Apple Tries To Gag Owner of Exploding iPod

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."

Comments

Re:Consumer protection?

[Arimus]

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.

Re:It turned me into a newt!

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:It turned me into a newt!

[maxume]

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

Re:It turned me into a newt!

[NitroWolf]

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.

Re:Exploding ipod? Don't worry!

[m.ducharme]

I think Sony has prior art...