Apple offers hush money for dodgy iMacs
Happy now?
Apple is offering cash payments to customers still having grief with their 27-inch iMacs, which have been plagued with various screen problems.
In the UK there are no 27-inch LCDs screens available to fix the iMacs so instead Apple is offering full refunds plus 15 per cent, Gizmodo reports.
Some of the machines have suffered from flickering screens, now fixable with a firmware update. But others have developed a strange yellow tint on the screens.
Despite the saga of problems Apple claims the current shortages are not due to stopped production but the overwhelming popularity of the machines.
A UK reseller told the site there was a backlog of 230 orders for the unavailable screens with no date for expected delivery.
This is the latest in a long line of glitches for the top desktop model - early versions refused to boot up and suffered from cracked cases.
The machine is still listed as available on Apple's UK online store - but with a shipping date of three weeks. ®
COMMENTS
no
hush money is paid on condition of silence - guess that's the "hush" comes in, d'ya think?
Apple's paid that before (spontaneously combusting ipods) but there don't seem to be conditions this time.
"compensation" seems to be the best description - consumers are reimbursed and given some extra money for the failure of the testing process.
It's hush money...
good customer service would have seen the product properly tested and evaluated before release so that these faults never got as far as end users.
Is there anything Apple can do that WON'T get criticised?
@20legend: It's better to let people think you're stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
I just don't get all the vitriol aimed at Apple by the microsoft masturbation brigade. So Apple screwed up with a product then did the right thing to apease their customers. I'm not aware of any other hardware or software manufacturers that have extended this level of courtesy, certainly not to the tune of 15%
By comparison, Microsoft admitted that Vista was a lame duck, despite that, we didn't see any level of compensation to their customers, not even a cheap upgrade to 7 despite the fact that they give their software away to the "right" people for free (or peanuts, I got Office 2008 Mac for £18 on the NHS scheme).
I'm not having a go at Microsoft, I use and buy both, but let's give credit where credit's due.
Tut tut
How sneaky for Apple to try and make amends and compensate disgruntled customers. Obviously the right thing to do would be ignore these customers, offer them nothing, and refuse to fix their machines as well. Because, well, Apple customers need to learn the company's actually evil, right? How are they going to learn they've made a mistake in buying from Apple, if Apple keep tricking them with, you know, decency...
Re: WON'T get criticised?
And after the *many* years of being told by PC owners that they didn't have 'proper' computers because they preferred a GUI to commmand lines and autoexec.bat files, can you really blame them?
FWIW, in 20-odd years of technology journalism, I've heard *far* more boasting from PC owners - faster, bigger, more games, more applications na, na, na-na, na - than from Mac users.
At least the Mac is a vibrant platform, which is more than you can say for Amiga, Risc OS, etc, etc.
