Dave Winer reports that he replaced a faulty 80GB Hard disk of his MacBook from Apple Store and did not get the defected disk in return.
"They were going to send it back to the manufacturer. I figured it would be refurbished and sold cheap to someone in a third world country. Little did I suspect.
He got his supervisor. She insisted that the drive belonged to Apple, even though I had paid an inflated price to buy a new one. She showed me the language on the reverse side of the form I signed. It was even worse than she had said. There was no guarantee that the drive they had just put in my Mac was new! It might have been someone else's defective drive.
I scanned the agreement, highlighting section 4, the part the store manager cited."
He is outraged:
"Falling back on the fine print is really lame. I think they should tell you up front, before they do the work, that you're not getting the old drive back. What if the data on the drive can be recovered? What if there are credit card numbers and other personal information on the drive? Source code? Trade secrets? Does Apple really want to treat their customers privacy so shabbily? For what? Don't they already make enough money off the $160 price for the new disk? It's amazing that a company can make it this far, having such special customers, and rarely if ever acknowledging it."
.jpg)
