Posted on 06/30/2007 11:22:20 AM PDT by Star Traveler
What FUD?
So, where did I post FUD?
Your FUD is the allegations and innuendos contained in the following:
I won’t even go into the problems apple has had with product design and reliability, and their relatively crappy customer service record when responding to their problems. But people keep lapping it up because it’s “cool to own them”.
Which I had quoted in my reply but somehow got lost between pasting it in and posting it. By making such claims you were spouting or echoing FUD. I merely showed that in relation ("relatively") to other computer companies, Apple's product design and reliability were NOT problems and that there service, award winning and considered the best in the industry, were not "crappy" especially not "relatively."
This is also FUD:
Or did the battery fiasco and their $100 replacement policy never happen? No class action lawsuits were settled with that, right?
The iPod battery non-issue? The one where a few people got upset that two year old iPod's needed battery replacements and filed suit? Apple would replace the batteries on out of warranty iPods for $99. That was a price for a service. Not a fiasco. If the iPod was still within its one year warranty, or within an extended service contract, Apple replaced the battery for free.
Third party suppliers jumped in offered competing services and/or do-it-yourself battery replacement methods and Apple, responding to market forces, reduced its price to $49.
There were eight plaintiffs in the battery suit... they got $1500 each in the settlement. The lawyer who put them up to it (he specializes in such class action suits against manufacturers) got over $3 million.
Apple set aside enough funds to give 234,000 iPod 3G owners (Apple sold 23,400,000 of them so they assumed a potential 1% claim) a $50 credit toward battery replacement. As I understand it, Apple re-categorized the vast majority of those funds from a liability back into profits because of a lack of claims on September 30, 2005.
And this is FUD, too:
Ipod Nanos never had a scratching problem? The solution to which was “Buy a case!” After they marketed it as the mp3 player you can just stick in your pocket and lock stylish doing it.
Again, a non-issue. The iPod nano screen was no more prone to scratching than were the regular iPod screens that were made out of the same material. Apple never said "Buy a case," nor did they advertise is as unscratchable or warranty it against scratches. The plaintiff's case rests on this allegation in their original claim:
"In a television advertisement broadcast throughout North America, prior to and immediately following the release of the Nano, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is shown using the Nano and specifically removing it from his pocket. Seemingly, this television advertisement was designed to tout the durability and convenience, due to size, of the Nano. By advertising the product in this way, Defendant led its consumers to believe that the Nano was in fact durable enough to put it in your pocket, briefcase, backpack, etc., without doing it reparable damage to the device."Couple of problems with this claim. Steve Jobs NEVER appeared in an iPod TV ad... and Apple made no such claims because they never advertised it that way. Instead they showed a guy dancing with it with a trailing glow left from the passing iPod Nano screen.
In addition, the iPod Nano is really quite durable.
"Testing by technology-enthusiast website Ars Technica has shown that even after being sat on, dropped by a jogger, dropped four times from a car moving at various speeds, then being driven over twice by the car, and finally dropped from nine feet onto concrete, the unit's screen was damaged but it could still play music. The unit finally stopped playing music after being thrown 40 feet into the air and landing on concrete."
Apple made no design or materials changes in the iPod Nano until the release of the 2nd generation Nano but retained the same screen material and it is still selling. I have friends with original Nanos and they have only minimal scratches after a couple of years hard use.
Again, it was only a small, small minority of complaints that made headlines. At the time the lawsuit was filed, a month after the Nano was released, there were fewer than 500 comments on the Apple thread about scratches on the screen. A lot of them were people saying thing like "Mine hasn't gotten scratched" or "Get over it, you have to protect it from stuff in your pockets." Far more people had no "scratching" problems.
I went to a Cingular/AT&T corporate store (the ones selling the iPhones), here in Tulsa and saw a sign on the door....
It said that they do not keep the iPhones “on location” overnight... LOL!!
That’s how popular the iPhone is, apparently, that they have to let people know that they don’t keep them on location. What do they do... send them to a Brink’s Armored Truck overnight?? :-)
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They were also offering free activation at that store, too (I suppose it’s all of them, but this one is on 41st, near I-44). So, that might beat Apple’s price, because I think you pay for activation on iTunes...
And don’t forget..., Apple is going out of business, too.... LOL
Any decade now...
eight plaintiffs... got $1500 each in the settlement. The lawyer who put them up to it... got over $3 million.Tort reform, now.
It will succeed as a consumer device for now which is its initial target audience. I think that it will never live up to all the hype that was generated, but its taking a big step in the evolution of a device this size and how to work and interface with it.
Blackberry will still dominate with the corporate/business customers, for now.
Apple did an excellent job of making sure there was enough inventory to meet demand.
These waitlists were created when nobody had indications of how much would be available on launch day and many suspected it could be like the Xbox 360 launch were there was massive shortages, people who found a way to get one were reselling them on ebay for hundreds more, and it took months for supply to finally catch up with demand.
I remember seeing some video of a guy being interviewed yesterday saying he was buying 2 because he belived he would be able to sell the second one online for at least double the price and that would pay for his own one.
I bet he’s feeling dumb.
Alot of people had the perception there was going to be shortages and people turned away quickly at the apple stores. There wasn’t much news about how many would be available for sale at each store till this past week.
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