Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Path: utzoo!lsuc!jmm
From: jmm@lsuc.on.ca (John Macdonald|John Macdonald|Toronto)
Subject: Re: Worthless Warranty
Message-ID: <1990Mar22.040852.3031@lsuc.on.ca>
Organization: (guest of) Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
References: <50816@cc.utah.edu> <7306@goofy.Apple.COM>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 90 04:08:52 GMT

In article <7306@goofy.Apple.COM> dwb@archer.apple.com (David W. Berry) writes:
>In article <50816@cc.utah.edu> DSONNTAG@cc.utah.edu (David M. Sonntag, MSPH) writes:
>>On March 8th (!?! Planned obsolescence???), my SE/030 hung up and died.
>>I bought it last year on April 28th, so the machine was only 10 months-
>>old.  Of course, Apple didn't make the new warranty retroactive to
>>cover all those folks whose machines would still be under a 12 month
>>warranty.  And their "generous" offer of 12 months AppleCare for the
>	I probably shouldn't respond to this, but this complaint is
>already getting really old.  Warranties get extended to longer periods
>fairly frequently.  Chrysler went from a 4 year to a 5 year to a
>7 year warranty, and offered no retrocative coverage or extended
>warranty.  Ford recently went from 4 year coverage to 6 year coverage,
>with no retrocative coverage or extended warranty.  There weren't any
>complaints about either, new buyers just thanked their lucky stars
>they got a longer warranty.  Now Apple goes from a 3 month warranty
>to a 1 year warranty, offers some retroactive warranty and gives lot's
>of other folks a real break on an extended warranty and the crackpots
>come out of the woodwork complaining that the extended warranty
>wasn't applied to every machine Apple ever made.  I guess I should
>just file this whole discussion under "Some people can't be satisfied"
>and forget it...

Well, generally I think that Apple has done reasonably well in
this extended warranty offering, but your analogy is slightly
flawed.  There was no significant public complaint that Ford
or Chrysler was offering an insufficiently long warrantee before
they increased their warrantees - they were making marketing
manoeuvres to attract customers with a new special bonus rather
than addressed a visible shortcoming in their existing product.
In addition, if you don't like the warrantee offered by Ford
or Chysler, you can always look at products from GM or Toyota
that have mostly the same capabilities - and no major difference
in look and feel.  Apple had a market of people who did not like
its warrantee but liked the competitors product even less.  When
a long-standing problem is addressed for some, it is not surprising
the those unaddressed will be annoyed.  "Crackpots coming out
of the woodwork" is an insensative and inflammitory way of expressing
yourself.  Of course, Apple could not have retroactively provided
extended warrantee to all existing customers and did come up with
a reasonable compromise.  But people bought Mac's despite the
insufficient (in their own viewpoint) warrantee because they believed
that there is no comparable machine on the market with an adequate
warrantee (and they quite possibly had to fight against claims that
a MSDOS machine was "just as good".  Such people can hardly be expected
to be happy about just missing out on the extended warrantee no matter
how neccessary it is for Apple to not lose their shirts on paperwork.

(I am not among the group who missed out.  My Mac+ is over three
years old, and neither the floppy disk failure or the SC20 failure
occurred during the one year warrantee period that Apple *Canada*
has always provided.  If I were among that group I would not be
publically claiming that Apple had done anything wrong.  I would
not have been happy about missing the extension, but I would not
feel that Apple had any obligation to have provided it to me.  Of
course, it is easy for me to say that I would have been sensible
in such a circumstance when I don't actually have to live up to
the claim.)