Negotiating with Apple
Yesterday I posted that I have to pay the full price for an update to Tiger for I came too early. Six days. Vic commented that I should try contacting Apple and so I did.
Obviously I’ve been not the 1st caller today bringing up the ‘Tiger-update-topic’ and we went right into business. After mentioning that I might as well return my box and reorder with the only drawback beeing that I wouldn’t have a nice PowerBook on my table for some days (which _would_ have been a horrible for me, but I didn’t tell them 
), the friendly guy on the other end offered me 50€ discount. Understandable. Apple would have to pay for both, my shipment back and resending a new PB, QA on the one I send back, repackaging, paperwork and I don’t know what else.
Anyhow, I wasn’t satisfied for that would be still 79€. I mumbled something about fair dealing, market share, reputation and evil competitors and the friendly guy put me on hold. On a side note: they have some nice music playing in Apple’s waiting loops. Somehow I imagined the Apple employee dancing around his desk to exactly that tune, checking his watch for 1 minutes and 26 second to go by just to tell me “sorry, that’s all we have to offer”. Just he didn’t do that.
He came back on the line telling me that he has permission to grant me a credit to my account worth 100€. 29€ to go! Well, I didn’t push it any further although I had the feeling it probably would’ve worked out to get Tiger for the ~10€ they charge for shipping for those with hardware bought after April, 12th.
Anyhow, I’m not greedy and they obviously _did_ understand my point of view or at least consider the effort of all that refund/resending, and they did not even try to talk themselves out of it. Besides that I knew that OS X.4 was going to be announced anytime soon, so I could have been patient as well. Which of course, I can’t be when it comes to new toys. All in all, fair deal for me. Ten minutes later I had a confirming mail in my inbox.
There’s also lots of discussion on this topic on the announcement on /.
April 14th, 2005 at 5:55
I’m glad that worked out mostly to your satisfaction. In the past, I’ve found that Apple is usually responsive to complaints that are reasonably legitimate. Sometimes you have to phone back to get another service rep. But as long as you’re polite, persistent, and insistent, you’ll get a fair resolution.