Another iPad mini dies in its 'sleep'. Hate Apple, warm to Sony.

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.

.. and now for something completely different, an anti-rant! Thank you Richer Sounds and Apple...

Why don’t I write more often, because all I do is whinge and moan, and it’s not healthy to write negatively all the time. My grievances are though not without substance, they are very genuine and often not addressed. ‘Often’ is quite important here, because the service I have received from Richer Sounds and Apple (Apple are now in my bad books for reasons that will appear in a later blog) left me, well, gobsmacked. In effect the ‘service’ I have been ‘provided’ by Orange, Google, Acer and ‘friends’ has been so appallingly bad that I just didn’t expect any better. I wrote this some time back, December last year, but better late than never.

The amazing Richer Sounds experience!

So first up Richer Sounds, I simply told them that I wasn’t happy with Humax’s service, and even suggested that selling Humax products doesn’t enhance their brand. They took the trouble to read my comments, and most surprisingly, offered a refund on something I had purchase almost two years ago. Initially I decided to decline the offer of a refund. I was intent with just registering my unhappiness

However the Humax box died and was subsequently replaced; I’d managed to overlook something critical. The 500GB of almost exclusively HD recordings that I had kept a backup of, and managed for over a year, using no less than an Excel worksheet to keep track of, simply didn’t work on the new box! I knew they were encrypted, and wouldn’t play on anything other than a Foxsat HDR box, but it turns out they won’t play on ANY other box other than the one they were recorded on. I’m quite sure it was just the power board that had died, had they taken it away, replaced that and returned it, that would have been fine. But they did what looked like a useful service, collect the dead one and leave you with a new one, but this knocked the stuffing out of the ‘Sky+ HD’ is closed and Humax is open and therefore better justification, and my recording efforts.

The neglected Sky+ HD box was pressed back into service, and first major surprise, new UI, it looks quite cool now, second surprise, no overnight crashes, in fact none at all. So it was never the hardware, it was the blinking software all along. Most striking is that the image quality for non-hi-def transmissions (now there’s an olde word!) are of a noticeable better quality. 

Now I e-mailed Richer Sounds back and asked for refund. They agreed. I tried to bring it near Christmas, but I was told they will be closing until Boxing Day, and as it would be busy, later would be better. So I thought, OK, maybe I shouldn’t be in such a rush to get rid of the Humax box. However on Boxing Day, I received an e-mail instead asking when I wish to bring it in! Amazing I thought, they remembered, even though I was still in two minds about a refund. As I was about to reply saying that I’ll be bringing it the next day, I thought, looking back at my messages, it is not explicitly obvious that I bought it almost two years ago, the only references was my blog post URL, and I’ll turn up at the store and be told, a refund, on a purchase that old? You must be joking. Now you might think otherwise, but I don’t like confrontations, I’d rather avoid them, and I do take a good deal of poor service before I snap and make my displeasure known. I thought I’d e-mail them and make sure that they know how old it is, the reply came, yes, the refund is on. Next step went down to the store, a chap starts taking details, another appears,’ ah the chaps who’s been e-mailing’, ‘yes it’s me’, and that was it, they started to do the paperwork for a refund. They asked for the card used to pay, and I thought, oh no, this reminds of a shoe shop argument some ten years back where they insisted I bring the card back I used to pay for it, as my brother had bought it me as a gift that didn’t fit, they were concerned that I’d be ‘ripping off’ my brother. We gave up and left back then. This time however it was a case of give any card. So I did, and it was done! Double wow! So retailers have THAT much latitude with regards to refunds, they just choose not to offer it?

Well done Apple too! (No longer! Details to follow).

Next up Apple, yes ours is an Android phones, but Apple tablets, household. Imagine my surprise when my son goes to sleep 23^rd of December, wakes up on the 24^th with a dead iPad mini. Dead, totally dead, we switched chargers, leads, hard resets (long press home and off etc.) nowt happened. So we went to the Apple store (Trafford Centre) the same day, it was detour in a planned journey, and arrived as it was closing, so I was able to ask a few questions. Is it OK that I didn’t buy it from Apple? The answer was ‘yes’. Next question, when can I bring it in? ‘The 26^th, though we prefer you book a Genius bar appointment’. So I went home and looked at making an appointment. The nearest was almost a week away, so I booked one. Then I thought, why not just post it back myself, and decided to try to book an on-line return, so I cancelled the appointment. The website went through the motions of wanting to run diagnostics with it connected, but it was dead Jim, totally dead. So with the on-line status stuck on awaiting diagnostics, two days later, we knew we’d be going by the Apple Store yet again, so we walked in and I was expecting fireworks. I am not going to describe what I was expecting, read my older entries for that sort of thing. So first up, no appointment, no problem, a chap assigned me slot that was due in 10 minutes. OK, that’s not bad. So 10 minutes passed by quickly, and a young chap had a look at the iPad, confirmed that we had nothing important on it and if wipe would be OK to get it going. He tried charging it briefly, tried to turn it on, no response. So he turns around, opens a cabinet and pulls out a box. Whoa! He’s not just about to replace this on the spot within five minutes of seeing us is he? Yes he was!  Here’s your replacement iPad, you still have 200 odd days of warranty left. Well I was stunned, I had only a few weeks back upgraded to a Sony Xperia Z1 from a Z, because I had no smartphone to use whilst Sony (or rather their repair agent SBE) took almost two weeks to repair and return it.

So with the Humax box gone, and the Sky+ HD box in use, we concluded that we really to miss being able to series link, though the desire to keep a series has now been diminished by the manner in which we lost years’ worth of recordings. So the Sky+ box is there, but no longer being used either, the ancient Sony RDR-HXD910 is pressed back into action, it was used as a DVD player, long ago. It has series link and dual tuner Freeview, but no Hi-Def. However the speed at which it operates really surprised us, the Humax box’s slowness is now all the more apparent. The series link, well it appears to start bang on time, and hasn’t missed recording a complete programme no end clipping, for the few weeks it’s been running . However the image quality is grotty to say the least. Now my telly, the Samsung 59” 3D-TV does have a Freeview HD tuner, but no way of recoding anything. It does, it appears to have the feature on the remote control, but it doesn’t work for me. There is now a new ‘fight’ on with Samsung, the start has not been good, and it doesn’t bode well for how this will proceed.