I love my iPod. Aside from my SEX1, it’s my favourite piece of kit and I use it every day.
Fortunately, it has never exploded, but if it did, I would never be able to tell you about it anyway. That’s because it has now emerged that Apple – wonderful, lovely, ethical, not-Microsoft Apple – are trying to hush people up when their iPods explode by forcing them to sign gagging orders if they want their money refunded. That’s nice. Friendly.
Apple attempted to silence a father and daughter with a gagging order after the child’s iPod music player exploded and the family sought a refund from the company.
The Times has learnt that the company would offer the family a full refund only if they were willing to sign a settlement form. The proposed agreement left them open to legal action if they ever disclosed the terms of the settlement.
The case echoes previous circumstances in which Apple attempted to hush up incidents when its devices overheated.
Which – to me, at least – doesn’t look like the most friendly or customer-orientated settlement offer for a defective product which could potentially have seriously injured its 11-year-old owner (yes, I know she looks older) because it exploded.
Boom.
Much like the Trading Standards officials quoted in the article, I can completely understand why Apple want these incidents hushed up: Apple fans are generally hysterical, leftie drama-queens and wouldn’t want to risk damaging their freshly waxed legs by putting an iPod Touch in their Guess jeans’ pocket.
Fortunately for Steve Jobs, his brand remains safe. All he has to do is to add some feature onto an existing product – ideally a feature which should have been on the existing product in the first place (and maybe an extra letter onto the name) – and the blinkered Apple fanboys will go wild and bombard twitter with overly excited tweets that OMG! it’s going to be, like, SO much better than their current Apple product and they CAN’T WAIT!!!!, helpfully forgetting that their current Apple product should really have done all that stuff already.
They’ll be so busy running off to the loo with pictures of the new over-priced phone/laptop/MP3 player that all the exploding iPod issues will be forgotten long before they go out and spend stupid amounts of money on the new device because it will impress their arty-farty friends; after all, it’s got that little logo on it and it may not explode.
Additionally, South African Apple fans will seek sympathy from similarly brain-washed individuals over the price of Apple products and how we only get the new stuff weeks after it is released in the US; crying about discrimination, while conveniently ignoring the fact that this happens here with every make, model and manufacturer of anything vaguely technological.
Yes folks, believe it or not (and some of you won’t) Apple is a big, ugly, capitalist company which is in business to make money. It doesn’t matter how trendy you think their products are or how cool it is to have the latest thing which looks exactly the same as the last thing does or did. There are very few people who find your chatter about memory size or connectivity exciting. They’re smiling and nodding just to be polite and because they’re waiting for the big bang when you play your next Jonas Brothers track.