So another day,
another blog entry, one written months ago, and found today. Time to put
Apple in my bad book of poor manufacturers. The then bane of my life, an
Apple iPad mini. In an older blog entry, I praised Apple for having
quickly replaced, on the spot, my younger son’s dead iPad, that had
literally died in its sleep. I thought nothing of the fact that it had
died after just 8 months of use. However my elder son, who takes even
more care of his hardware than his younger sibling had his iPad die on
him in identical fashion. He put it on charge overnight, and in the
morning it was dead and totally so, no sign of life. Try the usual,
different charges, different leads, try hard resetting it by pressing
home and off buttons together for ages etc. Nothing, same as before.
Well not quite the same, this one was slightly older, it was, shock
horror, 15 months old. I might as well start being disparaging from the
outset. Yes 15 months, which apparently is three months longer than an
Apple device is meant to last, after which it is beyond reasonable
economic repair and is destined for landfill. The idea being that you
pay for Apple care, which is extortionate (yes I know millions of Apple
users love it and it’s obviously only me and few others who find it
extortionate), or throw it in the bin and buy a new one.
Well I for one am not made of money, and find it outrageous that a near £250 piece of hardware when purchase was now, dead, and just after 15 months of use. So how did I arrive at this conclusion, i.e. it’s now landfill. Well time to step back in time some two months or so.
How to not get your iPad serviced in 10 easy steps.
A little background, my eldest son is 16, and I’d like him to experience the real world, so sent him on the mission to try to get it repaired. So he goes to the Apple Store in the Trafford Centre (that’s Manchester to the uninitiated) and they quote him a price of £180 to fix, but tell him that he should take to ‘3’ as it was on their contract originally and they will sort this out.
So off he went to ‘3’. ‘3’ said no can do, we need a confirmation from Apple that it’s dead.
Back to Apple. Apple provide the necessary report, all seems to be going well.
Back to ‘3’. They take the report, but now have new requirement, they want some form of proof of purchase. At this point my son gives up and comes over to me to ask for help.
I suggest he thinks about this a little, but I give in and provide some advice, ask them if they would be happy with the eBay invoice we have for the iPad.
Back to ‘3’. My son goes and asks them if the eBay receipt will be enough. They go, yes that will be fine, bring it over and we’ll sort it out.
So we abandon our iPad repair quest for the day and return home. We printed off the receipt they wanted, and went back again a few days later.
Back to ‘3’. My son gives the Apple report and the receipt over, now different staff there and they tell him a new story. Ring our call centre with details, we can’t do anything here.
Son comes back to me and his mum. Now mum decides to intervene, goes over and states that the staff members my son met previously asked him to come back with documentation. Their response was an expected, “Oh old staff was wrong” and that was that.
So back home again, I now ring ‘3’, or rather the Indian half of ‘3’ that appears to be what ‘3’ is, the shop front is just that, an utterly useless shop front for selling you things. Support? Well the support I had received from their shop is not my idea of support.
After about an hour on the phone, being passed around various departments, the whole things turns into an argument about my pay as you go account with them being useless, and that they will not offer a repair, all that I was told by the shop was irrelevant, it is the Indian half (call centre?) that runs the show from over 4000 miles away and that is that.
Oh yes, why did I declared the iPad to be landfill, well, here goes. A second hand one with a proper one year warranty could be bought for just £150! Which is less than Apple’s repair cost. Apple Care would have cost us £85. So adding 1/3 to the price and only covering it for an extra year. As I am trying to teach my son how to budget, it was not going to be an option for him to pay for that. Then again a used Android tablet would have had a longer warranty and cost less, e.g. a Sony Z Ultra, two years RTB warranty.
So we gave up, and now I have written this.
What am I sorely tempted to do? Waste £50 and take Apple to a small claims court, on the grounds that a £250 iPad should last more than 15 months and that it is their manufacturing process that’s deficient. Problem is have I got the time to do this, wouldn’t it be easier just to spent the £150 or and buy another? Probably. Not only that but if the iOS apps are not that important, my son borrowed my little used iPad 3, then why not go for an Android tablet instead?
If anyone, and it might not even be one person (!), has been following my exploits, then they may be wondering how is it that I am not as Android hostile as I used to be. Well that should be the subject of another blog entry, one that would describe how Sony included a backup program in their Android build that actually does quite a good job and made an upgrade from an Xperia Z1 to a Z2, quite a lot easier than it used to be.
Addendum:
The above was written quite a few months ago, since then
that iPad mini sat propped up near some books, and all it did was remind me of
how much it makes me hate Apple every time I see it. Yes I had a trusty local
repair chap look at it, and he told me the battery is fine, the logic board is
dead, and hence it’s worthless. I sent my son again to the Trafford Centre
Apple Store, this time to ask for a corporate address to take them to a small
claims court, and they just gave him, now a 17 year old, the URL for Apple UK
which he is meant to give to the lawyer he’s meant to hire. Truly obnoxious. No
there’s no address there, and on-line I found two, and can’t be sure which one
to use.
In the meantime I wasn’t going to make my son suffer, he
achieved 2 A*’s, 4 A’s and 4 B ‘s in his GCSE’s (all sciences were A/A*), so he
was allowed to select some treats and he chose to upgrade his ageing Sony Xperia
T to a (used but pristine) Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. He gave up the iPad 3 he had
borrowed from me, which we sold last month. Good riddance, we now have just two
iPad mini’s remaining in the household. Oh and the old Mac Mini that’s been
replaced by an MXIII 4k media player; need to sell that. Actually I did sell
it, to some moron on eBay who decided it was faulty, when it wasn’t, and then forced me to accept the return. Selling on
eBay, the stuff of nightmares. Many a story I have to tell, for another time, if ever.
The march of Sony Xperia Android phone is now reaching
saturation point in our household, two Z2’s, a Z and that old Xperia T which is behaving a
little oddly.
