Apple's Position
From Scratchpad
A call to AppleCare UK on Fri 18 May 07 confirmed currently Apple’s position is as follows.
Owners of defective PowerBooks should take them to an Apple Store for repair. Since the defect typically manifests AFTER the standard Apple one year warranty expires, end-users are expected to pay for the repair at commercial rates. A visit to the Apple Store, Regent Street, London, UK on 24 Mar 07 established that if your computer is beyond Apple’s warranty period, and you haven’t bought an additional AppleCare Protection Plan, you may be quoted repair prices between UK£500+ if the display needs replacing and UK£673 if the logic board needs replacing, and would be without your computer for around three weeks.
A cynic might characterise such an expensive-to-repair defect as built-in-obsolescence par excellence – "sting ’em royally when you originally sell the machine, then sting ’em so hard for as early an out-of-warranty repair as possible that they consider buying a whole new machine!" However, if Apple let’s down its loyal customers so badly, might they not take their notebook purchasing money to a manufacturer like Dell, who deal with their defective-PC=free-repair obligations with honour?
To summarise: in addition to paying a high price premium (eg: UK£1,949) for Apple’s top-of-the-range state-of-the-art notebook computer in 2005, Apple now expect us to pay them another huge amount of money (eg: UK£500+ to UK£673) for them to repair a manufacturing defect!
Since the Tier 2 representative could not provide adequate answers to the questions raised by this scandal, the following day, Sat 19 May 07, a five page letter (PDF 168KB) was sent to the Customer Relations Department, Apple Operations Europe, Hollyhill Industrial Estate, Hollyhill, Cork, Ireland. The letter closed as follows.
- All of which leads me to ask you the following questions, to which, for the sake of transparency, accountability and good customer relations, I hope and trust you will provide full and useful answers.
- Who leads the team responsible for detecting possible manufacturing defects by collating customer reports from worldwide AppleCare centres, Apple Discussions forums, customer initiatives like crosspond.com/apple.php, media coverage, etc?
- How are decisions on the inception of an investigation into a possible manufacturing defect made?
- How can customers with malfunctioning computers help Apple instigate a publicly announced investigation into the possibility of a manufacturing defect?
- What influence do media reports of a possible manufacturing defect have on decisions regarding the inception of a publicly announced investigation?
- How long after the public announcement of such an investigation can we typically expect the investigation results to be made public?
- How are decisions on the inception of a global Repair Extension Program made?
Apple's wholly inadequate response was as follows.
So much for "transparency, accountability and good customer relations"! And since the display in question now has 28 vertical lines and counting, ending such a preposterously inadequate reply with a "sincere hope that this situation will not diminish your enjoyment of the products and services that we provide" seems like a sneeringly bad joke at the expense of owners of afflicted PowerBooks.
Since the reply was by snail mail (despite supplying a return email address and expressing a preference for an email reply), and contained no email address, a further letter will be sent, reiterating the unanswered questions and more.
