Apple's "warranty"... *shakes head and sighs*

Sandinista said:

It only offered certain appointments at oddball hours of the day. I thought it was because I didn't have AppleCare that it wouldn't let me request a time of my own. Sorry again ;D

Click to expand...

Haha no. It was probably because all the good times were already taken!

Eric559 said:

Haha no. It was probably because all the good times were already taken!

Click to expand...

Yeah, you are probably right about that ;D

DarkArt said:

If my device, that I just shelled out a large sum of money for, is covered by a "1-year manufacturer's warranty," then why should I have to pay to determine if it's defective?

Click to expand...

Since apparently I was not clear enough the first time, please allow me to clarify.[/QUOTE]

YOU WON'T HAVE TO PAY IF IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT. APPLE IS NOT ASKING YOU TO.

You will only have to pay if Apple determines that it was not defective, and that you were at fault.

I know I haven't damaged my phone.

Click to expand...

Then you should be just fine letting Apple do its thing. You didn't damage it, Apple won't charge you. If you are refusing to accept the possibility of the diagnostic fee, then it's not surprising that Apple finds you suspicious.

technologist said:

Since apparently I was not clear enough the first time, please allow me to clarify.

YOU WON'T HAVE TO PAY IF IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT. APPLE IS NOT ASKING YOU TO.

You will only have to pay if Apple determines that it was not defective, and that you were at fault.

Click to expand...

Actually, Apple (the agent), was TELLING me I have to pay for support.

Then you should be just fine letting Apple do its thing. You didn't damage it, Apple won't charge you. If you are refusing to accept the possibility of the diagnostic fee, then it's not surprising that Apple finds you suspicious.

Click to expand...

No, I am not going to let Apple "do its thing," or pay for something that's under warranty. That defeats the purpose of having a warranty.

If Apple wants to make that assumption about me, that's fine. I can make the assumption they do not like to keep loyal customers who have put out a lot of money on their products in the past, and still is putting out a lot of money to them. Sure, I'm one person, but I'm sure they would rather have that one person give them money, then some one else (whether it be Microsoft, or whoever).

Like I said originally, I got the point of what you were saying and I understand it, however I don't agree with it. I am not willing to pay for a defective device if its under a warranty.

Regardless, I'm going to the Apple Store in a week to get the problem fixed.

DarkArt said:

Why would I spend $400+ on a device just to treat it like garbage? This is my 9th cell phone in the past year and was really hoping it would put an end to my bad luck with cell phones...


I know I haven't damaged my phone...

I'm sick of spending hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on hardware, only to have it fail on me. I get that during production lemons happen and maybe that's the case, I don't know.

I treat my high-priced items with more respect than I have for most of the people I know.

Click to expand...

I have this friend and he's a really nice guy to hang out with, but he has terrible luck with women. He must have been on 40 or 50 dates in less than 18 months, but has never gone on more than 2 or 3 dates with the same woman in that time.

Guess what?

The reason they never want to see him again, is NEVER his fault - it's always them. They're always weird or 'too keen' or something. Apparently he treats them with the utmost respect, he's funny, courteous, interesting and thoughtful and never too forward (or at least this is the story I get when we grab a beer together).

It seems like you have a serial problem with hardware, and you think it's always the hardware that's at fault. After 9 cell phones in a year, I might start wondering why I was having such bad luck and stop lashing out at the companies that provided them.

What Technologist said is perfectly reasonable. Perhaps you misunderstood 'Steve' on Tech support - I have been to the Genius Bar before expecting to pay a fee, and didn't have to pay a dime.

As I said, twice, I understand and I get his point that he was trying to make.

And maybe I was over-exaggerating a bit, and I will elaborate on my frustrations with cell phones over the past few years.

Since 2006, I've gone through:

Razr v3c - had an issue holding a charge, they gave me a new battery AND charger (still didn't fix the issue), they sent it out and found out the cause of the problem was a loose screw inside, which was fixed under warranty.

MotoQ - I upgraded to this near the end of my contract with the v3c because I wanted to go down the Smartphone path - this phone wasn't even activated when I left the store, because they said they were having problems and didn't really go into detail as to why. When I called in 3 days later (as instructed by the store rep), I finally had the phone activated, but it NEVER worked properly.

Calls wouldn't come through and SMS was very delayed. I would randomly get voicemail notifications. They were legit vm's, but the calls never came through and the phone never rang. The only thing on this phone that worked for me was tethering it to my PC for Internet access.

After speaking with a rep at the store again, they replaced it with a brand new one. I had the exact same issues I described above, except the SMS was working a bit better, then it stopped again. I called tech and the agent sent an "urgent" message to my phone to flush through the data. After that, I received A LOT of SMS messages, I'm talking 75+, all at once.

The phone calls still didn't come through properly. I could make calls, but that was it.

After speaking with another rep on the phone, describing the problems and what was done to fix it, they gave me the value of the phone ($350 at the time), to go towards a new phone.

This brought me to the HTC s720. Even after the $350 discount, I still had to pay almost $200 after tax to get this phone. I received it in the mail a few days later and was super stoked about it. Called in, had it activated, and everything was working amazingly!

That was, until about a month or so down the road, the phone would randomly power off/restart. Windows Mobile 6 would freeze, applications would stop working. Calls/SMS worked good though. The overall performance of the phone completely went down hill. When trying to play MP3's in WMP, it would either automatically skip to the next song, or play 10-15 seconds of a song then skip, or give me random error messages which I did research and didn't find a lot of info/fixes to the problem.

The buttons on the front of the phone also stopped working, and I had to slide out the keyboard to dial.

When on the phone with tech, he had me power-cycle, which took almost 20 minutes, even he was shocked. After several attempts, we finally got it up and running again and he did troubleshooting which did not help at all.

Telus replaced this phone with a refurbished one. Everything worked great for a few weeks, then the exact same problems started happening again. The funny thing about this is, a good friend of mine bought the same phone, and she had almost the exact same problems as me. She ended up getting a free BB Curve out of it.

Telus replaced this one again except with a BRAND NEW phone. And once again it worked great for a few weeks, then it went downhill. Telus wasn't going to do anything for me from here on in. This made me mad, because I know that typically in hardware issues, on the 3rd time of being replaced, you'd get a different phone. I used to work for T-Mobile, and I know this is true with them as I had to do the replacements.

I also know Telus does this, because as I mentioned earlier, my friend had hers replaced with a Blackberry Curve. So then I called to suspend my service until I could afford to buy a different phone.

It turns out the agent ended up canceling my account, and stuck me with an ETP of $500, on top of my balance. After speaking with several supervisors about the issue, they wouldn't do anything for me either.

When I was first with Telus, I never had an issue with their customer service, or their service in general. I actually praised them to other people I knew when they asked me about cell phones and service.

This brought me up to 2008. I went out and bought an LG285 last October. This also with Telus, and pay as you go. This phone worked better than anything previous (apart from the v3c, that phone was amazing). It's currently being used by my girlfriend and is working fine. There was a small issue a few days ago where it would say fully charged when it was plugged in, but as soon as you unplugged it, it would power off. Then it went back to normal - weird.

In the beginning of March, my girlfriend and I both both LG Rumors on Virgin Mobile, because I hated texting with T9 and wanted a full keyboard. These were inexpensive phones and did what I wanted (apart from email/browsing).

She never had a problem with hers, but about 2 or 3 weeks of having mine, my SMS would bounce back, or be very, very delayed. Calls didn't come through and dropped frequently. The phone would also randomly restart. Since it was so cheap to buy this phone, I just used it till I got my 3G iPhone and sold it to a friend.

I don't know if she's been having problems with it as she's a friend of my girlfriend's and I don't talk to her or see her that often.

April 2009, this is when I got the iPhone 3G, and everything was working amazingly up until about a week or so after 3.0 came out.

After re-reading this post, I have found out that it was, in fact 9 separate phones (even though some are of the same model), in the past 3 years for me.

That's a lot of time, money, and effort spent on hardware/service.

I'm hoping now you can see why I'm so bothered by this situation. I would not waste my time typing this if I was just making it up. Hopefully the Genius Bar can help me. I'm also going to go to the Rogers store and see what they say first. If neither can help me, I might just get rid of the iPhone and go with a Blackberry. I'm almost thinking I should've just done this from the beginning.

In regards to possibly misunderstanding Steve, I definitely did not. I asked him flat out "so I have to pay for tech support to determine if the unit is defective or not, before you (Apple) will repair/replace it?"

He said yes, and provided the "one-time issue" call @ $35, or to purchase AppleCare for iPhones @ $79, then call tech to determine the problem and go from there.

It's really quite odd that you keep having so many repeated hardware problems. Solid state electronics rarely "go bad", there's usually external influences (temps, humidity, etc). As an aside (and not to minimize your issues), when you do get this problem sorted out, I would pay close attention to the environments you expose your equipment to. Areas of high humidity (bathrooms, saunas, etc), high temps (in a car, during the summer) or other extreme conditions might be the culprit behind this string of failures.

Just something to think about.

The only environments my phone goes out to, is in my apartment, which is usually room temp or slightly cooler due to central-air.

When I'm out and about, it's in my side-bag (with a case/screen skin), unless I'm using it. And according to Apple's manual for the iPhone, it should function normally between . When it's raining outside, I don't use it, and it never goes in my bathroom.

I get what you're saying though.

I just really want this "curse" of bad hardware to end. I just want a phone that I can rely on and that works properly.

I didn't mean to come off as arrogant or anything, I'm just really frustrated.

I hope this all gets solved for you.

That one phone where they tightened an internal screw and it fixed it, I had a old Nokia that did that. Was giving me issues and one screw on the board was loose. Tightened it and it made the connection and never messed up again!