspaper.
    2. He obtained the iPod at Argos which I believe is not present in the US.
    3. He's from Liverpool - which, last time I looked, is in England in the context of this article.
    4. Trading Standards Institute is the UK consumer protection board.

    --
    --- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
  2. Re:It turned me into a newt! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Apple customer support is notoriously spotty. Sometimes you call them, get to talk to a human, and they ship out a replacement that arrives within a day or two. Sometimes you don't. The first time my PowerBook needed servicing, it took about 45 minutes on the phone (most of it on hold, on a 10p/minute customer support line) to get them to send a box out to collect it. They said it should be back in a few days. A week later I called them and was told it had been shipped back and would be with me soon. Another week later, I called them again and was told that it had been returned to the repair centre because I wasn't in when the courier tried to deliver it. Next call, I was told that it had never made it to the repair centre (i.e. the first two things I had been told were outright lies) - that UPS had a signature for someone at the repair centre but it had never made it into their repair tracking system.

    After eight hour on the phone (at 10p/minute) and six weeks, they finally sent me a replacement (good thing I backed up the disk before sending it in...). The replacement was DoA - it didn't even boot, it just got hotter and hotter until you pulled the battery out.

    Two weeks later, they sent me another replacement. This one actually worked, but had the wrong amount of RAM. A few days later they sent me some replacement DIMMs to install. I did, and a couple of months later, one of the RAM slots failed (this having been one of the faults that I had originally posted the machine in to get fixed).

    The next repair, they replaced the motherboard with one with a slower CPU. Then they over-tightened the hinges so first time I opened it after getting it back one of them snapped. They then failed to honour this as a warranty replacement (luckily for me, the local computer shop that was handling the repairs decided to absorb this cost to generate some goodwill).

    But over the same period I had several Mac-using friends who had repairs happen without any trouble. The most irritating thing was that all of my complaints were met by being told that Apple is consistently ranked top for customer support in independent surveys. This may be true, but it doesn't alter the fact that they consistently and repeatedly screwed up in my particular case.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Re:Picture by cptdondo · · Score: 3, Informative

    You must not have seen heavy makeup.... Try any of Avril Lavigne's followers.

    Anyway, that's obviously a staged shot, so the makeup was applied by the photographer's studio. Not surprising. Heck, I've had more than that pancaked on my face - when they were doing marketing shots for a control panel I built. (And, yes, I'm a middle aged guy.)

    What does that have to do with the ipod?

  4. Re:It turned me into a newt! by maxume · · Score: 4, Informative

    They offered you the opportunity to purchase the new extended warranty because their projections show it will be profitable.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  5. Re:It turned me into a newt! by NitroWolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dell.

    As much as I hate them, their warranty replacement is ridiculously simple and fast. Anytime I've had an issue with Dell components under warranty they ship a replacement out without arguing. They don't even require me to ship the item back first, they just ship out the replacement and include a return label that I put the broken part in and ship it back for free.

    I can fault Dell for many things, but warranty replacement is not one of them.

  6. Re:Exploding ipod? Don't worry! by m.ducharme · · Score: 4, Informative

    I think Sony has prior art...

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  7. Re:iDiots... by jacksonj04 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I used to be very similar, thinking that OS X users were being cushioned from the harsh world of real technology. Now I am a Mac user, and I'm happy to report that in fact I am being cushioned from the harsh world of having to hack the registry, of having to manually install drivers, of having to repeatedly alter system settings because something decided it would be fun to change them, of having to deal with people who say "just read the manual" when nobody has bothered to document it properly, of arcane command line switches that have no consistency between products. Instead, I can get on with being tech-savvy without the computer getting in the way.

    Don't confuse "tech-savvy" with "can find their way around the registry" or "knows which command line switch makes obscurelinuxtoolset run in the mode you would expect it to run in by default".

    --
    How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
  8. Call in Failure Analysis by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative

    The people to call when this happens are Failure Analysis Associates, an engineering consultancy that analyzes engineering failures. They started with building structural failures, and they've branched out. They call themselves "The Exponent Group" now.

    One of the things they do is battery failure investigation. These are the people your class action lawyer brings in to find out what really happened. Companies with a clue use this to fix their manufacturing processes. Whether or not Apple has a clue about this, or whether they just take whatever their China supplier gives them, remains to be determined in court.

  9. Re:It turned me into a newt! by dna_(c)(tm)(r) · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. The standard mouse since 2005 is called Mighty Mouse and has 4 configurable buttons - although you can't visually distinguish them (that actually is a flaw). Prices start at $999 for a MacBook, not $2000.

    I still prefer working on my Ubuntu desktop and laptop, though.