It looks like Apple underestimated the lengths to which one Apple MacBook Pro user would go to when it came to getting his machine fixed. Famed blogger Seattle Rex has just gone ahead and posted his battle with the Cupertino giant over a defective MacBook Pro that was sold to him, and his long battle with Apple over getting it repaired.
Defective MacBook Pro user takes Apple to court & wins
The good news is that Seattle Rex won the battle in small claims court, the bad news was the ordeal he had to go through to make a point. Basically, he purchased a MacBook Pro around 4 years ago with a defective Nvidia 8600M GT GPU. When he found out the machine was defective, Apple refused to take it back and give him a refund, but instead promised that they would replace the 8600M GT boards when they failed for up to 4 years from the date of purchase.
At around the 3 year mark, it failed and Apple stated they wouldn’t repair it. Instead, they gave Rex a huge bill to have it repaired, even though NVIDIA would be the one’s paying the full cost of repair.
With already $4,000 out of the pocket, Rex took to small claims court to get Apple to fix his MacBook Pro. On court day, he found that Apple sent two people to defend the company. And what did they use to say that the MacBook Pro was no eligible for warranty? An overlocked CPU. You see, Rex paid extra to have it clocked from 2.5GHz to 2.8GHz. However to Apple’s surprise, Rex knew computers. He told the judge that the hardware in his MacBook Pro was identical to that of any other. The judge confirmed that with Apple and the case went on like that with Apple trying to throw more curve balls but Rex explaining to the judge just how nonsensical they were being.
As Rex stated, “I’m not trying to insult iPeople, at least not in this article, but during both mediation and the trial, I realized that Apple has a strong expectation that their users not be tech-savvy and, as such, Apple seems used to infantilizing and bamboozling their customers with silly and nonsensical explanations of highly technical matters.”
Seattle Rex won the case and until today couldn’t understand why Apple went out of their way to deny him the repairs despite knowing that NVIDIA would be footing the bill after confirming that they had produced those defective chips years ago.
[SeattleRex]
