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Apple Changes Stance On Water Damage Policy
tekgoblin writes "It appears Apple has changed its stance on whether an iOS device is actually water damaged. If you remember when the 13-year-old girl sued Apple in December, it was because her iPhone's moisture sensors had gone off and Apple voided her warranty. Those sensors have also been triggered by simply exposing the phone to low temperatures. Now Apple says that if the moisture sensors are red but the customer disputes and says no liquid has come into contact with the device, the warranty may still apply."
This will save me a lot of money on dry cleaning.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
But good luck getting them to apply it.
Now Apple says that if the moisture sensors are red but the customer disputes and says no liquid has come into contact with the device, the warranty may still apply.
In other words, the sensors are unreliable.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
so, new phone?
The funny thing is those papers are used in semiconductor bulk packaging to serve as a warning, not that the parts are unusable due to water but that a pre-bake may be necessary to drive water out that entered the packaging as a result of ambient humidity.
So yeah, anything that involves thermal shifts resulting in possible condensation can set these off while not harming the phone in the slightest. I don't know why anyone thinks these are in any way reliable.
Translation: Our useless sensor is about to lead us into nasty litigation that will likely void our warranty-evasion scheme, so we better open the door a little bit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In other words, nothing has changed; it is still at their sole discretion if they wishes to honor the warranty.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I know the cell phone companies (including Apple in this overgeneralization) are a bunch of greedy so-and-so's, but a quick perusal of the stories at (The Customer Is) NotAlwaysRight.com will show why the Water Damage excuse is rather valid.
Such as, the borderline fraudulent:
And then, the just stupid:
(Fair warning, though... My Ghostery plug-in shows a whopping 18 web-watchers on that site. No wonder it won't come up on my phone. Or maybe it's the water damage.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
So im sure to get modded off topic but i'm reading /. on my 3GS right now
and this new layout apple does not like. For some reason i can never
see the top story. The title is always half cut off by the /. Masthead. wtf??
Its also unbelievably slow to load the page and safari seems to have a hard time
fitting the content to the phone display so who am I to sue in this case, Apple or cowboy
neal? ----sent from my ipho
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
So, what Apple is saying, never take your iDevice anywhere, because we don't believe you that you didn't get it wet.
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
I already got a phone returned back after a service technician deemed my warranty void because of water sensors triggered.
The repair service has a online digital log which says the technician spent 2 seconds (!!) voiding my warranty. I was furious when I got my three choices
1) buy new phone £450
2) return this phone BUT pay a technician service fee £50 for handling my case
3) they discard my phone for free
But the worst thing was the fact that there wasn't anything wrong with the phone except that model had a well known hardware problem with their headphone jack (it would easily jam and stay in headphone mode even though no headphone was plugged)
this was a BIG let down on a previously very happy Apple customer. Nowadays they got those damn water sensors in everything and you'll be damned if they trigger without your knowing.
How many people check their water sensors when unpacking their phone?
The problem with LDI stickers is that it just shows that the sticker was exposed to liquid. At the unnamed cellphone provider I work for failing a phone for a tripped sticker if they have insurance won't fly. We have to find corrosion or other signs of liquid intrusion on the circuit board.
But seriously people. If you use your phone in extreme conditions and it fails, that is not something that should ever be covered under a warranty. I love how they are saying that the LDI's aren't fair because if you use the phone in -20C and then go inside they can trip. Guess what -20C is BAD for your electronics. Leaving your phone in the room while you shower is BAD for your electronics. If your actively using your devices out there and leaving them exposed you deserve to lose your warranty coverage. Warranty covers defects in the equipment not defects in the user. Remember these people are in the store trying to make warranty claims because their phone is broken. Its not like the phones/devices are working fine. If your stupid enough to do something that trips your stickers Apple has the right to deny you.
Them using stickers as ways to blanket deny a phone is not unique to apple. What is unique to apple is they are the only company that pretty much forces you to go to them for support. If you have stickers tripped in any HTC/Palm/Moto/Samsung devices and your sending your device to them for warranty service, that is gonna be shipped back to you as unrepairable and your gonna be charged for shipping.
What I don't understand, is how Apple can get away with using the "moisture" sensor to void all warranties. If the damage was likely caused by moisture, sure, but I've heard examples of Apple stores refusing repair of broken buttons or other defects that clearly are not related to water in any way.
What I love in stories like this is the implication that Apple actually gets to CHOOSE when the warranty applies. This is wrong for at least two reasons:
1. You have private rights against Apple which you are entitled to enforce.
2. You have statutory rights which Apple cannot simply declare to be null and void.
On #1, you have the right to hold Apple to the warranty and to the contract of sale. Depending upon how it's expressed at the time you buy the device, the mere fact that a little sticker changes colour does not mean that Apple gets to unilaterally walk away from its obligations to you any more than you can unilaterally alter the terms of the warranty or agreement yourself.
On #2, in many places there are statutory warranties which do not give a flying fuck what Apple's opinion about a little sticker is. Again, they are likely to depend upon whether the device actually was damaged by the user through misuse, or whether it was in fact designed or manufactured in a defective way. Obviously these rights varies by jurisdiction.
The common thread is that Apple's arbitrary statements of "fact" do not in any way affect your right to have a defective product repaired or replaced, or to obtain a refund. The fact that a sticker changes colour does not somehow alter reality to mean that you did drop your device in a glass of water when you didn't, any more than a device which has been carefully half dipped in water would lead to a refund simply because the sticker hasn't changed colour.
I also wonder whether Apple implying that it is their random declarations of policy which determine whether you have refund rights might not be illegal. Certainly under Australia's new Australian Consumer Law it will be a serious offence to make false or misleading statements about what rights consumers have, and as of 2012 goods will be required to include a statement from the manufacturer confirming the consumers rights under the legislation.
Read Pynchon.
is a droid that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators
It's annoying how they seek an unreliable moisture sensor technology when theres a perfectly functional electrical insulator available for creating water proof circuits:
http://cnettv.cnet.com/waterproof-your-gadgets/9742-1_53-50003181.html
It's expensive... but worth researching into, if applied during fabrication or even just construction then such sealants could be used very sparingly and very effectively by coating only where needed.
I rubbed an apple against my Apple product. Does this void the warranty? Perhaps they should have named the company "Rock" instead. Then the SNL war skit about "iRock" would ring true.
Table-ized A.I.
About a year ago I had a phone with a tripped sensor start rebooting randomly every couple weeks. I brought it in, they said it was flipped, I said it was never wet. With no fuss they brought it into the back, checked inside, saw the inside sensors were fine. They gave me a replacement phone on the spot.
I do not see anything new about this, other then now it's in writing.
I dont know about AT&T's smartphone insurance, but when I got mine from a nameless company that rhymes with Lint, the person at the store actually told me "If it fails due to water damage, dont tell us, dont bring the phone in, call the warranty number and say the phone was lost, you'll just have to pay $50 for a refurbished one, but they wont flat out reject the warranty".
But, I know some providers wont insure smartphones, because they're so "Expensive". And if you're worried about data...remember the old addage: Backup Backup Backup!
OMG... I have a sig?
I dropped my original iPhone in the tub. I was taking a soak and reading/answering emails -- one of those hell weeks where I was working around the clock and getting 45 minutes of sleep a day, if I was that lucky. I dozed off for a minute and startled back awake, and had let the bottom of the phone drop into the water. It was dead, dead, dead. I tried drying it out with desiccant, but no luck. It had *not* triggered the sensor (it was still pure white). I was honest though, took it to the store and told them what I had done. They replaced it with the 3Gs for $100 and a re-up on my AT&T contract.
They completely replaced the innards on my uni-body MacBook Pro, gratis, when it started having power management issues. It would just shut down at random. This, despite the fact that I had previously taken the thing completely apart to clean the keyboard out after my daughter dumped a full can of Diet Sprite into it. It had been six months since that had happened, so I was confident the new issue was unrelated, and they had evidently seen enough of the same symptom to agree with me.
I imagine the experience varies from Apple Store to Apple Store, but the one here certainly treats me well. I have no complaints. I can say that for very, very few other vendors.
What happened with the 13 year-old girl's phone is that it was exposed to low temperatures and then brought into a hotter, more humid environment, at which time humidity condensed on the white sticker causing it to bleed its red color through. If condensation from bringing a phone from a cold to warm environment isn't enough to damage a phone then, YES, Apple better freakin loosen their rules about water damage or they're gonna get many more law suits. But, if condensation can actually damage the electronics and not just trigger the sensor then Apple either needs smarter water detection or they need to be more descriptive about what voids the warrenty (e.g. "No cold tempereatures" too).
I'd be so pissed if I didn't get water on my phone and Apple refused to honor the warrenty!
Environmental requirements
* Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F
(0° to 35° C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F
(-20° to 45° C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
So, do you know of anyone on this planet that lives somewhere that these temperatures, humiditys, and possibly even altitudes won't be exceeded at some point during the year? In my opinion that's a pretty cruddy stats for a personal device intended to be carried with you everywhere.
Some years ago, my original-version iPod Shuffle had an unfortunate meeting with a cup of coffee. The music playing functions didn't survive the event, IIRC because the battery got toasted, but it still works fine as a USB memory stick. Of course, a gigabyte of memory stick was a lot bigger back then than it is now, and I suppose I should try to hack something interesting with the remains.
Many years before, my Palm Pilot III had a similar misfortune, and the falling cup of coffee also took out the backup database, which was the pile of dead trees in the briefcase. (Of course it happened a week after a hard drive failure on my laptop, which was not the fault of coffee, but I lost all my calendar. :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
MOBILE phones are by definition for use in the real world. I have an iPhone4 and have the expectation that it will function in common real-world applications.
The unit repeatedly shut down at outdoor temps at or below 32 F while the device was in an exterior jacket pocket. It even shut down after being placed inside a glove and in an inside insulated jacket pocket. Interestingly, online Apple specs are as follows: (i) Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F, (ii) Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F. Does this mean that iPhones are unfit for use outdoors in large parts of the US in wintertime at temps below 32? Or on hot summer days at temps higher than 95? It is hard to believe that such a costly product is so incapable of withstanding typical atmospheric conditions, but Apple's specs seem to confirm the foregoing experience.
Temperature is related to the moisture sensors as follows: Extract an iPhone from a warm pocket on a cold, high-humidity day. The entire phone is immediately covered in condensate - presumably not just outside where the condensate is quite visible, but also inside the device's shell to which there is airflow and where the paper moisture sensors are located. My iPhone was never, ever exposed to moisture - other than the aforementioned condensate which is quite common in winter's cold, moist environment. The moisture sensor of my iPhone closest to the dock connector was discolored. I suspect that is typical of a large number of iPhones used in cold climates, and potentially enables Apple to deny many warranty claims.
Do you really think that you're any different?
Yeah.
Check out your iPhone.
I don't have one.
Check out your iPod.
I don't have one.
No, you paid all that money to be part of the Tao of Steve.
No I didn't.
Your $10 wristwatch is nearly waterproof
No it's not (I don't have one).
So why does your $300 iPhone have moisture sensors
It doesn't. Because I don't have one.
I can't believe that any self-respecting engineer would actually work for this guy.
It's for the same reasons why he does what he does. Money, and an over-inflated ego. Shit, I bet even the people who work retail at the Mac store look down on other consumer electronics retailers. The guy honestly believes he's the pioneer leading the world into the next age of enlightenment, and he's been screwing people out of money since day 1 when it was him and Woz.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What is a 13 year old doing with an iPhone? Does she even have a job? Are her parents aware of the ongoing worldwide economic crisis? Don't they know how difficult it is for us practical parents to keep telling our kids that they can't have what is essentially a toy until such time as they are old enough to need one and can take care of it properly?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Has anybody thought of the possibility that the phones went from a low temperature, into a high temperature, relatively high humidity environment? i.e. Going from your car in the winter into your nice, warm house. That might trip the sensor when moisture condenses in the cold phone.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
They refused to fix my 3GS.
I had only the bottom sensor tripped and this was due to having a long call AFTER getting out of a jacuzzi and having a rather sweaty head. Still, it at least gave me the motivation for taking my iphone apart and scratching away at metal bits inside it until it started working again.
This is the one issue that means my next phone will be Android.
Are you seriously trying to explain science in an Alabama church??? This is blasphemy and you will be burnt alive by the slashdot church of Steve Jobs
Guess what -20C is BAD for your electronics.
No, it isn't. You may not be able to operate the device at those temps due to battery chemistry issues, but no harm wil come to the electronics.
Thank you for demonstrating how clueless techs typically are.
Because if Salem taught us nothing, it's that little girls never ever lie. Now get me some matches. There be witches to burn.
A modern mobile device has to withstand the moisture from rapid temperature changes like getting outside in winter from your home.
What they do not have to withstand is being dropped into a water basin or similar ... except certain special devices which are hardened against a lot of environmental effects.
Esp when looking at the target audience, I have no idea why any court should accept apples original stance on moisture for mobile devices.
Sadly reading comprehension is a big deal.
More so in the USA.
I would consider reading a "genius" level trait for most Americans, considering the plethora of idiots I've had to walk through there email setup.
There's actually one guy in Houston, TX who believes you spell Houston "HAWSTAN". I had to fight with him in setting his SMTP address correctly to houston.[someISP].com
I've had less pleasant interactions. My first mac had some serious hardware issues that took some legal threats to get fixed despite it being only a month old.
A few years ago I convinced my SO to buy a macbook, she had to return it to Apple 14 times (!). Everything failed on it, screen, harddrive, DVD drive, graphics card, the case (splintering white plastic on the edges.
This continued until it went out of warranty, then they told her she was out of luck. Ultimately the third party shop she had bought through gave her a new macbook despite Apple refusing to consider the constant repairs as grounds for some kind of warranty extension.
She got Applecare on that and it seems to make some small difference in how they treat you when the increasingly shoddy hardware starts to break.
All in an effort to void warranties, this is made to allow them to know if someone dropped it in water, but i thought that apple extended the warranty to include dropping in water, no? I thought that was the appeal of the iphone 4, it was water resistant...I guess i am wrong, can someone site reference?
When I bought my first calculator, an HP-45, back in university, one of the selling points was the degree of water sealing -- i.e. you could dump a cup of coffee on it and not wreck it. That was a long time ago. My current HP calculators do not appear to be sealed to the same degree, neither is my cellphone. I guess that the real issue is that sales were being held back by the product being to durable when exposed to common hazards, so the design was revised to correct this. I have no problem with my laptop (or desktops & servers) not being water sealed -- if the house floods I have larger problems. But getting caught out in the rain with my cellphone is just life. Whether or not Apple and every other maker of consumer pocketable electronics goes the extra mile to screw the customer it should be obvious that we know better and have chosen not to. I would suggest that this is a more important view than whether the sales guy has lattitude on honoring the warranty.
In my experience there are two basic classes of non-techie user: there are the utterly, wilfully ignorant morons, and there's really nothing that can be done about them, but there are also a very large number of users who (admittedly foolishly) panic as soon as they sit at a computer and don't think to try to read/comprehend that dialog on their screen - if it's on a computer it's somehow "different"; these types you can normally hand a copy of this, with a smile, and they'll actually be sorting their own problems pretty quickly (although admittedly with the occasional solution of this nature).
this is my experience with apple: i have a debilitating medical condition not dissimilar to chronic fatigue. it makes me severely lethargic and has impacted my life greatly. i am currently on disability. i also have a late 2006 macbook pro which i use logic on. it heats up & shuts down so to prevent that i put a casserole dish of ice under it. hey it works. anyways one night i had extra ice so i threw it in my trash can which has a plastic liner. i never throw liquid in a trash can like that but due to my condition i decided i could do it & deal with it later. the next night i was in bed & using my iphone when, lying in bed, i set the phone on my book case, at which point it fell. i figured, shit. i'll get it in the morning. well half an hour later i had to use the restroom so at that time i decided to pick up my phone. at which point i found it in the trash can, submerged in water from the ice i threw into it the night before. i took it to the apple store to see if anything could be done as far as fixing or replacing it. they DO have an exchange program where one may give them their damaged phone and get a replacement for $199. this is a very fair practice to me. i was so happy i didn't have to pay $600 for a brand new one. so before you guys whine about how 'greedy' apple is (always amuses me how some can consider a company to be greedy as if it is a single sentient being..) at least they have a program like this. microsoft never would. speaking of, as the guy was helping me, i explained to him how it happened, due to my condition, etc. i also had my disability papers to prove it. i brought them in case there was any negotiable cost (the guy before said cost 'depended' etc. but was mistaken). anyways, at the end of my appointment, when i was to sign off on the exchange, the guy showed me a zero balance. he waived the fees completely and gave me a brand new iphone, free of charge. this was a very kind and generous act. also, as one poster cynically says "now they'll take other points into account (presumably including, but not limited to, whether there is any other evidence of liquid damage, how convincing the customer's story is, how good a mood the manager is in that day, how attractive the customer is, how much fuss the customer kicks up, and the proximity of that day's lunch break)." -i believe it's the other way around. apple has ALWAYS been helpful to me, as i've always been honest and straight with them. before my appointment i heard one of the 'geniuses' tell another customer 'honestly it's not the dumb questions. what bothers me most is when people lie to me straight to my face. it's just insulting.' so maybe apple uses those sensors as just one more piece of criteria when they know they're being lied to by some jackass who comes in with a phone that was obviously submerged. another point of generosity is where if one has a broken ipod out of warranty, they can exchange it for 10% off a new one. apple doesn't have to do that, but they do. i'd save the kdawson-esque anti-corporate outrage for someone who actually deserves it.
So not only was Apple the only company picked on for this wide-spread warranty void practice - they are also bashed when they are the only ones hinting at changing something.
Fandroids hate facts.