Apple’s dirty secret…

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.

16 thoughts on “Apple’s dirty secret…

  1. Apple fanboys scare me. They’re becoming the equivelent of those religious people that ring my bell once a week asking me to pray.

    Unfortunately my first iPod didn’t do anything near as cool as exploding…instead it just decided one day that it had had enough of Billy Ocean and died. 😛
    .-= Goblin´s last blog ..Distant Dreams =-.

  2. Reflex > But how could they? They’re Apple and their boss has a dicky liver.

    They’re not like all the rest.
    They wouldn’t do that to us. Would they?

  3. Wait – we can program iPod’s to explode when people play the Jonas Brothers? Ah, I love this new age of eugenics – so much more efficient!

  4. Jacques > Apparently, a UK passport can trigger a terrorist bomb to detonate, so I’m sure this is a pretty straightforward development.

  5. I should really check my posts before I push send. But I was too busy wiping the spittle off my chin.

  6. I dunno this is all over my head. I love my iPod in a non-scary kind of way, but iTunes is a load of poo. I still can’t register my damn iPod because it insists that I fill in which US state I live in. Lame.
    .-= Po´s last blog ..Who’s got the monkeys? =-.

  7. Ad Wizard > You’re right, I hate getting pittle on my chine.

    Goblin > “The damage is so extensive it looks as though the iPhone was dropped by an astronaut, survived re-entry and smashed into the car like a meteor.”
    So weird – that’s EXACTLY what I thought when I saw the photos, but there was no hole in the car’s roof.

    Emil > Boom.

  8. *She* is 11?!? Gosh – no wonder girls are getting themselves into trouble at much younger ages these days! Never been an Apple fan – and have no plans to become one either. However, while it hasn’t actually exploded, my digital Kodak camera went bonkers on the weekend, and appears to have died from heat exposure – generated by itself! 🙁
    .-= Helga Hansen´s last blog ..Vetting the petting =-.

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