djhanson's Journal: Apple Vs Little Guy

I just got back from a small claims court proceeding against Apple Computer. They successfully won their argument in front of the court that adding additional memory and disk drives to a computer/server constitutes a "custom configured computer built to the customer's specifications". And therefore is not eligible under the company policy to be returned. Has anyone else heard of such a thing? As near as I can tell, Apple is the only company that has such a restrictive policy. I called both IBM and HP, and neither of those companies has such a policy. Am I the only one that thinks there is something terribly wrong with a policy like this?

Any opinions? Suggestions? Comments? Whatever?

(I almost think that this policy should rank right up there with the iPod battery scandal -- http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/ . I wonder how much those guys would charge to do a video production for my situationf.)

Dennis

[e-mail]

sucks!

[Bombcar]

Perhaps you could convince a judge to require them to pop a javascript applet every time you select an option on their website saying "This is custom! You will not be able to return it!"

But Apple, in all reality, sucks.

Re:sucks!

[djhanson]

I am beginning to agree.

At first I thoguht that they were embracing open source, and joining the community. But, now after evaluatiing there Xserve box, I really have to wonder.

Re:sucks!

[Bombcar]

They make a very nice product, but I'm afraid (just like expensive cars), that I will be buying used. Someday I might buy a powerbook, but I want to be sure I understand what I'm getting into. Personally, if one knows linux and understands enough to, say, install Gentoo or something of similar complexity, then Apple is not for them. It is too limiting.

But if my sister wanted a computer, I'd recommend Apple, simply because I don't want to be bothered with issues.

But if they became 95% of the market, I thin