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Apple Fined By Italy For Misleading Customers About Warranty Terms
beaverdownunder writes "An Italian watchdog has fined Apple 900,000 euros ($1.2m, £750,000) for failing to inform Italian shoppers of their legal right to two years of technical support, recognizing instead only a one-year standard warranty. This had led people to pay extra for Apple's own support service, AppleCare, which overlapped with the government-mandated guarantee."
Where was this concerned Italian government when MTV sent over the Jersey Shore cast?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's pretty common with corporations - especially US corporations - in the EU. There are quite strong consumer protection laws that mean that a lot of 'extended warranties' are just promises to honour the terms required by law. They just offer the same service that they offer in the USA, where there are much weaker minimum standards.
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Tho years of guarantee on consumer goods is not just an Italian law, it is a European Union directive.
The EU protects consumer rights. American companies an the like need to get a clue. Try to avoid the gray areas instead of screwing the customer.
To be fair, consumer laws in the US are pretty poor and there's very little government intervention even when US companies deliberately and systematically break the law.
But this was not in the US, it was in Italy and like much of the the rest of the world, there are laws in Italy to protect consumers from dodgy goods.
US: society equals corporations and the laws reflect that
EU: society equals citizens and the laws reflect that.
elsewhere? Depends on how badly the government has been screwed by corporations (IMF, World Bank, etc...) already.
If you compare Apple Care with the Dell Next-Business-Day-Support, Apple Care is next to useless, at least in my experience. I've been asked to reinstall the OS even ofr trivial/obvious things (e.g. the soundcard being noisy even when muted, even during boot) - Dell ships a diagnostics tool inside the Bios and/or on CD, which you can go through even with a "technician" on the phone. Even if you managed to convince Apple that your Macbookpro is broken, you'll have to walk/drive it to a shop, and they'll take at least 14 days to fix it, if they manage fix it at all. With Dell, you can arrange for a technician to visit you the next day, or just have them send you the spare part in advance for easy to install things such as harddisks. This complete inability to support their own productts is really the traw that broke the camels back why I won't ever by another Apple product again.
Apple Care is better though
No, it's really not.
They have stores all over the world
Yeah, just like most big brand stores, but this is not very relevant because the store you bought an item at is presumably local to you, so who cares if they also have a location in East Jabyyp? Unless you regularly travel a lot, the chances of this being useful is pretty low.
if you are supported, they an tell you that
There's the problem. It's not like Apple Care is one of those cell phone insurance plans where it covers anything that can go wrong. Plenty of things can go wrong that they will be happy to tell you is not covered - even stuff that is not a wear-and-tear fault. Try to get a reasonably expensive part replaced, such as a video card, and they'll tell you how they found some dust in your chassis, so it overheated and it's your fault for not keeping it clean (nevermind that you can't open the chassis on most modern macs without voiding the warranty anyway). At least that's what they told me for my wife's 3 month old iMac.
Likewise my brother's 1 year old Macbook Pro had a recognized fault with its video card. It would sometimes just refuse to produce any video, sometimes to the built-in LCD, sometimes to the video out port, sometimes to both. Plenty of people with the same generation MBP had the same problem. He took it in to get it repaired, and was initially told it was covered since it was a known problem. When he went to pick it up a week later, they wanted $800 in parts in labor - even though he had been told it was going to be a covered repair. Their reason? The chassis had a scratch on it - seriously. They claimed this scratch (in an aluminum chassis) had caused the damage. They went ahead and made the repair without consulting him, and now refused to return his laptop until he coughed up the cash.
Also, if it's not this year's model, they're not going to have replacement parts on hand, and it's going to be 1-2 weeks before you can get that replacement part.
But it seems like a good idea for someone who isn't tech savvy and doesn't want to bother their friends for help
That's probably true. If you don't know how to use your computer, the Geniuses can tell you how to double click. Make sure to call ahead for an appointment, they're booked until next week, but they'll be happy to let you sit in their gallery store for 45 minutes after your appointment time while you have nothing else to do but decide if maybe buying a new one is a better path than being without a computer for two weeks while your old one is getting fixed on your own dime despite having an extended warranty.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
They have to be making a shitton of money on hardware. I bought a laptop from Sager last summer for $1100: 1920x1080 extended-gamut screen, quad-core Sandy Bridge processor, Geforce 555M, the works. Very nice machine. I wound up pricing those specs on Apple's website: you couldn't get a graphics card on par with the 555M for love nor money from Apple, and to get everything else it'd be around $2300.
The Apple machine has nicer speakers and that aluminium body, but beyond that -- Apple's got to be pocketing a large part of that $1200 difference.